100 Favorite Shows: #43 — Bob’s Burgers
“You’re my family and I love you, but you’re terrible. You’re all terrible.”
Fox has long controlled the adult animation genre on network television with its famed “Animation Domination” block of programming on Sunday nights that has included The Simpsons, Family Guy, American Dad!, and more such family-based sitcoms. When Bob’s Burgers joined the fray, it merged the family comedy premise with that of the workplace comedy, based on Fox’s urging to explore more styles. It was Loren Bouchard, a writer and producer in the industry, who partnered with King of the Hill’s Jim Dauterive to develop the series, about a working class family just struggling to get by. Comprising the family was the father, Bob (H. Jon Benjamin), mother, Linda (John Roberts), older daughter, Tina (Dan Mintz), only son, Gene (Eugene Mirman), and youngest child, Louise (Kristen Schaal). Since its debut in January 2011, Bob’s Burgers has been met with critical acclaim and a barrage of Emmy nominations, earning a devoted fanbase over ten seasons, almost two hundred episodes, and a forthcoming feature film.
(Spoilers for Bob’s Burgers are in this essay, ese.)
The initial premise of Bob’s Burgers was hardly different from the adult animated sitcoms we’d seen before. The Simpsons depicted a working class family with a nuclear model (in this case, two parents, two daughters, and one son) and so did Family Guy (swapping out a daughter for a son). However, where Bob’s Burgers differs is in its character depictions. Both The Simpsons and Family Guy featured clearly defined characters (Homer Simpson and Peter Griffin both fit the mold of a patriarchal, beer-swilling idiot) and both continue to air for massive tenures spanning decades on national television. But Bob’s Burgers rebuked the notion of buffoonish fathers, resigned mothers, and rebellious children.
Instead, Bob’s Burgers shone a more heartfelt light on the Belcher family, showing them as more wholesome and caring of one another. On Bob’s Burgers, the love the Belchers share is the point of the series. Yes, the unrefined animation and earnest musical escapades (to the tune of a soundtrack album, including one song from The National that sounds suspiciously like a Taylor Swift jam) helped to redefine the series (and the animation medium) as it figured out its identity, but at the core of Bob’s Burgers, it was always about the love.
On The Simpsons, Homer strangles Bart and on Family Guy, Peter viciously mocks Meg. But on Bob’s Burgers, the characters sought only to lift one another up, supporting them when they needed it most and learning how not to act among family when their actions manifested negatively. (Crucially, the lessons learned by the Belchers actually have an impact on the characters’ development going forward, as opposed to resetting the deck each week.) Largely, the care they pass between one another is the result of how each of them is imperfect — and comfortable to be so.
The titular Bob, a slightly bemused, slightly amused father figure who keeps an open mind in most scenarios, is the lead of the series and patriarch of the Belchers. For the most part, Bob’s actions are fairly self-effacing (even when he can hardly believe the nonsense his kids come up with and decide to say directly to their parents’ faces), but they are always conducted in the name of what he believes is best for his loved ones.
His downtrodden pessimism (which streaks through his character roughly eighty percent of the time on Bob’s Burgers) is counterbalanced by Linda, who is fun-loving and self-amusing. (She’s the type of person who claims to be a “fun customer” and actually lives up to the claim, as in one dinner with Bob when she mistakes a taxi for a “snatchy.”) The supportive nature of Linda’s character is always obvious because she cares enthusiastically enough for both her and Bob (Bob’s support is typically more muted and reluctant). When Tina is tasked with crafting a project based on her reading of The Call of the Wild, Linda devotes the entire afternoon to a home musical production of the story, as she always takes an interest in the kids’ extracurricular activities (even if they’re made up, like their “glee, key, and ski” club loyalties).
The adult presence in the Bob’s Burgers restaurant is buoyed further in later seasons by Teddy (Larry Murphy), a local handyman, regular customer, and friend of the Belchers. As a surrogate uncle for the kids, Teddy’s storylines typically revolve around his inherent loneliness and eagerness to please the family he treasures spending time with. But they always allow Teddy into their lives, even if his desperation is occasionally more apparent than it is at other times, because the care they extend to one another is also applicable to Teddy. And it goes both ways, as Teddy is consistently inclined to indulge the childlike fun, whimsy, and collective imagination of the Belcher children.
