Elon Musk Will Find ‘Krapopolis’ Funny. Everybody Else? Not So Much.
Fox executives have been waiting a long time to invite their audience to step in Krapopolis, and are betting they’ll want to keep doing it for a long time. I’m just not sure they’re right.
In mid-2020, Fox signed a deal with Community boss Dan Harmon to develop a new animated comedy. This was a year after Disney had bought most of 20th Century Fox, but not the broadcast network. Without an affiliated studio to provide new scripted shows under the same corporate umbrella, Fox network execs began leaning in two directions: reality TV and animation. The Sunday lineup featuring The Simpsons, Bob’s Burgers, and Family Guy had been running forever, and is a reliable money machine, so why not bring in the man who helped create an absolute juggernaut in Rick and Morty?
Originally, Harmon’s show — which at the time didn’t have a publicly-announced name or premise — was supposed to debut in the spring of 2022, roughly in line with how long it takes to get an animated series up and running. Then that date was pushed back to November of 2022, then to May of 2023, and finally to this Sunday. Along the way, Fox ordered a second season before a single episode had aired. That’s fairly standard in the modern TV ecosystem, and especially for animated series that need a much longer lead time. But back in May, the network ordered a third season before a single episode had aired, which is more or less unheard of. Fox execs believe Krapopolis is going to be huge — or, at least, they really need it to be.
And maybe it will. Rick and Morty casts a very wide halo, with alums of that show running various hit Marvel series, one of the best current Star Trek spinoffs, and other recent animated series like Solar Opposites(*) and Strange Planet. Maybe even in an era where it’s harder than ever to get viewers — young ones in particular — to watch anything on the broadcast networks, Harmon’s name alone will bring in a big crowd.
(*) There has also been a large shadow cast over Rick and Morty World, with co-creator and main voice actor Justin Roiland having to leave that show and Solar Opposites after being accused of domestic violence, and now sexual assault. Roiland was not involved in Krapopolis.
But based on the three episodes made available to critics, Krapopolis doesn’t seem worth all this fuss. It lacks the wit, imagination, and emotional savvy of Harmon’s other series. And other than some inspired line readings by the voice cast, the show lives down to a lament by its main character, who at one point gets a muted reaction to a joke, and says, “I agree: it’s not laugh-out-loud funny.”
Krapopolis is set in a mythical version of Ancient Greece. Tyrannis (Richard Ayoade) is the king of the titular location, designed to be the world’s first true city, and a turning point for how he believes humanity should operate. “Civilization is the future, savagery is the past,” he boasts. But he keeps running afoul of both his misunderstanding of how people of his time think, and of relatives who don’t share his vision and often actively stand in the way of it. His mother Deliria (Hannah Waddingham) is a destructive, narcissistic Greek goddess who only cares about getting people to worship her. His father Shlub (Matt Berry) is a literal monster — “part scorpion, part lion, part eagle, part horse, part person,” he explains — whose primary interest is sex with anyone and anything that will have him. His sister Stupendous (Pamela Murphy) is a massive wall of muscle who believes every problem can be solved with her fists, while brother Hippocampus (Duncan Trussell) is a fish-man monster who would prefer to stay in his science laboratory and find new ways to make people “terrified of my godlike power!”
How civilizations are created and function is the most frequent theme of Harmon’s work, and Krapopolis is the most overt example of this yet. He just doesn’t do much with the idea here. Most of the material is nudge-nudge, wink-wink anachronistic humor. Hippocampus invents explosives, and when asked to explain the concept, he insists, “Words don’t describe it. It’s just… da bomb.” In a later episode, Tyrannis gathers representatives from all of the neighboring kingdoms together for a peaceful exhibition, which Stupendous transforms by inventing the idea of violent athletic competition. Almost immediately, two members of the audience begin talking like contemporary play-by-play announcers, with one acknowledging that they can’t predict how much game is remaining because, “Measurements of time are not really a thing yet.”
Very little of this lands. Berry, Waddingham, Keith David (as Asskill, violent ruler of a nearby kingdom of cannibals) and some of the other actors deliver the dialogue with panache. And some of the most violent and/or sexual material(*) at least leaves an impression. But even with the mix of historical comedy and supernatural Greek god hijinks, much of it feels like watered-down versions of preexisting comedy bits. There’s even a scene in the third episode where, after everyone agrees that wolves are mankind’s greatest enemy, Tyrannis complains, “This family is the wolves of people!” — a less funny callback to the Community scene where Troy called Britta “the AT&T of people.”
(*) It’s a mark of either Fox’s desperation to bring in younger viewers, or simply an acknowledgment that almost no one differentiates between shows made for broadcast, cable, or streaming anymore, but most of Berry’s dialogue is only slightly less explicit than when he’s playing the similarly horny Laszlo on FX’s What We Do in the Shadows. There’s also a fair amount of gore, particularly whenever Hippocampus is around, and the queen of one of the other local nations is nicknamed, “The Biter-Offer of Penises.”
Three episodes is not a big sample size, and comedies often take time to find their voices, be they live-action or animated. Early Community episodes barely resemble the self-aware, pop culture-parodying gem that show became. Bob’s Burgers didn’t really start to work until after the Belchers had become so well-established that their behavior became hilarious precisely because it was so inevitable. It’s entirely possible that Krapopolis comes into its own over time, and that Fox’s big bet on it will pay off. But for how long it’s been in the works, and for how much the network seems to have riding on it, it seems no sturdier at this point than the city its hero has tried to build.
The first two episodes of Krapopolis debut September 24 on Fox, with additional installments releasing weekly. I’ve seen the first three.