Season Review: Fairview Season One

Comedy Central actually has a pretty incredible record of adult animated comedies that aren’t South Park…not lately…but they do. Series like Ugly Americans, Legends of Chamberlain Heights, Dr. Katz, Futurama, Drawn Together, and Brickleberry are just a small smattering of examples of quality adult animation that, quite honestly, I don’t understand how the network doesn’t just replay this shit all day long instead of reruns of The Cleveland Show. Even if they piped in some MTV content like Beavis and Butt-Head, the ratings would spike like nuts much in the same way animated comedy has helped out Disney networks FXX and Freeform find some footing.

Unfortunately, Fairview will not be included in the upper-echelon of animated comedy history. The franchise, executive produced by Stephen Colbert, now CNN President Chris Licht, and longtime animation mainstay RJ Fried, is exactly the type of result that is going to come about as a result of hiring a bunch of NY-based writers whose sole collective writing credit is jokes on Twitter. With scripts and dialogue largely derived from hashtag bubbles filled with one-sided opinions and no real original thought, Fairview never quite takes off.

It doesn’t help that the show premiered new episodes after the king of animated satire in South Park, but unlike a show like Legends of Chamberlain Heights where episodes may broach some of the same topics with a different viewpoint, none of Fairview’s viewpoints are atypical, and instead, just coast along the lines of what is acceptable social discord from six months ago. The aesthetic of the show, to the animation pure hard, isn’t going to sit well, but I actually liked the cutesy looking characters because at least from a visual perspective it was something a little different. The voice cast featured promise as well, James Austin Johnston never really had a chance to shine his talents here and Aparna Nancherla is quickly becoming a figurehead on animated series resumes, though sometimes for head-scratching reasons.

A lot of the slight hindrances could have been overshadowed with quality writing. Fairview is none of that. Fortunately for us, Comedy Central appears to have some good series on the way with Jodie and The Ren & Stimpy Show plus cousin network Paramount+ filling our summer with new Beavis and Butt-Head. Until then, let’s see if Comedy Central can find a more original series pickup.