Each of the kids is very well-defined, at that. Louise, always donning a pair of pink bunny ears, is a mischievous, ambitious schemer, who often forces herself to mellow out and reluctantly lean into the kindness that consumes her conscience. Tina is the new teenager who struggles to navigate puberty in a non-awkward way as she finds herself caught between being horse-crazy and boy-crazy. (The internalized desires of Tina often leave her socially confused, as when she has a sexual dream of zombies and confuses her fears for attraction.) And, of course, there’s Gene, the layered “indoor kid,” who seems crude at first glance, but is actually musically inclined, filled to the brim with referential one-liners (from Lipps Inc. to Salman Rushdie to Kirk Cameron), and capable of finding enlightenment in a zen garden.
At first, it took Bob’s Burgers a little bit to find itself and strike the perfect balance of juvenile humor with smart quips and wholesome character interactions. But even from an installment as early as the series’ second ever episode, “Crawl Space,” the path that Bob’s Burgers would so frequently take was instantly apparent. “Crawl Space” takes a de facto sitcom premise (Bob tries to avoid his mother-in-law, Gloria (Renée Taylor)) and shoves it through a barbershop pole of topsy turvy animated antics, as Bob relegates himself to being stuck in the walls of the restaurant for the episode’s duration.
At once, “Crawl Space” contains the whacked out bizarre promise of a series that would become increasingly comfortable getting increasingly weird with its stories, as well as the early, unconventional interactions between parent and child. As Bob shimmies through the wall, he makes his way behind Tina’s horse poster, prompting her to ask, “Are you in the wall or in my horse poster?” to which Bob simply neighs, showing the fun-loving side of his personality, rare as it might have been. Later, the weirdness deepens well past this as Bob imagines the Kuchi Kopi nightlight he’s stuck in the wall with coming to life, ordering him to kill Gloria, and manning the bar at a speakeasy seemingly plucked straight from The Shining. In only the second episode, Bob’s Burgers clearly risked alienation from standard network audiences. But by being true to what the show was meant to be, Bouchard and Dauterive depicted a series that stood out by being wholly unique.
Over the course of Bob’s Burgers, the characters run in their various circles (a revolving community of strange adults for Bob and Linda and a more accepting community of schoolchildren for Tina, Gene, and Louise), engaging in an endless stream of misadventures.
Bob and Linda are presented with myriad antagonists at every turn of the series, like the Italian restaurateur across the street, Jimmy Pesto (Jay Johnston), and their landlord, Mr. Fischoeder (Kevin Kline), who once knowingly suggested, “Just because I’m a landlord and I wear a white suit and an eye patch and I raise your rent and ride around and throw firecrackers at you, I’m the bad guy.” However, as infuriatingly stagnant as these characters can be in the face of any Belcher attempt at progress, the victories come for the Belchers, not in besting them (wins occur for them about as frequently as they do for the Orlando Magic), but in helping others and treating everyone with the most kindness they can muster. In this treatment, the Belchers manage to maintain a small — but loyal — customer base in their restaurant, including those characters who can often feel at home in a restaurant with an unremarkable counter and a few booths. I’m thinking primarily of Marshmallow (David Herman), a local transgender prostitute who always arrives at the restaurant with oodles of silliness. Many series would treat Marshmallow as a punchline. On Bob’s Burgers, Marshmallow (whose nickname comes because she loves dessert: “Honey, just show me a sweet potato pie and I’m on top of it”) enters as the promise of a fun scene or episode.
For the Belcher kids, a more cynical series would present their friends as enemies (with characters like Tammy (Jenny Slate), Jocelyn (Roberts), and Zeke (Bobby Tisdale) as potential bully archetypes and Regular-Sized Rudy (Brian Huskey), Darryl (Aziz Ansari), and Andy and Ollie (Laura and Sarah Silverman) as dweebs), but on Bob’s Burgers, the necessary attention and merit are paid to fleshing them out as three-dimensional figures, too. Despite their various causes for annoyance (like when Andy and Ollie attempt to carry each other at the same time), the Belcher kids find, at worst, entertainment in them and, at best, companionship. The characters always lead with kindness and they wind up as a hodge-podge friend group.
