3 out of 5

Created by: Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, Bill Lawrence

From the brain trust that worked on the Lego Movie and the Jump Street flicks (Lord and Miller) as well as the creator of Scrubs (Lawrence), ‘Clone High’ is a partially magnificent parody of teen high school / college shows (dramatic or comedic ones) that floats dangerously close to ‘too cool’ territory, perhaps as a result of it airing on MTV.  Thankfully, this vibe is mostly overcome by the rapid fire gags (the animation allowing for plenty of background jibes) and generally ridiculously genius premise.  Unthankfully, the conceit that ends up being a semi-focus of almost every episode – the love triangle of the clone of Joan of Arc falling for the clone of Abe Lincoln who’s falling for the clone of Cleopatra – ends up being rather noxious, as Lincoln, the oblivious doof character, just wasn’t the right choice for the focus of the show.  To be fair, besides Joan, none of the characters are particularly relate-able or unannoying in large doses, but Lincoln is clearly the lead and the humor could’ve been better served by maybe making it an even plain across the board, or giving the character some redeeming qualities.  Archie Andrews (an influential template of the innocent doof) has a likeable personality, at least, he just can’t ever get things right with Betty and Veronica.  Clones?  Right: so the setup here is that a shady government organization grew a bunch of clones of historical figures (from all eras) to eventually take advantage of their various strengths in some shady government way… in the meantime, the clones have grown up, and are now in a high school cleverly named Clone High.  The principle of said school – Principle Scudworth – is the hilariously over-the-top shady-plans-kept-from-his-shady-overlords mad scientist tossed into the mix, with his robotic butler Mr. Butlertron, and Scud’s plans clashing with that week’s episode’s “topic” – ADD, drugs, etc. – is often the source of humorous calamity.  The nature of parody, though, is that when the skewering lands perfectly (episode 9’s rock opera, episode 10’s “a clone dies” gag), it shadows mightily over when the skewering doesn’t land (the O-Town episode, the Xmas episode), and it only takes a slight deviation from course to send the rest of the jokes off the rails.  Still, even with Adult Swim, it’s a fairly small pool of consistently smart and funny ‘adult’ cartoons, especially with ongoing plotlines, and ‘Clone High’ had an excellent setup that occasionally lent itself to some awesome episodes that definitely reward repeat views.  (Which is nice, since this only made it one season…)