The new version of Pinky and the Brain, a short of which was in every episode watched for review, is pretty much a constant win. Its shorter tags consistently delivered, especially one riffing on the nonsense of sports press conferences that hits the sweet spot of effective meta-jokes pretty damn well. So, here's what's positive about the 2020 Animaniacs: No episode featured a one-off gag I didn't at least chuckle at. That's a lot of negativity to expound on a cartoon, no matter how designedly negative the cartoon is.
At one point, a caricature of Seth Meyers is seen drinking from a mug that reads "Smug," which is about as explicit a "pot calling kettle" moment as I've ever seen on television. Instead of successfully having bite, it plays more like obviously fake vampire teeth - and it sidelines three of our most splendidly wild animated comedy characters into delivering arms-folded, uninvested wisecracks about stuff happening to them, rather than making stuff happen. The scripts stare at our modern world with a head on a swivel, eager to poke at every single aspect (especially if it involves a modicum of progressivism, but also if it involves joked-to-death topics like Russian trolls and Trumpism) and call it dumb. "Woke jokes" run rampant, with trite and hackneyed observations about current-day hipsters and how sensitive they are. The opening crack about how wild and funny it is that bathrooms have gender-neutral signs is only the tip of the iceberg of this strangely conservative-leaning shift in comic voice.
Here, the returning cast and new showrunner Wellesley Wild (of Family Guyfame, which brings a lot of this show's venomous new tone shift into context) paint the Animaniacs as our voices of reason our figureheads of intelligence reacting to a world gone mad our Jim Halperts, not our Michael Scotts.
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