Season Review: Purgatony Season One

Heaven Upside Down.

From the producers of Cyanide & Happiness and Joel Watson comes a brand-new animated series called Purgatony for the Blackpills app. For the show’s first season, eight episodes of about 20-minutes and under have been produced and feature Joel Watson and the crazy guys behind The Cyanide & Happiness Show.

At its core, Purgatony follows a clerk named Tony who works out of his office in purgatory. His boss, Death, is tasked with killing mass amounts of people on a daily basis, and it’s Tony’s job to help curate the workload and figure out which people get sent to heaven and which go to hell. His workmates make up a rather cliched group, the boss is constantly harassing Tony to come to his office for menial tasks to which Tony tries his best to perform his clerical duties usually in some sort of show of one-upmanship to his more ass-kissing office neighbors only to usually fail miserably.

During the course of the episode, we follow Tony as he heads to heaven, comes back down to Earth, and even to a baseball diamond where he finds out that his former baseball coach was a real prick. For the most part, the episode premises are a lot of “boss tells me to do something, I go do it, and then there’s a recap from the boss as to how I did”.

There isn’t a lot of ingenuity with Purgatony and the dialogue is super bland and ill-affectionately delivered by Watson who comes off sounding like a poor man’s Marc Maron for endless drones of rapidly mis-firing punchlines that almost never hit. This, coupled with a cast that is 99% dudes in both voice and characters makes for a monotonous eight episodes that seem to be never-ending, but you’re thankful that they did.

Fortunately, the episode settings are kind of fun. At the end of the day, heaven, purgatory, and hell are all made-up Christian sentiments, so why not fuck around a bit? However, there are definite displays of paying attention to the rules set forth by the King James adaptation of the Holy Bible that plays out as plot devices that only will appeal to a select few. For example, there’s a scene where a baby is sent in for judgment and the loophole that Tony finds is that since the baby wasn’t baptized, he gets another chance at life. Anybody non-Christian isn’t going to understand that joke, and worse yet,  it sounds like some of the more Irish-born Roman Catholics were trying to put over their fake belief system as some sort of a savior as long as you do your sacraments to God, and if you aren’t Christian-you’re fucked.

Quite frankly that last part is kinda like why I love heavy metal but can’t stand bands like Winger or As I Lay Dying. I’m totally fine with the producers of art having their own personal beliefs, but as soon as you start advertising your false ideologies under the guise of entertainment using subliminal methods, we’re gonna have issues. This show wasn’t that great, to begin with, but I expect better out of the guys that made The Cyanide & Happiness Show one of the sole reasons to have a Seeso subscription.