This dynamic also contributes to the lax vibe of Bob’s Burgers, even when the character-driven humor can easily tip into the absurd (a chilling piano score and zoom underscore “game-changing” moments that are actually fairly innocent, the kids do battle with Wonder Wharf worker Mickey (Bill Hader) over ambergris, Gene obtains a cryptid mask). The chill vibes emanate from the monotone delivery from Benjamin and Mintz for much of the dialogue (even in the recurring, warnings of “Gene” and “Oh, my god” from Bob, which seem apathetic, in spite of his hearty, hard-working demeanor). But they also stem from the easygoing, pleasant humor that percolates in every episode, occasionally as a contrast to the strange subplots. (A classic is in the consistent misnomers attributed to Bob and his restaurant, as Gene calls the eatery “Dad’s Burgers” and Teddy thinks Bob’s surname is Burger.)
Largely, puns run the game of pleasantries on Bob’s Burgers (including the referral of Linda as “Nag-atha Christie” or the “Secretary of Nag-riculture”), as each episode maintains a recurring gag of renaming the business to the right of Bob’s Burgers in the intro (my favorite: “A Ton in the Oven, Big and Tall Baby Clothes”) and Bob’s “burger of the day” (my favorite: “I Know Why the Cajun Burger Sings”). They’re all such innocent, gentle jokes that can serve as a warm antidote to television’s inclination to go more caustic than classic. (Take “Carpe Museum” for example, when Bob asks Regular-Sized Rudy, “Why do they call you that?” and he answers, “Just look at me.” It’s a shockingly pure joke that insists nothing more than Rudy is just regular-sized and it’s absolutely dynamite.)
Bob’s Burgers switches between blatant and subtle humor with the ease of someone who’s been driving a stick shift since the age of twelve. The season three episode, “O.T. The Outside Toilet,” is absurd enough in its premise of Gene befriending a stolen talking toilet in the woods. But it also meets the subtle standard-bearer of Bob’s Burgers’ humor, as evidenced by Tina meeting the toilet and asking it to say, “I love you, Tina. I’m not a toilet, I’m a boy,” to which the toilet replies simply, “No.”
One of the great television actors of our time, Jon Hamm, lends his voice to the toilet in a voice acting turn that is not stunt casting, considering no one realized it was Hamm until the end credits rolled the first time the episode aired in 2013. The level of voice talent on Bob’s Burgers rivals that of The Simpsons, as Hamm is just one example of many. The cavalcade of guest spots also include Amy Sedaris as Mort’s (Andy Kindler as the Belcher family’s friend and local mortician) date and Adam Driver as a nude model in the holiday episode, “The Bleakening.” Not a single performance on Bob’s Burgers is phoned in; the creative team and the actors possess as much heart as the characters.
Part of this heart also comes from the fact that Bouchard and company are a generation removed from the initial relatability of The Simpsons. Now, I see my interactions with my own parents as being much closer to Bob’s Burgers than to any other animated family. Gene frequently refers to his parents as being hot (what with Linda’s “birthing hips” and Bob’s “good nipple”), but is also quick to mention that a dumpster is where he feels most at home. Even the inane questions from Tina (“Do you think horses get songs stuck in their heads?”) remind me of my family and the dumb love we all possess for each other.
The interactions between Bob and Linda are similarly sweet as the ones they engage in with their kids (personally, I enjoy when the two compete for “parent of the week” honors against one another), always accepting one another for who they are and never acting as if they aren’t one another’s favorite person. The most heroic elements of their love are in the moments when they decide to just let their competitive natures and arguments fall away in favor of just being comfortable around one another again; they’d rather be happy than quarreling.
That’s one of the core ethos of “L’il Hard Dad,” a season five installment that sees Bob seeking a refund on his remote control helicopter and Gene accompanying him to conquer his fear of freezing in the face of conflict. Instead, as Bob risks his life to prove a point against his hobbyist adversary, Gene realizes that, sometimes, it’s better to just let the petty stuff go, which can be a heroic act in itself. Bob realizes this (he always accepts that his children have the capacity to teach him, as much as he can teach them) and actually listens to his son, rather than insisting that he knows better. They may not be each other’s father (as Gene suggests), but in that moment, they’re at least each other’s hero.
The Belcher children always stand out from their peers, as the unnamed children in the Belcher universe are typically depicted as verbiage-devoid, joke-derived husks (one child is referred to by his mother as “an idiot” outside of a courtroom, one doesn’t quite know what to make of Mr. Frond’s (Herman) impromptu ADD diagnosis and responds blankly, “Huh?”). The lack of specialties for some characters provides a valuable undercurrent on the series: Bob and Linda attributing intellect to and belief in their children, allowing them to grow beyond just blending into their Ocean Avenue community.
