In the canon of shows created by Matt Groening, Netflix’s Disenchantment is markedly closer to Futurama than The Simpsons. Developed by Groening and golden age Simpsons showrunner Josh Weinstein, this foray into a medieval fantasy world starts small on a big canvas, then starts to paint outwards.
Although it quickly develops into an ensemble sitcom, this approach starts with a more straightforward protagonist. As the first daughter of the financially embattled kingdom of Dreamland, Princess Bean (voiced by Broad City’s Abbi Jacobson) is a single young woman who longs for some individual freedom outside of her landed status.
But like Homer Simpson and Bender B. Rodriguez before her, she’s more interested in having a drink and a good time than singing to animals like other fantasy princesses. Much to the chagrin of her dad, King Zøg (John DiMaggio at his most John DiMag-nificent), Bean spends her days tooling around the kingdom and getting into misadventures with her elf friend Elfo (Nat Faxon) and her personal demon Luci (Eric Andre).
The first season of ten episodes lands on Netflix next week, but for the purposes of this review, I deliberately spaced out the seven episodes that have been shown to critics, rather than bingeing them all in one go. It’s an approach that might do the series some favours. But on a service whose shows are mostly designed to be devoured whole, there are still a few concessions to the usual Netflix format.
Unlike Groening’s previous shows, Disenchantment is lightly serialised, with more plot elements recurring across episodes than his usual network sitcom mode of restoring the status quo at the end of the half-hour. The extra-long first episode, A Princess, An Elf And A Demon Walk Into A Bar, ends on a cliffhanger that’s picked up in the following episode, but it appears as if the continuing story elements wax and wane throughout the run.
Funnily enough, the show is immediately better when it hews closer to the running time of a Netflix show. If this were going out on a traditional network, it could be even tighter, but the marked uptick in comedy from the first episode to the second is in part due to it being ten minutes shorter. Creative freedom is great and all, but like BoJack Horseman and Kimmy Schmidt before it, this shows why a quicker running time is generally a better thing for TV comedy.
The other issue that Disenchantment has to overcome early on is finding a unique selling point. From Monty Python to Shrek, plenty of other creators have ploughed the fantasy-comedy trough before now, so it takes a couple of episodes for the show to find its groove.
This is positioned as “Simpsons meets Game Of Thrones” and you can definitely see the influence of the latter show. In the first seven episodes alone, there are marriages, incestuous ruling couples, bloody coups, murderous plots, and more. Dreamland’s castle even has a handy Moon Door like the one at the Eyrie, which plays in much the same way as the trapdoor in Mr Burns’ office.
Groening and Weinstein also push past their network constraints with some more violent slapstick than we’re used to seeing from their shows, even in the bloodiest Itchy & Scratchy shorts. We get a taste of this in the very first episode when Elfo leaves his happy woodland realm for the first time and learns about war by crossing the battlefield of an epic clash between gnomes and ogres, and over the following episodes, there are a number of laugh-out-loud climactic sight gags to enjoy.
While the show sometimes leans a little hard on this, its most endearing quality is that it never gets overpowered by any of the weaker stuff, because it always has so much going on per episode. In the strongest, best-plotted episode of this run, Bean starts out attempting to find a job and contribute to society but winds up in the Dreamland equivalent of a slasher movie riff, which also crosses into the territory of Get Out, Indiana Jones, and a well-known Grimm fairy tale.
The writers’ pop culture savvy and experience in the TV industry pays dividends throughout the first seven episodes, while the characters are still being developed before us. The ensemble voice cast would be strong enough with Jacobson, Faxon, Andre, and DiMaggio, but there are recurring roles for Lucy Montgomery, Noel Fielding, Rich Fulcher, Matt Berry, and Futurama’s Billy West too.
The voice actors add a lot to this, in particular for the preening Prince Merkimer, whose lines are usually even funnier than they sound because of the Lord Flashheart-like pomp of Berry’s delivery. Adding to the great sound of the show, composer Mark Mothersbaugh provides a catchy theme that perfectly reconciles the show’s comedic anachronisms and recurs as an enjoyable motif throughout the action.
Many other reviews have compared the show to the first seasons of The Simpsons and Futurama, pointing out that they weren’t up to the same standard as their respective heydays. This may be true, but Disenchantment deserves to be enjoyed on its own merits, rather than as an extension of two great shows.
For better or worse, it’s certainly more polished than either of those shows were at their outset, but it’s doomed to suffer from being compared directly to either of them. It’s not as consistently funny all the time, but it hits the ground running and its characters and style are more than entertaining enough to get us interested in further adventures.
Disenchantment arrives on Netflix on Friday the 17th of August.