Season Review: Bob’s Burgers Season Twelve

After twelve seasons, Bob’s Burgers has become a regular fixture on our television screens at this point. It feels like we’ve seen almost everything there is to see when it comes to Bob, Linda, Tina, Gene, and Louise, but just because a lot of ground has been covered doesn’t mean the show is completely out of ideas. There’s still the movie dropping later this week, after all. But for now, how does the recently-wrapped season fare when it comes to grading?

The twelfth season started out pretty strong with Manic Pixie Crap Show, an episode focused on Louise’s secret vulnerabilities that resurrected her rivalry/friendship with Millie. I remember thinking that the episode felt fresh despite not having the largest stakes. With so many episodes in the past, it was great to begin the new season with a showing that proved the show still had some gas left in the tank.

That’s not to say that the entire season was a pleasant surprise. There were definitely moments when things felt a little too familiar or like lesser retreads of previously stellar scenes. Episode fourteen, for instance, Video Killed the Gene-io Star just seemed like it hit a lot of similar notes to other Gene and Courtney episodes and didn’t do enough to justify its own existence. 

Luckily, I would still have to say that things like that are more rare than the norm. In general, this season produced a fair number of successes, including some really solid eps that might stand in line with some of my favorites from earlier seasons without looking worse by comparison. Teddy is a character who has been around since the beginning, and on first glance might not seem like a guy with very much going on. But the thirteenth episode of the season, Frigate Me Knot, finds him revisiting his time in the Navy and going in a deeper emotional direction than I’ve seen from Teddy in the past. 

Episodes like that make me hopeful that there’s still some legs to this show before it breaks down from overuse. Bob’s has only become more popular over the years it seems like, and with a major motion picture hitting theaters very soon it seems like that popularity is only destined to grow. One might think that the movie would be the high point of the series, one that could signal the end approaching. But hey, The Simpsons Movie came out in 2007 and 15 years later the show is still producing new episodes. However, that’s not to say I want the same for Bob’s—just because season twelve didn’t result in an appreciable lessening of quality doesn’t mean it should go on forever.