The season four (my favorite season) episode, “Fort Night,” for example is a showcase for Louise (whose manic energy is channeled into the need for candy from trick-or-treating) primarily and the rest of the local kids in a secondary capacity. As Bouchard described this episode for Rolling Stone, it derives blatant inspiration from the symmetrical designs of Wes Anderson. However, it finds its strongest Andersonian elements in the Moonrise Kingdom-esque division of kids and adults (as Halloween tends to be) — the children trick or treat and the adults build a dragon costume. Halloween episodes, in contrast to the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays on Bob’s Burgers (all of which the series excelled at), are typically focused on whimsy as opposed to lessons, centering on all the fun that’s to be had from a night of costumes and free candy.
It’s a perfect match for Louise’s maniacal nature (Halloween tends to be the annual event that scratches base needs of her id, so as to make her a more palatable, manageable child for the rest of the year), but “Fort Night” is curious to uncover what happens when this alignment is attacked. This unfolds by the way of Louise’s id genuinely becoming personified (in the form of Millie (Molly Shannon), a little girl who feels outcast from the primary friend group on Ocean Avenue).
Through Millie, “Fort Night” unleashes elements of psychological torment (which Louise has certainly considered, but never inflicted before), as Millie manages to trap the kids inside of a cardboard box fort for the entirety of the episode, teasing them and gaslighting them and, as Sally Brown would say, making them lose out on tricks or treats! We get to see how Louise behaves when she’s deprived of her most anticipated night of the year and the episode concludes with her ravenously diving into her parents’ collection of candy acquired through the night. They’re reluctant, having not heard the explanation as to why they dodged the dragon costume, but eventually cave and eat the candy with Louise — even if they’re slightly perturbed to be doing so.
For Gene, one of his strongest showcases comes in the aforementioned “O.T.” episode, which illustrates the sweet strangeness of Bob’s Burgers as the series’ heart, rather than working opposite the beating humanity of the series. An obvious homage to E.T., a story of divorce, “O.T.” is instead about a family coming together to help Gene, both when he needs it most and when they can hardly understand why he’s fighting to save a toilet. For him, it’s about more than the bidet or the Vivaldi-orchestrated fountain or the way he can make easy money by betting Tina and Louise that there’s a talking toilet in the woods. It’s about the bond with an inanimate object because a child can bond with anything. Gene’s spirit remains uncrushed throughout the episode, even when the toilet-skateboard concoction slides off a cliff and he naively shouts, “Fly, toilet, fly!” The toilet doesn’t fly and the toilet is not his friend, but his family indulges the connection all the same.
The episode reminds me once more of my own family, as I found a piece of cardboard in the shape of a person on the floor of a Target one day as a child. Hiding it in the back of the greeting card aisle, I eagerly sought it out the next time we visited the department store and I was delighted to see it was in the same position. My parents laughed and rolled their eyes, but they encouraged me to hold onto my cardboard friend all the same. Or, at least, they didn’t discourage me from doing so.
On Bob’s Burgers, Bob and Linda would do anything for their kids and that much is evident on one of the series’ most iconic episodes (and a showcase, lastly, for Tina), “The Equestranauts.” “This isn’t a community of my peers,” Tina observes when she enters the hall that houses the Equestranaut convention (for a fandom somewhere between a PG version of “Charlie the Unicorn” and a PG-13 version of My Little Pony). What she witnesses is not little girls who want to play with their horse dolls, but rather men, who have warped the fandom, rather than respecting that some pieces of content are not explicitly geared towards them. (“Men ruin everything,” Bob and Teddy agree at the counter.)
This sentiment that drives the episode seeks to deconstruct the absurd idea at the core of it: how the lore of Equestranaut-driven immortality elevates the story beyond a satire of real-life “bronies,” who co-opted a property that was made for childhood playtime. One of the ringleader fans of the Equestranauts, Bronconius (Paul F. Tompkins), believes that his team of Equesticles (fans of the horses) will lead him to unlock the secret of eternal life through the cartoon. He believes things are “too happy” in “Horse Valley,” illustrating how some real-world bronies take their obsession too far and end up ruining the appeal for children who are drawn to the magic of friendship embodied by My Little Pony or, in this case, “The Equestranauts.”
