1 out of 5

Creator: Commissioned by the BBC, various writers and producers

Pitifully unfunny, and unforgivably annoying.

Popetown focuses on the eternally patient Father Nicholas, the eternally naive Sister Marie, a trio of eternally greedy Cardinals, and the eternally four-years old Pope, who all reside in ‘Popetown,’ which is a crappy CGI static-backgrounded town of three or four locations over which our really undefined characters are penciled, and which exists in the midst of a barely glimpsed metropolis that I guess is supposed to be like New York or LA or something.

Immediately distracting is the show’s introduction: a live action bit of a Catholic School class which eventually does annoying quick zoom onto a student’s notebook where he’s doodling figures from the cartoon.  So we’re watching his doodles.  That’s the distracting part – it completely takes us out of the series from step one.  Hey everyone: none of this is really happening.  Enjoy.  What’s odd is that the writing of the cartoon itself floats just outside of creative and funny almost the entire time (it’s not bad enough to be campy or culty, it’s just not good enough to be anything), but the live action openings – which feature a teacher delivering a straight-faced lesson that’s always contradictory or ridiculous – ARE funny, so it’s like a double whammy – none of it’s really happening, and only the stuff that WAS really happening will make you laugh.  Whoops.

Though the series never made it to air while it was produced for its content, it’s really not all that offensive.  Beyond the brazen move of making the Pope a child (literally – he won’t bathe, he has a high pitched adolescent voice, he plays with toys and loves his crucifix pogo stick) and the Cardinals only concerned with getting to the top of the world’s richest list, it’s really standard cartoon fare, with the Father being tasked with something and then something going wrong in some wacky fashion and then 18-20 minutes of frantic trying to fix the issue before a deus ex machina type conclusion that resets the status quo.  The series almost makes it to intriguing in the second episode when it goes fucking batshit bizarre and the Pope’s head becomes detached… this is never explained or investigated, just, hey, the Pope has a detachable head – but it never gets this weird again.  The plots do show dashes of creativity, but the premise is just ripe for much more, and instead the writers settle for boring racial stereotypes – Asian tourists, kvetching Jews, etc. – who hang around P-Town.

The annoying thing I mention – the Pope’s fucking voice.  Nails on chalkboard.  The opening theme song features the Pope “crying” at three separate instances, instances which I’m pretty sure are just cut and paste audio.  I don’t normally skip show titles when I’m shotgunning a series, but this sound was so grating on the first episode that it easily became just another reason to dislike the show.