Fox Broadcasting has a new animated show that will get you asking “why does this exist?”.
Duncanville is about a red haired high school boy named Duncan and his family. It tries too hard, has nothing special about it, and differentiates itself from other Fox shows in no way at all. It’s not terrible. But the jokes are mostly flat and the characters aren’t funny relatable archetypes – it’s all just a bunch of stale tropes put together as something new.
Formulaic Snooze
It’s like Fox animation heard one pitch for an animated sitcom and would accept only versions of that one pitch for the next 35 years and then the green-light department takes that standard and compares it to each new series they air with only slight modification, with Duncanville coming full circle back to where they started.
The pitch outline goes:
It’s an animated comedy about a white family of 5 in the suburbs.
The father is an inept doofus, but the mother is super competent, especially by comparison to the bumbling dad who is always getting into trouble.
They have three kids – two girls and a boy.
The teen boy, like the dad, isn’t very smart but will be a caricature of the most problematic stereotypes about pre-teen/teen males.
His sister however is there to lampshade stereotypes and buck those trends and her main trait will be that she’s, by contrast anyway, a deeper thinking type who is mistreated by life.
And then theres a baby who is the youngest but also the smartest in the family as evidenced by precocious moments that the rest of the family never seems to recognize.
Then each show that gets greenlit goes under review in comparison to this standard and the history of comparison to that pitch above has been:
The Simpsons – Yes, perfect, 100%. No modification.
Family Guy – Yes, but make the precocious baby a male.
American Dad – Yes, but make the precocious baby an Alien instead of a 3rd kid.
Bobs Burgers – Yes, but make the precocious baby girl older – like 7-ish, and keep the competency levels with the parents but make the mom a little kookier and the dad just as inept but more stoic.
The Cleveland Show – Yes, but the family is black, and the precocious baby is a male, like we did in Family Guy.
Duncanville – Yes, perfect, 100%. No modification.
Like… why? Why did we need this?
“I thought of it first. They did it first…”
To be fair… I could just be sour-grape-ing here and somewhat unfairly picking on the show.
I am definitely consciously vexed by unimaginative series premises going into production, but maybe I’m just grousing about it because of a less conscious resentment that this series stole the title structure and opening theme from two animated pilots I had previously pitched and then executed them both in ways that don’t justify them getting to broadcast before me.
My series concept Martyville (2003), about a main character named Marty, used the title to portray how he is basically the mayor of his own little neighborhood of connected associates. Duncanville uses no similar setup for its premise. It’s not really about Duncans little circle or the world orbiting around him as the opening sequence suggests – it’s just a cookie cutter family comedy arbitrarily named after the son.
My series concept Dolphin Mode (2007), about a teenager navigating life through school, social encounters, and family, deprived its name from the fact that dolphins keep swimming while asleep by just closing one eye and sleeping part of their brain and then switching off – making for a good metaphor of both ambitious steadfastness that never truly sleeps and also burnout jaded teen culture that just kindov sleeps through life. Anyway – the opening theme is similar to Duncanville’s in that the main character stays in position in the frame, walking towards the camera while the people and surroundings he’s walking through changes as an alternative punk style dreamy tune plays.
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