Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Bless The Harts’ On Fox, An Animated Series About A Struggling But Loving North Carolina Family

It’s been nine years since King Of The Hill ended, and there hasn’t been an animated show since that has captured what Mike Judge did so well over the course of that show’s 13 season run; depict a working-class family that’s nice to each other even if they’re struggling. Emily Spivey is trying to do just that with Bless The Harts, loosely based on the characters she grew up with in North Carolina. Read on for more…

BLESS THE HARTS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Jenny Hart (Kristen Wiig) gets the mail, and the carrier tells her her water is about to get shut off. How does she know? “When you’re this late they put the threats on the outside.”

The Gist: Jenny lives in Greenpoint, North Carolina with her daughter Violet (Jillian Bell) and wacky mother Betty (Maya Rudolph). They’re always broke, having to juggle bills and make sure the most urgent one is paid. Right now, it’s the water bill. But when Jenny sifts through the bills and finds that she’s paying for a storage unit she doesn’t know about, she confronts her mother.

Betty, who prints online memes (which she pronounces “me-mes”) on her dot-matrix printer and mispronounces half her sentences, tells her that the unit contains her nest egg, and shows it to her: Hundreds of Hug ‘n’ Bug dolls, which she snapped up when they were pulled from the market for being too flammable. They were the biggest toy of the ’90s, but were oddly current-events and pop-culture specific, like “Tonya Harding Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.”

Jenny agrees it’s a goldmine, but Betty won’t let her sell any. She sneaks one out and puts it on an auction site, where it gets snapped up in an instant. Little does she know that it’s Betty who’s buying all the dolls she sneaks out of storage and just putting them back. So all Betty is doing is spending Jenny’s money.

At her job at “The Last Supper” restaurant, Jenny often finds herself talking to Jesus (Kumail Nanjiani)… literally. She envisions Jesus sitting in a booth or something, having a conversation. And Jesus tells her that those dolls are worthless. He gives The Bronze Age as an example of a fad that faded… after a few hundred years.

Meanwhile, the artistic Violet is making a graphic novel that’s a fantasy version of her life. Jenny’s boyfriend, Wayne Edwards (Ike Barinholtz), who considers himself a surrogate dad to the teenager, is distressed when she depicts her influential biological father as a hero and Wayne as a stump. He convinces his buddy Leonard (Gary Anthony Williams) to help him build her an art studio that looks just like the one she depicts in her comic, using only found objects. He manages to do it, but the cranky old lady next door calls the building inspector on him, and he has to tear it down.

Our Take: Bless The Harts is really trying to be the next King of the Hill, and for that, we salute it. Created by Emily Spivey (SNL, Wine Country, Last Man On Earth, Up All Night), it’s loosely based on her life growing up in North Carolina. What she’s trying to do is, with the help of an all-star voice cast, is foster the same warm, neighborly vibe that Mike Judge did with Hill in the ’90s, where the humor is easygoing and you are more hanging out with this working-class family.

The show has a chance of getting there, mainly because of Spivey and the cast, but it’s not a good sign that Fox chose episode 103 for the season premiere, and even that episode only contained sporadic laughs. We’re not expecting huge guffaws from a show like this, but we didn’t even get a chuckle. Even the continued joke of all the ’90s specific Hug ‘n’ Bug names wore thin after the first couple of examples. And even the reliable Rudolph can’t pull off Betty’s constant mispronunciations because it just makes her harder to understand; you can’t laugh at something you can’t hear.

The only thing that worked was Nanjiani, who makes Jenny’s vision of Jesus into a bit of a simpering know-it-all, because, well, he’s Jesus and he does know it all. For some reason, the scenes where Jenny and Jesus hang out — they even sing the Hug ‘n’ Bug jingle together — don’t get old.

We do hold out hope that the relationship that’s been established between the characters — Wayne tries hard to be a father figure to Violet, Violet loves her mom and grandmother despite their bickering, and Jenny and Betty depend on each other — creates funnier situations down the road. But right now, the show is trying to be satirical and story-oriented, and very few animated series can pull both off.

Sex and Skin: Nothing.

Parting Shot: The Harts decide to kill two birds with one stone, and set the code-violating studio on fire with all of Betty’s Hug ‘n’ Bugs. But when Jenny gets a real bid on the “Colin Powell Macarena” doll, Wayne heroically pulls it from the fire. In the final scene, we find out who bought it, and given the doll’s name, it’s not a big surprise.

Sleeper Star: Barinholtz is hardly a sleeper star, but we like the fact that he plays Wayne as a bit dopey around Violet and even Jenny, but his thought process is much more detailed and intelligent, and he reveals that side in front of Leonard.

Most Pilot-y Line: Jenny tries to get Jesus to turn wine into water, which Jesus informs her is not how it works. “Besides this box is half empty, and this one isn’t even wine; it’s a rose flavored vodka.”

Our Call: STREAM IT. We wish we could make more of a slam-dunk recommendation of Bless The Harts. The show has a lot of room to improve, but the writers and cast are top-notch, and the story is warm enough to give it a chance.

Your Call:

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company.com, RollingStone.com, Billboard and elsewhere

Stream Bless The Harts On Fox.com