Season Review: The Great North Season Two

When The Great North’s first season debuted back in the fall of 2020, it was exciting to see what the Molyneux sisters and their fellow creators had in store for us. While the first season introduced a lovable family in a unique setting along with some Bob’s Burger-ish heart and humor, the season was only 11 episodes and at the time I wrote that it wasn’t necessarily enough time to get invested as a viewer in a brand-new show. Now that we’ve spent over twice that long with the Tobin family, have my feelings changed?

In short, kind of. Season two of The Great North was the more typical 22 episodes in length, meaning that we’ve really gotten a chance to see what kind of show The Great North wants to be. With more time to develop the characters and storylines, the show has certainly evolved and grown. I’m not entirely sure that evolution was entirely for the better, however.

One of the things I noted in my review last season was that the show seemed to suffer a bit in differentiating itself from its spiritual sibling Bob’s Burgers. Moon in particular felt like a straight up gender-swapped copy of Louise, even down to his strange headgear of choice. Luckily we actually get a decent number of episodes starring Moon this season—although he’s still probably the most blank-slate like amongst his family members. They even let him take off his hat this season to help avoid those Louise comparison, even though his hat-less character design is one of the ugliest things to look at in the show.

I feel like the writing has carved out a bit of a niche for itself, too, with enough outlandish humor to be a bit less grounded than Bob’s while still keeping that heartbeat underneath to provide just enough of an emotional anchor to hang on to. One thing I do not enjoy about the recent season is the over reliance on dumb puns, though. Wacky wordplay is one thing, but there are a lot of puns in season two that just feel phoned in, especially in Wolf’s dialogue.

It’s interesting that this second season feels deliberately seems to place Judy in a bit of a backseat after her more starring role last season. I have no idea if this was due to network tests or ratings or whatever, but it definitely felt like we had less teen Judy and more adult male leads like Wolf and Beef. The voice acting is still one of the highlights of the show for sure, with Nick Offerman really finding his footing as the Tobin family patriarch this season.

The Great North tried to make up a lot of territory quickly in its short first season, introducing viewers to a big family that only got bigger once Honeybee officially joined the clan. In season two, the show is able to build off those foundations and deliver episodes that are more consistently funny as well as some that pull at the heartstrings. Some of my favorite highlights of the season include Beef joining the local moms group for Moon and Ham helping a chaotic grandmother to break out of her nursing home rut. Reviewing the first season I wrote that the show wasn’t entirely worthy of calling itself ‘great’ yet, but hoped that would change with time. And I think it has—at least for the most part. There’s still a number of misses this season, but overall, I’d say The Great North gets closer to greatness than not.