4 out of 5

Directed by: Dave Willis and Matt Maiellaro

Combining last season’s kind of “over it” attitude with some of the random inspiration that fueled classic seasons, Aqua TV Show Show ushers in the next best intro – art and music-wise – from the original, with the latter provided by Flying Lotus, and tones down the gross-out stuff in favor of just pursuing some absolutely awesomely ridiculous plots, trailing any given storyline out to wherever it wants to go… but “grounded” by the trio’s personalities. You could say this is the m.o. for any Aqua Teen ep, but as the show ebbed and flowed post the first movie, whatever that initial spark was fizzled out, and Willis and Maiellaro sometimes cast about in ways that were just “we think this is funny,” and not necessarily leashed to any framework that made it Aqua Teen. What ‘makes’ anything Aqua Teen is, of course, up for debate, but I’d maintain that it’s something focused around the characters, and then you pit them against a force or person which seems relatively logical in that context; a more difficult bar than it may seem when you’re dealing with an anthropomorphic Fries, Shake, and Meatball, but one our creative duo met very consistently for several seasons.

Season 10 – aka Aqua TV Show Show – feels like that’s back for the most part, though there is an inevitable “here we go again…” malaise beneath a lot of episodes. It’s not bitter at all, which is why it works – perhaps why this season never slinks into Season 9’s casualness – but a background thought that arguably equates to maturity, and makes it so that the crew isn’t always rushing towards a punchline. This has the positives poked at above, encouraging a bit more “organic” weirdness – and openness to trying out some different paces and tones, as the growing guest cast list shows – though it also means we don’t always get to a punchline.

A solid later season, showing that one of the granddads of random humor can still hang.