100 Favorite Shows: #89 — Animals.
“You basted this bird pretty good.”
The point of lists like these is to express one’s own personal journey through television. That’s why, even though many who make a Top 100 list like this wouldn’t even know that Animals. existed, let alone consider it for their ranking, Animals. made the cut! To understate things, Animals. was not for everyone. It received mixed reviews and cellar floor-level ratings during its three season run from February 2016 to August 2018. However, those who jived with the sense of humor imbued in the series by creators Phil Matarese and Mike Luciano were given a gift by HBO. Thirty episodes of a bizarrely animated and intricately plotted pseudo-anthology series centered around different kinds of animals is one of the best types of series that the peak TV era made room for. The 1960s could never.
(Spoilers for Animals. to follow. Technically.)
The vibe I always got from Animals. was that of the weird shit you’d stumble upon while watching Adult Swim during an adolescent sleepover. It’s the kind of show that is almost certainly better experienced while high, thanks to the fact that it is well within the lineage of those offbeat, industrial Saturday Night Live sketches from the ’70s that rarely had punchlines and were just kind of odd. Animals. took that exact feel and slipped it into the style of New York, I Love You type vignettes.
As for the creators, Matarese and Luciano’s sensibilities always struck me as similar to that of Simon Rich or B.J. Novak. Of course, they all tell modern, human stories with familiar tropes, but unfamiliar styles. Animals. took the social foibles that come with independent New York living and told the stories through animals, who were experiencing a whole other side of New York City while the humans walked above them or beside them or — in the case of the avian residents — below them.
The unfamiliar style came in the form of do-it-yourself animation that felt like the same sort of glitchy, cardboard cutout-esque movement that has defined South Park most primarily. (Animals. also featured the occasional live action segment.) Contrary to South Park, Animals. was much more subtle in its humor, emphasizing naturalistic dialogue above flashy, visceral jokes that tend to reside in the patterns of graphic pajama pants. Often times, the punchline in an episode of Animals. would be a perfectly banal sentence (“I’m gonna go play dead in the corner over there,” says a pug who avoids confrontation) with the genius stemming from the dry delivery of Matarese and Luciano, always down to voice multiple characters in the series’ episodes.
As straightforward as much of the dialogue could be, the story lines of many Animals. episodes were so absurd if you actually considered what was happening. If you’re the kind of person who finds Animals. on HBO, you’re the kind of person who will be unphased by the adult behaviors of the animals in question. But just an extra second of thought unveils the preposterous nature of many episodes, which could only be told through the creatures. This is evident in the third “Rats” episode, which saw the lab rats (long after Pinky and the Brain) dating Lumpy (Emilia Clarke), a sentient concoction of hay and food and dust and waste. Here, one rat engages in extremely taboo sex with Lumpy, who turns out to be a figment, and the other is completely suicidal as a result of the endless laboratory testing inflicted upon them. (This continued a thread from the previous season’s “Turkeys” episode, which saw a turkey aspiring to be pardoned ahead of Thanksgiving and the rats abducted.) The entirety of “Rats (3)” is ludicrous, but it’s the complete creative product of Matarese and Luciano, thriving in their lack of inhibition that came from airing late on Friday nights.
Animals., with all of its low ratings and lack of attention, was so indie that Jay and Mark Duplass, the kings of indie HBO anthology series, actually produced it. That’s right, Animals. was so indie that it thrived off the clout of indie filmmakers. (The Duplass influence also brought in myriad stars, including David Harbour, Edie Falco, Anthony Mackie, Tracy Morgan, Michael Sheen, and Jenny Slate, as well as Comedy Bang! Bang! alums like Claudia O’Doherty, Jon Gabrus, Nathan Fielder, and Scott Aukerman himself.) Stemming from a CBB bump, too, the alternative focus of Animals. on a podcasting style of comedy also comes through in the second “Rats.” There, Marc Maron portrays Rat Marc Maron, further paralleling the underground world of animals with our real society.
I admire Matarese and Luciano maintaining the veracity of their comedic vision on television, even at the expense of many naysayers (shouts to season three’s “Horses”). There were so many stories in the city that they could’ve chosen to tell with animals and they decided to lean into debauchery and egregious violence (along with an overarching plot of animals reclaiming the world after a pandemic sweeps through it — uh oh!); I’m in awe of it.
