Matt Groening
Disenchantment

No point beating around the bush: Disenchantment is crap. It is a work of such insipid malevolence that it doesn't even deserve a preface, an introduction, a ceremonial pantomime like the meeting between two giants of entertainment like Netflix and Groening or the awaited return of the creative team behind The Simpsons and Futurama. It doesn't even deserve to be in the same sentence with those two Absolute Masterpieces, let alone being compared to them. Disenchantment is crap, it exists and there’s nothing you can do about it, and it is so mediocre and disappointing that it doesn't even complete the full circle to become involuntary trash entertainment, like Illud Divinum Insanus for instance: it's crap and it remains crap.

Everything is wrong with Disenchantment: it fails as a comedy because it doesn't land a single joke, managing to mess up every type of comedic timing, drowning every possible funny situation in a sea of embarrassment that makes the latest Simpsons episodes seem like Monty Python by comparison, offering us a collection of gags still stuck in 1990 (emblematic in the first episode is the scene of changing letters on a cake to create an insult, something even Bart hasn't done since '93 at least); it fails as a parody of the fantasy genre because it was clearly conceived by someone who only knows the most banal clichés of fantasy, and here you really see the difference with another parody like Futurama, which instead conveyed immense love for Sci-Fi in every single frame; the plot is wrong, bland, almost non-existent except for a handful of twists glued on with spit in the last episodes, so boring as to make even a single episode feel heavy; the characters are terribly wrong, ugly, utterly banal, born old, without a shred of originality, from the tomboy princess who gets drunk and doesn't want to be a princess (seriously Matt? Where the hell have you lived for the past twenty-five years? Come on) to the dopey elf ripped off from Fry, to the demon Luci so copied from Salem the cat that at one point (practically immediately) the creators just stopped caring and started having other characters treat him like a cat.

Even the animations are terrible, which wasn't at all expected given the high budget provided by Netflix: movements are slow, awkward (further ruining the timing essential to comedy), to the point of recalling cartoons from thirty years ago like He-Man. Am I exaggerating? Perhaps, but not by much. The fact is that every episode is a torment, lasts half an hour on the clock but feels like two hours, and sorry if this is a minor flaw when talking about an animated series, especially if it comes from the same creators of those two shows there and the production studio of Bojack Horseman. Just a note on the original dubbing, at least this is decent, if not for Nat Faxon, who, in dubbing the elf-Fry-knockoff, laid it on so thick while mocking Olaf’s accent from Frozen, that it ended up as a rip-off. If only this were the problem.

A dramatic rejection in short, a bitter disappointment not only for those who expected the Futurama of our era but also for those who had low expectations (even from the trailer it looked bad, it must be said), and indeed it was greeted with raspberries and spits by practically everyone, except for the usual handful of nerds ready to defend the indefensible, as long as it's branded Netflix. Naturally, there's already a second season in the works; as far as I'm concerned, I'm sure that in a year I'll have better things to do than wasting five hours to see if it has improved in the meantime; for example, a visit to the proctologist.