Returning to Adult Swim’s Sunday night line-up for what promises to be an explosive fourth season, The Venture Bros., chronicles the escapades of the titular goofy teen brothers, Dean and Hank; their neurotic scientist father, Dr. Thaddeus Venture; their mullet-sporting bodyguard, Brock Sampson; arch-nemesis, The Monarch; and The Monarch’s wife, Dr. Mrs. The Monarch (formerly Dr. Girlfriend). What began as a clever riff on Johnny Quest and the superhero genre has evolved into an engrossing series with a tangled and hilarious mythology. Over the past three years The Venture Bros. has distinguished itself from Adult Swim’s other droll animated fare, but for those who have yet to fully pledge allegiance to Team Venture (or for the more dastardly of you, The Guild of Calamitous Intent), here are five reasons why you should watch the fourth season of The Venture Bros., the most exciting show ever (to air during a 12:00 AM – 12:30 AM Sunday night time-slot)!

1. The Characters

What other show can boast a roster of characters that includes an albino scientist, a hydrocephalic former quiz show champ with a growth-hormone deficiency, a male to female transsexual retired assassin, David Bowie, a pair of evil switchblade-wielding achondroplastic moppets, a cute goth girl, and a super genius with the face of a man and the body of a baby who—owing to the fact that he was absorbed by his twin brother in the womb—wasn’t “born” until he was middle-aged? Each member of this diverse, idiosyncratic crew has their own distinct psychosis and fantastically ridiculous personal history.

2. The Theme Song

Every time I hear those blaring trumpets and dramatic crescendos, the fourth-chair flautist in me thinks about how “cool” it would have been to play The Venture Bros. theme song in the high school band. Composer JG Thirlwell has managed to imbue the song with a sense of peril and this epic instrumental is the perfect contrast to what Venture Bros. creators Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer have said is essentially a show about failure.

3. The Pop-Culture References

The Venture Bros. is the only show that can go toe-to-to with Family Guy when it comes to delivering those satisfying, moderately obscure pop-culture treats. Even though I’ve personally never had too much of a problem with that other program’s reliance on flashbacks and non-sequiturs, there’s certainly something praiseworthy, masterful even, about Publick and Hammer’s ability to give The Boys from Brazil a shout-out without disrupting continuity or logic.

4. The Humor

Because Adult Swim programming is usually surreal, absurd, or in some way socially or sexually transgressive, the shows tend to polarize audiences. I can’t imagine anyone ever saying, “Eh, well I kind of like the rambling wordplay in Xavier: Renegade Angel.” You’re either in to that stuff or you aren’t. But The Venture Bros. has a little something for every one. With its super-villains and necromancers, it will entertain fans of surrealist humor. Yet, a hyper-realistic logic is imposed on those fantastic elements, making the show more palatable for satire fans—the villains belong to a labor union with an incredibly elaborate vetting process and health benefits. Publick and Hammer also use the show’s late-night basic cable time slot to their advantage and never shy away from the risqué gag—there have been quite a few instances of implied pedophilia.

5. The Stakes

While there is a secondary character who exclusively hunts Blaculas, I’m not referring to the pointed wooden vampire slaying implement. I’m talking about consequence. I’m talking about investment. Most animated shows resolve all conflict within a thirty-minute window but The Venture Bros. has storylines and subplots that have spanned the shows three-year run. Though the mythology is nowhere near as convoluted as, say, Lost, there is enough carry-over from episode to episode to reward consistent viewing.

In an homage to the conclusion of Easy Rider, the first season’s finale saw the death of Hank and Dean. But the second season revealed that Dr. Venture had a clone bank and a new Hank and Dean were apparently installed in place of the dead ones. This was definitely a cop-out; everyone acknowledges that. However, in season three’s outrageous climax, all of the Hank and Dean clones were destroyed, forever eliminating that safety net, and with the exit of two beloved characters, the finale also proved that nothing in the Venture-verse (inept, pseudo-baddie henchmen in particular) is too precious to be blown to bits.

