Season Review: Mike Judge Presents: Tales From The Tour Bus Season Two

A little more funk can go a long way.

Funk music. An interesting genre of music to do a docu-series about, animated or otherwise. Other genres of music have made for tastier stories, however, on its surface, funk should have done just fine. With the likes of James Brown, George Clinton, and Rick James, one would assume that writing this season should have been a walk in the park, right? Unfortunately, while we did get flashes of brilliance, a lot of the individual episodes presented in Mike Judge Presents: Tales from the Tour Bus Season Two felt more like deleted scenes from the big names and less like they could stand on their own.

George Clinton was tapped not only as our first subject this season, but also, the funk music producer for the season which works marvelously. The initial episode got me all excited with wild costumes and a bunch of hit singles to go along with deep dives of the artist topic. In the case of Rick James, a two-part episode probably wasn’t needed, in the case of James Brown, a Part 3 with a bit of expansion on Morris Day and the Time would’ve worked fine due to the fact that most of the Morris Day episode is, again, about James fucking Brown! Likewise, Bootsy Collins very well could’ve been an expanded portion of either the George Clinton or James Brown episodes thereby freeing us up for additional episodes that could’ve highlighted other diamonds in the rough similar to the Betty Davis episode.

When the show executes its brilliance on a multitude of levels, it’s as good as anything on TV. However, a bit more thought into the construction of our weekly subjects and additional creativity on who those subjects should be would’ve sent this one through the roof. Having said all that, Mike Judge Presents makes for a fun Friday night. The animated production on a few of the episodes is really, really, good though on others it can be easily questioned why there’s any animation at all. To increase that value, the Betty Davis episode should be a standard-bearer with additional time given to a subject’s features, kitty cats in the background, snake-curling cigarette smoke, the finale was by far the most fun to observe coupled with a harrowing story of a funky fresh hero seldom heard about these days. When I see a docu-series, I wanna LEARN something.