Season Review: Praise Petey Season One

Overview:

Petey has had everything in life until the moment that she suddenly doesn’t. A lifetime of carefree apathy comes to an end when Petey is ripped out of her cushy New York City lifestyle and begrudgingly takes over her father’s legacy, which just so happens to actually be a cult.

Our Take:

Praise Petey is first and foremost an absurdist animated comedy about a twisted cult where human sacrifices are par for the course. That being said, this silly comedy cleverly draws parallels over how the selfish traits that birth successful cult leaders are often the same personality types that get deified in prestige television where “bad men” call the shots. Praise Petey beautifully plays with the preconceptions of these types of dangerously cults of personality while it attempts to argue that a cult leader can not only actually be a good person who’s not destined to fail, but that being a cult leader actively makes them a better person. Disbelievers be gone, Praise Petey accomplishes the impossible while being uniquely hilarious and oddly heartwarming at the same time. Drink the Kool-Aid and give in. This animated comedy has what it takes to be one of the year’s big hits and help Freeform cultivate a library of cutting edge animated series.

Cults are kind of having a moment on television. Looking beyond the dozens of documentaries, scripted series like The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, The Path, and The Leftovers have made these troubling communities more accessible than ever. This taboo topic is now perfect material for an unconventional comedy. Despite their growing prevalence, these series typically examine the cult of personality that can take over susceptible individuals who are missing something in their lives. The cult is just a filter to better examine hurt individuals and the inherent desire for community. Praise Petey works very carefully to prove that it’s more interested in the people inside the cult than it is in the absurdity of the cult itself. It’s an effective way to indoctrinate skeptical viewers into this new comedy so that it can then sell the character-driven narratives underneath it all. Come for the cult, stay for the progressive social commentary on the nature of society.

The first episode of Praise Petey–like with most series–is the clunkiest. It begins dense in exposition, but thankfully gets this out of the way so that Praise Petey can just have fun and not worry about whether its audience is confused or knows every character’s backstory. There is no shortage of comedies that dig into a fish out of water dynamic as someone moves from the big city to a fresh start in a small town. Praise Petey doesn’t succumb to the typical pitfalls that are associated with this formula and it still finds enough unique things to say whenever it leans into the cult angle. Some of the show’s most entertaining material comes from the internal tug of war Petey faces now that she’s in a situation where she can finally be heard and has worthwhile ideas to share. However, there’s a palpable danger that the deeper Petey gets in this lifestyle might actually hurt lives and worsen the community. There’s the eventual fear that all of this megalomania will go to Petey’s head.

Praise Petey’s strongest brainwashing tool to win over its audience is the heightened, appropriately cartoonish sense of reality that insults the genre’s tropes, but simultaneously owns them in a way that oddly grounds these stereotypes. For instance, Petey’s ex-husband is a literal plank of wood, a great joke that Praise Petey never draws attention towards and it instead just brazenly underlines the ludicrous energy of this world. Such an outlandish tone can make it harder to genuinely connect with characters and buy into their struggles. However, Praise Petey  hits some surprising emotional highs despite the snarky, self-aware tone that it clings to like a security blanket.

Praise Petey’s highly surrealist reality is very much in line with Drezen’s other work on Miracle Workers and Girls5Eva. This style of comedy works even better in animation’s exaggerated medium where wild gags can literally go anywhere and not be tethered to any sense of reality. Praise Petey gleefully visits silly, broad places. It also makes some astute commentary on the cult-like nature of society, tradition, their perks, and the sliding scale of what’s brainwashing and indoctrination. This bite makes Praise Petey far more than just the shock value of its premise. It thrives through comedic stories that explore how faith isn’t black and white or absolute. It should be incredibly interesting to see what this series and Petey’s grander arcs are, as well as what Praise Petey is really trying to say.

Praise Petey is dense in a beautifully cyclical style of comedy that shows why one person can’t run a community on their erratic whims and how a desire to be selfless can trigger greater chaos than ever before. It pushes the toxic premise that in order to do some good there needs to be some evil at the same time; being a leader isn’t easy, but that dark deeds aren’t only necessary, but inevitable, regardless of how much Petey wants to avoid it.

Praise Petey progressively leaves its comfort zone. However, the show’s standard episodic structure is a little too tidy during the season’s start. Petey has a new issue in the town/cult to solve whether it’s fixing the economy, starting a magazine, or building up resources and exports as she tries to amend her father’s old ways with her modern approach to cultdom, for both better and for worse. This still leads to excellent material and the second-half of the season is much more willing to break away from form and structure in order to follow more creative whims. This leads to some shadowy Elder cult conspiracies that courses underneath everything and threaten to usurp Petey’s rule through ludicrous roadblocks like sacred tortoises.

There’s a playful will they/won’t they rom-com energy between Petey and the town hottie, Bandit. It’s pretty telegraphed, but still works and becomes more natural over time even if it’s born out of a hackneyed place. Praise Petey’s writing is still smart enough to get ahead of it all and actually make you want to root for these two crazy kids’ love. If nothing else, it’s just encouraging to see a show that has so many strong female characters where all of the best lines come from women.

Through all of these radical ideas Praise Petey is still able to get to the core of what a community really needs and is supposed to look like. Oddly enough, Praise Petey bears the biggest resemblance to this year’s Mulligan, another animated series about rebuilding America, albeit set during an actual apocalypse and not just a brainwashed cult community. Both shows work in their own unique ways, but Praise Petey feels like it has greater substance and the ability to last longer and help turn Freeform into a worthy home for subversive animated comedies. Praise Petey is strange, sweet, and silly in the best ways possible. It’s destined to be a cult classic–pun intended–but with any luck it’ll be a mainstream hit.

‘Praise Petey’ premieres July 21st on Freeform, with next-day airing on Hulu