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Sit Down, Shut Up, FOX, Airs Sundays at 8:30/7:30p CST

Episode: “Pilot” (Season 1, Episode 1)

Synopsis: In the series premier of Sit Down, Shut Up, the latest addition to Fox’s Sunday night “Animation Domination” line-up, the dimwitted and largely demented faculty of Knob Haven High School, discover a bottle of what they believe to be steroids in a student’s locker. Naturally, they decide to distribute the pills to the school’s pathetic football team (“the baiters”) but not before testing them out on unsuspecting assistant principal, Stuart Proszakian voiced by SNLer Will Forte.

Review: The plot of this first episode is incidental and really just a way to introduce the obscenely over-the-top cast of animated characters. In addition to loopy “Ass Principal” Proszakian we meet Ennis Hofftard (Will Arnett), the meathead English teacher, Andrew LeGustambos (Nick Kroll), the flamboyant, bisexual drama teacher, and Helen Klench (Cheri Oteri), an ornery librarian with a fondness for Kegel exercises. Muhannad Sabeeh “Happy” Fa-ach Nuabar (Tom Kenny) is a custodian/possible terrorist, Miracle Grohe (Kristin Chenoweth) is a creationist science teacher, and Willard Deutschebog (Henry Winkler), is a neurotic German teacher who, in a tedious subplot, fears he’ll lose his job after a student spots him buying “filthies” aka porno mags. We learn via flashback that Knob Haven’s principal was maimed during the drama department’s production of Edward Scissorhands; so serving in his stead is sassy Sue Sezno (Kenan Thompson). Finishing off the list of revealingly (or stupidly) named characters is Larry Littlejunk (Jason Bateman) who is, perhaps, the most intelligent of the bunch but somehow stuck teaching P.E. As you can see, there are roughly five million characters in this show and the first episode suffers because of this. There are far too many wacky personalities to keep track of. Bateman’s Littlejunk—haha, guess it’s funny after all! —seems to be the show’s true protagonist and hopefully now that all of the groundwork has been laid down, future episodes can focus more on him.

As far as the jokes go, the pilot was bogged down in a lot of bawdy, eye-rolling humor. The opening scene finds Ennis Hofftard driving behind a group of bike riding “high sc-losers” and telling them to “make way for a teacher with a little nut sack.” He is, of course, referring to a bag of nuts and not underdeveloped genitalia. But wouldn’t that line have been so much more satisfying if the writers would’ve just let things stand at “little nut sack”? It’s like they were on the verge of being slightly subversive but chickened out and decided to go for the broad, easy gag.

To the show’s credit, the animation is set to a live-action backdrop which is novel, and there were several provocative Meta, fourth-wall-breaking moments sprinkled throughout. Some just seemed to be commenting on sitcom conventions—Larry Littlejunk requests a flashback, Stuart Proszakian keeps saying that he needs a catchphrase—but there was at least one reference to the whole here-today-canceled-tomorrow nature of TV. Andrew LeGustambos says that he isn’t going to test well with audiences because he’s bisexual. It’s just one brief moment, and maybe I’m making too much of it, but I couldn’t help but think that creator Mitch Hurwitz, who also created Arrested Development, may already be preparing for the show’s cancellation.

I’m sure I’m not the first to ask it, but speaking of Hurwitz, how completely bizarre is Fox’s marketing strategy for this show? Every advertisement that I saw for Sit Down, Shut Up mentioned that it was the brainchild of the creator of Arrested Development. Award winning, critically acclaimed, adored by many, yes, Arrested Development was all of these things. But it was also canceled. By Fox. So here Fox is, trying to persuade us to watch a show by telling us that it was created by the same man who created a show that they didn’t think was worth keeping on the air. I’m having a hard time deciding whether this is totally moronic or if Fox is just doing us a service and telling us not to get too attached.

Did you watch the first episode of Sit Down, Shut Up? If so, what did you think?

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