In “Squirrels,” a matriarchal squirrel gets ready for a second wedding while her angsty son falls in love with another squirrel in attendance, Sandy (Mindy Kaling), and writes her an extremely emo love song he performs in front of the entire ceremony — only to learn that he’s related to Sandy. Two turtles (Jessica St. Clair and Lennon Parham) in the second “Pigeons” flirt with a mechanical frog in their lake, taking turns waving at its unresponsive robotics. In the first “Cats,” Shane (Adam Scott), a goose, is forced to reckon with the fact that he’s not a swan (“Dude, you just honked”).
Yet, no recap of the absurd stories produced by Animals. would be complete without the telling of “Wallet,” an episode anchored by Olafur (John Mulaney), narration from Gina Rodriguez, and, obviously, Tom Bergeron. These elements contribute to the show coming across as a departure from the rest of the series, but it doubles down on this by including a flurry of homages to hyper-realized Japanese martial arts films. In “Wallet,” a pigeon is put in charge of saving the day after a number of other pigeons turned orphans into “Yakuza bad boys” (essentially the Hot Cops from Arrested Development). It’s not the most thrilling climax to an unconventional installment, but it does bring out the truth serum, which reveals that one bird, Jacob (Lauren Lapkus, doing her best Todd from CBB voice), spent much of the episode “jerking it.”
Obviously, Animals. was frequently silly, but it was also not apprehensive about dabbling with some real themes, like when an algae (Jason Alexander) has an existential crisis about his insignificance in the universe. The other algae ignore him because they’re content to just be algae. That’s a prevailing theme throughout Animals.: the creatures are still the creatures. For example, Phil and Mike, the rats in “Rats (3),” are placed into a testing facility and they still stupidly push both buttons the researchers watch them for. Makeup products are tested on them and even though they’re clueless as to their cruel plights, they’re still slightly anthropomorphized. (When they return from their day of being tested upon, they first check the mail.)
With this in mind, many of the animals tended to feel like Mike and Phil recreating many of the experiences they had in their own lives. The primary example of this comes in season three’s “The Trial,” which sees a legal debate over which 1990s comedy star is better: Jim Carrey or Adam Sandler? The debate is inherently dumb and unsolvable, but I still appreciated that the creative talent behind Animals. knew how crucial it was to treat something so innocuous with such intelligence, as I’ve tried to do myself with Sandler.
And they still left plenty of room to be goofy! Throughout the episode, the humor is infused into the dialogue with slight, muttered asides that serve to underscore the lunacy of the entire episode. (When a balloon is used to simulate a sick child who is enamored with pathos for Sandler, the rat on the opposing council scoffs to himself, “It’s a fucking balloon.”) By the end, a decision is made (it’s good to have the knowledge that both actors can be of high quality, but it’s also refreshing that Animals. felt confident enough to take a stance: Sandler over Carrey) and in celebration, the Sandler-defending rat exclaims to the nearby news anchor, “Suck my [bleeped] dick! Send that Carrey motherfucker to jail!” One has to wonder, if “motherfucker” was not bleeped, then what the hell was bleeped before “dick”?
In the middle of the episode, a brief aside is taken for everyone in the courtroom to disparage The Middle, which they agree is a lesser clone of Malcolm in the Middle. As The Middle was removed from both Sandler and Carrey, both sides felt comfortable agreeing that they were not in favor of that long-running and scarcely-discussed ABC comedy. Mirroring this against the mutual understanding Phil and Mike brought to the trial when deciding that Punch-Drunk Love and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind canceled each other out and were not relevant to the cases, it seems like the episode was mostly a result of a time in the past when Matarese and Luciano just hung out together to shoot the shit.
That was always the focus of Animals., especially when considering Matarese’s tweet above. Whether they were making each other laugh and then making those jokes a reality or just singing “All Mixed Up” by 311 together, Animals. always felt like two stellar comedians just mucking about. That’s what mattered. Not the animation, not the ratings, not the reviews. Matarese and Luciano made exactly what they wanted to make and they made it together. Phil Matarese said it best. What magic.
