Review: Bless the Harts “Violet’s Secret”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

While Wade has to deal with his construction work accidently spooking a neighbor’s bird, Jenny and Betty tail Violet on her way to some secret meeting, which they speculate is at a cult, only to find out that she actually just got a part time job, which she didn’t tell them about because they would embarrass her.

OUR TAKE

With most live action productions basically at a standstill with the pandemic still raging, animation is one of the few things mostly unaffected and allowed to continue under the circumstances, hence why all of Fox’s animated shows (aside from Duncanville, which won’t be back until next year) have been able to return at around the time they normally would. Bless the Harts is a pretty special case among them, as it marks the first time a show in the line up has gotten a second season since Bob’s Burgers. As such, it has quite a bit to prove in terms of showing that it deserves to stay. And while I wouldn’t say Bless the Harts’ first season was necessarily terrible, I also wouldn’t really call it very good either. It certainly did some different things, having a family dynamic mainly made up of three generations of women as opposed to the “married couple and three kids” model that its peers use, but the humor missed more often than it hit. Still, it made use of its first ten episodes establishing its cast and setting well enough, so receiving more than double of that should mean that things are built from there.

Unfortunately, I can’t really say this is a very strong start for the season, partly from the quite noticeable art style (and possibly animation style) change that was pretty distracting throughout. All the designs seem to have been…smoothed over, I think? Jenny’s face looks like it’s been through surgery of some kind, which ends up making her look more generic as a design, while everyone else looks slightly more uncanny than they did before. And the animation has possibly moved over the Flash, which just leads to some rather creepy still shots that I can only dread more of to come. The story still feels more or less like the writing from the first season, so at least that’s consistent, but not in a good way. The main plot is all about building up to this reveal that Violet is not actually in a cult, but trying to get a job and the reason for the secrecy was to keep Jenny and Betty from embarrassing her, which they do anyway, so…could this have been avoided? And then it’s just wrapped up at the end anyway so the status quo can be reset, so…yeah. 21 more episodes of this, I guess.