It is very uncommon to see an adult animated comedy series take a slightly more conservative vantage point especially whence compared to the numerous animated comedies that tend to be on the liberal side of the political fence. However, clearly there is a market to serve this area given that DailyWire+, home to Adam Carolla’s Mr. Birchum, has surpassed more than a million paid subscribers. For a service that, at the time of this writing, costs about $16 a month, that’s a decent amount of capital that can be used to continue to serve this audience. While liberal-owned streaming services tend to fight over the same fanbases and do so by queer/race/gender-bait tactics, DailyWire+, and to a lesser extent Netflix, is showing that there are whole hosts of audiences not giving a shit about any of that and instead just want to laugh and have a good time. Hell, even FOX News’ Greg Gutfield will routinely have weeks where his ratings outperform those on broadcast networks all of whom are vying for the same audiences. Low-brow adult animated comedies can, and continue to serve, these audiences have for decades. That said, Mr. Birchum is proof that the sophistication of the ancillary components of an animated comedy still have a long ways to go whence produced on probably smaller budgets when compared to the Family Guys and The Simpsons of the world whom routinely cost $2 million an episode to make.
When the series was originally announced and subsequently promoted, the notion was Mr. Birchum could answer for conservative values what a series like Family Guy does for increasingly liberal values. However, upon revisiting all six episodes of Mr. Birchum’s first season, the animated comedy does feature good ideas in which to broach these topics, but the scripts are so antiquated in their execution that the intended effect misses more times than it hits and therefore ultimately defeats the purpose. Like Family Guy, Mr. Birchum will utilize cutaways gags to highlight funny flashbacks and “what ifs?”, however when those cutaways are delivered, the results are ham-filled at best and largely don’t take advantage of the fact that this is an animated series and are more akin to how live-action would treat cutaways in really just depicting imaginary scenarios rather than doing anything truly imaginative. The actual premises of each Mr. Birchum episode is actually not bad, episodes about kids not really being taught valuable life lessons in school, gender politics, and even highlighting gen Z’s take on actually helping in charitable actions rather than just doing a bunch of selfies that seem sincere but are in fact lacking any real intent. These are all very well illustrated ideas, but the dialogue can seem very drab at times and very seldom is anyone’s voice-acting that over-the-top great that it can save said dialogue.
The series follows the titular character, Mr. Richard Birchum(portrayed by Carolla) working at a public school as a woodshop teacher, an art that is increasingly under scrutiny by the public school systems, especially when they hire a DEI officer in Elliot Karponzi (voiced by Tyler Fischer). While Birchum tries to instill values for kids that used to be rudimentary, i.e. helping out your community, paying attention in school,and actual life skills that kids can use in well…life. Fortunately, Birchum’s supervisor, Principal Pam Bortles(Roseanne Barr) and so is his best friend Don Gage (Alonzo Bodden). Back at home the environment is a bit more even-keeled. While his wife(“Wendi” voiced by Megyn Kelly) is a real go-getter, that same attribute doesn’t seem to align with son, Eddie (voiced by Kyle Dunnigan). Step-daughter Jeanie (voiced by Brett Cooper) wants to be so-like Richard in that she really takes a liking to construction and is wise beyond her years. Along with a pretty solid cast, Mr. Birchum features a more-than-solid guest cast with the likes of Jay Mohr (Coach Murphy), Rob Riggle (Gunderson), Patrick Warburton(Burly Man), and Danny Trejo (Switchblade) all providing valuable contributions to the series and each of whom play off well with the main cast, most prominently Mr. Birchum.
As mentioned before, the dialogue needs a lot of work in the jokes department and even in the not-jokes department. A good example of this is despite the fact that Adam Carolla’s character is named “Richard” or “Dick” for short, both his wife and his stepdaughter refer to the main character by his last name, which really doesn’t help enforce the family dynamic that the series is hoping to instill on the viewers. The animation production by Chassy Media is presented as clunky and somewhat rudimentary in its execution, all attributes that could potentially be over-looked if the scripts were quite a bit more concise.
Overall, Mr. Birchum embodies the spirit of what made the Birchum character likable on Crank Yankers and when he was a regular feature on KROQ-FM, but plain-jane scripting and an attempt to cater to an audience rather than try to challenge said audience falls flat, and as such, is a subpar effort to the other animated comedies Mr. Birchum attempts to emulate.