3 out of 5

Created by: Dan Harmon

covers season 1

I’m sure you could explain to me some historical joke behind calling this Krapopolis, beyond the Ancient Greek setting and the more obvious “pun,” but let’s assume – correctly – I’m not smart enough to know that history, and that other viewers are probably in the same boat, and that there probably isn’t actually any justification behind it given that there’s a character named “Asskill,” who leads the “Killassians,” and I’m left with my general feeling: that Krapopolis is kind of a dumb name.

But we have a creator – Dan Harmon – and some voice actors – chiefly, for this example, Richard Ayoade and Matt Berry – who rather excel at escalating the surface dumb to the hilarious: through Harmon’s writing; through Ayoade’s innocent and Berry’s flat delivery; and maybe that general feeling, and what it might portend, is allayed by confidence in the creative team.

Yes and no. Krapopolis is kind of a dumb show. It’s a very typical dysfunctional family sitcom, just allowably more ridiculous by dint of being animated: so this family of gods, demigods and mortals, ruling over the titular city, can shapeshift into creatures, or be a cyclops, or be a fish-monster walking around with a fishbowl helmet, and it doesn’t require any more budget than it does to animate it. Regarding the style of which: the show has the kind of round, indistinct look of many of Fox’s “Animation Domination” series; there’s nothing particularly exciting about the character or world designs. They’re very friendly. They fit the characters. But if I’m being especially unfavorable: it’s a straight-down-the-middle design that wouldn’t surprise you if there was a laugh track.

Tyrannis (Ayoade), Krapopolis’ demigod king, is arguably the main character, haplessly trying to lead the humans of his city to a better life that doesn’t always involve blindless worship of gods like his mother, Deliria (Hannah Waddingham); the mindless sexual escapades of his Mantitaur father, Shlub (Berry); the heartless science experimentation of his half-brother sea-monster, Hippocampus (Duncan Trussell); or the violence-solves-everything methods of his sister, Stupendous (Pam Murphy). The humans are generally humorously treated like dumb mobs, jumping to extreme and judgmental opinions that parody modern society in various ways – e.g. someone is instantly a pariah for daring to try a different clothing style, like pants.

This is an acceptable week-by-week setup, but finding the balance between Harmon’s humor pacing and the UK-leaning cast’s style of delivery often results in a very bland wash of conceptually funny stuff that doesn’t really make you laugh. Ongoing gags like reading the daily news off of depictions on urns feel stuffed in; jokes that are, again, conceptually funny on a whiteboard, but lose energy once they make it to screen.

But: things get better. The show kind of has to go through the motions of letting us know it’s aware of common Greek myths and is ready to parody them, and gets a lot of its more obvious “the world is the same as ever” jokes out of the way – perhaps somewhat painfully – in its first slew of episodes, and then a rhythm is found, and the stories start to feel a bit more organic as we get used to the characters, and perhaps as the actors got used to their roles, if we want to assume this was recorded in airing order, which the production codes do mostly suggest. I don’t think the show ever achieves feeling like it’s especially original, but it does find a tone, and we can then settle in for the back half or so of the season, during which I cracked a few smiles.

If Fox holds true to its renewals, renewing the series for two further seasons, even before the first aired, this isn’t actually a bad deal: Krapopolis, had it been a sink-or-swim show, and admittedly had not arrived with its pedigree, I’m pretty sure I would’ve dropped out after a laughless first couple episodes. But its underwhelming nature slow-rolls into more successful episodes, which suggests two things: that this will be a series that’s better on repeats, and / or that it will keep getting sharper and more defined as it goes on.