We see it in the end of the episode, as Tina, worn down by the actions of the nefarious, manipulative men she encountered, puts her dolls away and decides it’s time to grow up, so she doesn’t become a warped, frustrated old man (shoutout to Jimmy Stewart) like Bronconius and his Equesticles. Of course, Bob refuses to entertain the notion that Tina won’t play with the doll after he read 1,200 pages of Equestranaut lore to go undercover and win her doll back from Bronconius after she was duped into trading it. Bob dresses as a purple brony, Bobcephala, and transitions from a man who couldn’t tell the difference between a horse’s mane and its tail on Tina’s toothbrush to a man who can recall Tina’s own zombie Equestranaut fan fiction. Yes, he would have become this spy for Tina no matter what, but he’s still keen to see her play with the doll he fought so hard — and got a partial tattoo — for when he darkly ordered, “Play with the doll, Tina.” It’s ninety percent because of the cultish hell he went through and maybe ten percent because he’s not ready to stop seeing Tina as his little girl yet.
Despite all the hurdles presented in these three episodes alone and the classist plights faced by the Belchers (Bob is treated like a distinguished gentleman about town because of a simple gray suit, showing how low the bar is for him; Gene yearns for “nice things,” like a bag of flour and a toilet), they still manage to care for everyone they meet and especially one another. They always have time to provide attention for their children’s antics and they always have time to entertain the grunt work others request of them (even when they don’t ask in a nice way). On top of that, the episodes of Bob’s Burgers are also sure to make time for the various ancillary elements that help flesh the series out with more color.
Take my favorite episode (and the series’ best Thanksgiving check-in), “Turkey in a Can,” for example. At the core of it (as each Thanksgiving holiday finds a new way to usurp Bob’s dreams of cooking the perfect family meal for the fourth Thursday in November), “Turkey in a Can” is a whodunnit regarding the culprit who perpetually puts Bob’s turkey into the toilet each night while the family sleeps. Compelling mystery aside (as we trust each respective claim of innocence), the episode provides attention to Teddy’s story about a rat wearing a hat, a song Gene wrote about gravy, the belief that their home contains a shower ghost, and the newfound knowledge that turkeys make Linda horny sometimes.
However, “Turkey in a Can” also contains a delightful detour that sees Bob flirting with the butcher who sells him each subsequent turkey (Tuc Watkins). Believing Bob only asks for more turkeys so he can chat him up and ask for a date, the butcher slowly sees himself worn down, remarking that he’s “so sick of Tony” (even as Bob implores him to stay with boyfriend Tony, citing that the butcher is out of his league and contemplating his own bisexuality), and agreeing to run away with Bob, who instead flees with his raw bird.
It’s a hysterical sequence in an altogether impeccable episode that really digs at what Bob’s Burgers m.o. is: occasionally stupid humor, silly premises, and warm wholesome family activity. After all, the Thanksgiving traditions of Bob’s Burgers (which frequently feature Linda’s sister, Gayle (Megan Mullally)) are on par with Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s Halloween heists and The Office’s Christmas parties. In “Turkey in a Can,” Tina winds up traumatized by the raw turkey in the toilet, Linda pukes in their cat’s litter box, and Bob drives himself insane in an attempt to solve the mystery (he obviously thinks it’s Louise, at first). But when the solution arrives (Bob sleepwalking and believing the toilet was a young Tina, in need of potty training), it’s vastly sweeter than anyone could have expected. It’s an act committed by Bob in the name of a more nostalgic period of parenthood. Gene thinks that a turkey is mistaken for Tina because of her “cocky strut,” but it mostly just goes to show that Bob might love the turkey more than he loves his own children. He doesn’t, but sometimes? Well. He might.
Despite it all, Bob and Linda are sure to encourage the creativity within their own children because the series itself is a testament to thinking outside the diner, redefining oneself, and plotting what could otherwise be simple episodes in a more creative fashion. After all, “Turkey in a Can” is not creative for its prohibiting Bob from cooking his own meal; it’s creative for presenting Bob as the culprit behind the case. They’re an imperfect family, but a learning one and the American family, like the U.S. itself, is inherently imperfect. But they’re getting better all the time and they’re stronger when they’re unified and the family is together and present. For me, I’m lucky enough to have that in real life, too. For so many, though, I’m sure Bob’s Burgers is as close to therapy as cuddling a friendly dog. Through every Halloween night, every talking toilet, every magic horse doll, Bob’s Burgers has stretched out a more welcoming hand to an increasingly disaffected public. The world needs more loving families — families who are simply trying their best.
