Season Review: Santa Inc. Season One

It’s the most wonderful time of the year once again. The weather’s getting cold, the snow is falling, and people are decorating their houses with shiny lights. But, more importantly, the media world is unleashing its barrage of holiday movies and specials to get us in a joyous mood. The first piece of holiday-themed content, however, is anything but joyful.

HBO Max continues its streak of providing adult animated content with a series that’s as jolly as the man in the red suit himself. The service has started exceptionally well with J. G. Quintel’s latest show, Close Enough, then stumbled hard with The Prince, which shamelessly parodied Prince George and the royal family. I haven’t watched Ten Year Old Tom. Now, we have yet another series that seeks to satirize a well-known celebrity, and that celebrity is none other than Santa Claus.

Santa Inc. is an eight-episode adult animated series from creator Alexandra Rushfield and executive producers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. It centers on Candy Smalls (Sarah Silverman), a female elf worker at Santa Inc. who dreams of becoming the first female Santa in history. She gains support from her friends: Cookie (Leslie Grossman), the gingerbread mother, Goldie (Gabourey Sidibe), the bisexual reindeer, her intern Devin (Nicholas Braun), and the big guy himself (Seth Rogen). 

I can quickly point out that this is one holiday show you don’t want to watch with your children, even with its classic stop-motion animation. The main reason for that is the adult humor and its portrayal of specific topics, such as religion, race, and feminism. Of course, these types of jokes in a Christmas-related show or movie aren’t entirely new for Rogen and Goldberg as they were previously involved in the 2015 holiday comedy, The Night Before, as the producers. However, unlike that film, Santa Inc. didn’t hold itself back on its raunchiness, especially how it treats women.

Putting the humor aside for a moment, was the show able to provide some holiday cheer for its mature audience? Well, yes and no. It’s nowhere near as insufferable as The Prince, so I’m pretty grateful for that, but that doesn’t mean it’s the next Christmas classic either.  

One of the things that made Santa Inc. a tolerable watch was its social commentary, particularly sexism in the workplace. What seemed to be a formulaic arc about Candy’s journey to becoming the next Santa transitions into a fight for change in the work environment. Throughout the series, the upperclassmen tend to look down on lesser-known employees and often offend them, especially women. Even though the episodes suffer from their formulaic elements and humor, the series handled these themes reasonably well.

The stop motion animation was also something that I admired while watching the show. It was produced by Stoopid Buddy Stoodios, the same studio behind Robot Chicken, Netflix’s Buddy Thunderstruck, and Hulu’s M.O.D.O.K. While I wouldn’t call it a groundbreaking achievement, the style maintained the raunchy style of Robot Chicken while resembling something out of a Rankin/Bass holiday special.  

Despite some of the characters being unlikeable during a couple of moments, the voice cast made a merry little effort in delivering some decent performances, including Sarah Silverman as Candy. Seth Rogen is his usual self regarding his adult-rated portrayal of the jolly old fat man. If you like Rogen because of that, then you’ll probably enjoy him in Santa Inc. But be warned, this Santa is raunchy with a capital R. The rest of the cast was also acceptable for the most part. Although, I’m not a huge fan of Junior, voiced by Craig Robinson. Regarding his distasteful personality and lack of solid comedy, Junior is one reindeer that will go down in history as the worst animated character I’ve ever seen.  

As I mentioned before, the humor is very explicit in its violence, sex, and language, primarily the tasteless jokes aimed towards women. Some of them were either offensive or humorless or even both. It depends on the viewer’s perspective. I thought the comedy in this one was just okay. It’s not as shamelessly horrendous as The Prince, but it’s also not hilarious enough to get me laughing like Santa. Admittedly, there were a couple of jokes that got me chuckling more than others, such as the partridge gag in the finale and a gift shaped like a Nazi swastika. Other than that, the comedy struggled to balance its mean-spiritedness with humorous parody.

Overall, Santa Inc. has plenty of raunch and themes to make it an acceptable Christmas gift for its target audience. The only way I can describe this show is that it’s a Robot Chicken sketch that stretched itself into a series. It’s a fair idea at first, but it slowly became a repetitive barrage of adult jokes aimed at sexism and Jews after a while. The main elements that saved it from getting a lump of coal were its voice cast, animation, and depiction of the toxic work environment. It doesn’t beat out Close Enough as my favorite adult animated show on HBO Max. Still, it had enough enjoyable moments to kickstart this year’s holiday season on a decent note.