Season Review: Bob’s Burgers Season 14

Do you like Bob’s Burgers? Of course you do, you wouldn’t be reading this review of its fourteenth season if you didn’t. When you hit a number of seasons in the teens, there’s usually a bit of an expectation that the writing will basically go on autopilot, with characters Flanderized down to base traits blown out of proportion and story ideas solidifying into a rigid frame that the studio doesn’t dare break out from. Heck, that term Flanderization, is in reference to that very thing happening to The Simpsons past its tenth season, and one could certainly argue something like it happened to Family Guy after a certain point. But, for whatever reason, Bob’s Burgers has not lost a step just yet, even after almost a decade and a half on the air, even becoming the first Fox animated show to even get a fourteenth season in almost a decade (American Dad got one a little earlier but on TBS). However, like every other ongoing Fox animated comedy, the Writer’s and Actor’s Strikes of last year got several episodes shaved off the season, making it the shortest since 2012. Heck, Bob’s Burgers started only a couple years after the last big strike, so this is somehow their first time being impacted this way. But did this season end up sizzling enough? Let’s find out.

Despite only having a baker’s dozen of episodes to work with, the show still manages to give all of the principal cast at least one focus episode with them in the A plot, and even a couple episodes focusing on a couple characters at a time. Gene gets an episode about trying to remember a song he heard in a dream, Linda’s has her trying to keep one of the raccoons she looks after away from Animal Control, and the improvised finale goes to Tina learning to deal with weird body sweat after her first teen party with her peers. Not all of the episodes are the show’s best though, with the holiday episodes, or at least the ones that fit into Halloween and Christmas, falling well below the usual standard. However, even with some less than ideal episodes, there are still some clear gems among them that may even go on to be counted as some of the show’s best, most notably “The Amazing Rudy”, which gives us a closer and much more emotionally tangled look at Regular Sized Rudy’s hectic parental situation. It’s by far the season’s best episode and should absolutely be watched if you have to pick one out of the batch.

So yeah, that’s another solid Bob’s Burgers season that won’t give you food poisoning. As much as some of the episodes feel lacking, it’s nice to see there’s still ones that can make you feel a lot more than you’d expect. It didn’t get to go out on a banger of a finale like the last two seasons, but it still managed to have enough to it to show that it’s hanging on just as well as it always has. It’s crazy to think about at this point, but we’re only a few years away from this show celebrating its twentieth anniversary, so maybe we’ll see something special when it finally gets around to it. The show will be back on the Fall line up later this year, but between then and now is the possible strike by The Animation Guild that could end up shaking up the next season as well. Fingers crossed it doesn’t come to that, but even if it does, Bob’s Burgers is a show about a working class family working to get what they can and deserve, so it would certainly be in the spirit of the show if the people who make it possible have to go on strike. But we’ll know for sure what happens there in the Fall, so take care until then.