Review – Ugly Americans

Ugly Americans – Comedy Central – 1 Season – USA / SBS – 10:00pm Monday – AUS

Monday nights on SBS have long been the home of off-kilter animated comedies. Everything from the occasionally brilliant South Park, the amusing Aaagh! It’s The Mr. Hell Show!, the not-quite-as-good-as-it-should-be bro’Town right down to the downright strange Quads. Ugly Americans, a series about the demons, monsters, weirdos, freaks and oddities that live in New York City, fits perfectly with that eclectic collection of shows.

Ugly Americans was created by Devin Clark and former Simpsons writer David Stern. They’ve created a world based around the fairly easy joke of ‘aren’t New Yorkers a bunch of freaks?!’ and then filled the cast out with literal freaks. The main character is a normal human named Mark (Matt Oberg, one of the anchors from the hilarious Onion SportsDome) who lives with Randall, a zombie. Randall’s the worst kind of zombie though, he became a zombie to impress a girl but by that point she’d become really interested in warlocks. Women. Mark is dating his boss, Callie (Natasha Leggero, judge on Last Comic Standing), who is the daughter of the Devil. Isn’t that always the way?

Mark works in Social Services and he’s in charge of getting illegal immigrants jobs and making sure they don’t get busted by a police service ordered to crack down on illegal ALIENS (get it?). There is a lot of opportunity for Ugly Americans to make a lot of easy puns and while most of the time it just goes for it, the show also seems well aware of what it’s doing. As Mark walks off down the street his colleagues say “he’s going to get eaten alive out there” only to watch him literally get eaten alive by some giant frog/ogre thing. They then mumble a lot of things like ‘wow, would you look at that, he really did get eaten alive out there’, ‘what can I say? I know how to pick them.’ Etc.

Sometimes the puns work (I particularly liked some of the stores Mark passed on his visit to Hell: Demon Marcus and Bed, Bath & BEYOND) but often Ugly Americans can feel a little like Shrek: The Adult Version. That’s really the only way to explain a talking squid who is being held out of water accusing his torturers of ‘air-boarding’ him. Instead of water-boarding? Get it? You get it. All this makes Ugly Americans sounds like the hokiest little series but it’s got a definite weird streak that makes it more appealing that the squids with puns would let on.

As Mark travels through his world he sees news reports of a Yeti Convention, and of Land Whales beaching in the streets. His visit to Hell takes him to a restaurant where every dish seems to be made of baby arms. “I’m going with the breadsticks”, he decides only to be told “those are also baby arms.” Fans of SBS’s other animated offerings will especially enjoy Mark’s run in with a headless woman with a dozen breasts a face-gina. I’m only guessing they’ll enjoy it, it seems the sort of thing those weirdos go for.

Word on the street (and by the street, I mean the internet, which you can pretend is like a giant galactic street) is that Ugly Americans does get better from its pilot. It’s tough with animation to get everything right straight out of the gate. Often it takes years before you’re really firing on all cylinders. The Simpsons was at its best in the 4^th season, South Park took a few runs around the block before it really got it right and American Dad still hasn’t worked out how to be good. If I give Ugly Americans the benefit of the doubt, it could turn from a mildly amusing sitcom about the crazy monsters of New York City into a consistently amusing sitcom about the crazy monsters of New York City; if I don’t give it the benefit of the doubt though I’d just expect episode after episode of monster related puns.

Good, Alright, Bad Or Ugly?
Alright