So many adult animation series of late have concentrated so hard on gags — especially gags that involve bodily functions and cartoonish violence — that they forget to actually develop their characters. So it’s refreshing to see a series that gets in its share of dirty stuff but actually gives its characters some room to be more than just drawings.
Opening Shot: A shot of a dining room on a cruise ship, tinged by the amber windows we’re peering through.
The Gist: As the captain of the ship is charming people by playing piano, a team of law enforcement rappels onto the ship, led by Chief O’Neil (Cedric Yarbrough); they’re looking for someone in a captain’s uniform. Fooled when the captain is surrounded by children in captains’ uniforms, they bash in and tase everyone. They ultimately arrest the captain; the first mate, Liza (Lesley-Ann Brandt), calls someone and says, “They got him; it’s on again.”
Meanwhile, Jonathan Fall (Jason Ritter) is about to graduate from the merchant navy academy, but finds out he has the lowest test scores in the class (it’s scribbled on a sticky note). With limited job prospects, he finds an ad for the Seahorse Naval Job Placement Center.
The ship captain arrested on racketeering and smuggling charges mysteriously hangs himself “Epstein style,” as O’Neil tells his men. One of the agents, Agent Steel (Christopher Meloni), wonders if they need to do more work on the case, because this operation seems to be a lot bigger than one guy. O’Neil and the rest of the crew scarf down celebratory cake and tell Steel that the case is over.
Jonathan has his own issues; he comes from a long line of ships’ captains, and it seems like his wealthy family barely acknowledges his presence. During a half-birthday party for his brother Tanner (Adam Devine), his parents Blake (Christopher McDonald) and Alexis (Bebe Neuwirth) banish him to the treehouse that serves as his living quarters.
The agency, out of deference to Jonathan’s family, finds him a job piloting a motorized riverboat in a kids’ amusement park. Even that job goes south when Tanner boards, bigfoots his brother, and runs the boat into a fiberglass whale display. Liza and her colleague Pedro (Alejandro Edda) show up at the agency looking for a new captain, one who is at the bottom of their qualification list. That happens to be Jonathan. But when the employment agent gleefully puts Liza’s pic on their social media account, Liza shoots up the office and sets it on fire.
Jonathan is shocked when he’s offered the captaincy, but suddenly Blake and Alexis are treating him like their favorite son, much to Tanner’s dismay.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Captain Fall reminds us a bit of a slower-paced Archer.
Our Take: We were a bit surprised that Captain Fall, created by Jon Iver Helgaker, Jonas Torgersen and Joel Trussell, doesn’t dive headlong into the crazy and profane joke-a-minute pacing like most adult animation series of late have done. The creators actually take some time to give us an idea of why Jonathan Fall is the perfect fall guy (get it?) for the crew of the smuggling ship.
We actually start to feel bad for him by the end of the first episode, which is a testament to both the writing and Ritter’s stammering, sweaty voice performance as the feckless Jonathan. He’s such a go-along-to-get-along guy that he’s not even flummoxed when he walks in on his parents screwing to the beat of a metronome, which allows the two of them to come at the same time. He’s the victim of abusive neglect, and it shows in how much of a people-pleaser he is, even when he’s being bullied.
The rest of the characters are a bit, well, cartoonish, but that’s fine for the first episode, given the really nuanced look we get at Jonathan. What we were surprised with is the casual violence on the show, like when Liza shoots up the employment office, apologizing to everyone before shooting them. Unlike the aforementioned Archer, the violence is a touch too realistic for adult animation, especially for a show that’s supposed to be a comedy. Sure, innocent people die in these types of shows all the time, but not in the way it was portrayed in that scene.
But that’s just us being fuddy-duddies about something specific. Captain Fall isn’t nearly as sophomoric as we expected it to be, and that all by itself makes it one of the better adult animation series we’ve seen on Netflix.
Sex and Skin: Isn’t it enough to see two sixty-something animated characters fucking to a metronome?
Parting Shot: In a lair at the top of a mountain, a man (Anthony Carrigan) looks at a video of Jonathan in his captain’s uniform and cackles to his cat that it’s the “future of our enterprise.”
Sleeper Star: Bebe Neuwirth has done a surprising amount of animated voice over work, and she does a Jessica Walter-level job as the Jonathan’s witheringly emasculating mother.
Most Pilot-y Line: “What can I say? I like the taste of raisins just as much as grapes,” says Tanner when Jonathan asks him about having relations with the senior citizens at his birthday party.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Captain Fall can be silly and profane at times, but it also has some nuanced characters and an actual story, which is more than what we’ve seen from other animated series of late.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
