"The Boondocks Season 1" Aged Beautifully, Effortlessly Smart

 

    I have officially finished watching the first season of The Boondocks. It's a show that's always been on my radar, but for one reason or another eluded me, mainly the fact that it cannot be streamed in Canada unless I buy it off of Apple TV. But, I am in a bit of rut when it comes to figuring out what I want to do, I could not finish Tomb Raider 1 unless I felt like ripping my hair out, so I decided to give this show I see online so often a spin. And I should have watched this show earlier. I don't think it's the best show I've ever watched so far, but it's just a really enjoying watch. Let's talk about it.

    I'm not saying this show is for "Le Intellectual" or whatever, but when I say this show feels pretty smart, I mean in the sense that I never really have to worry about anything aging poorly. Even if this show wasn't an animated show I would say it's pretty smart about topics it chooses to satirize, even if it's often through the lens of children. Like considering this show was released in 2005 I was surprised when the first season already started taking shots at both Bill Cosby and R. Kelly. In my mind both of those men were cancelled were when I was child, which was around 5-10 years after these episodes aired. 

    Compare this to a show like How I Met Your Mother, which started around the same time as this show. I started to enjoy it enough that I was pretty quick to handwave away any discrepancies or jokes that felt like they were in bad taste for the modern era. So much so that I was pretty surprised to see people complain about the show online, considering I had learned to love it. On the other hand, for better or for worse, I would say the topics The Boondocks chooses to touch upon still feel pretty relevant even 20 years later. Which could either be an indictment on society in general, or just praise for how timeless the show is proving to be.

    I will say though that this season definitely did feel like a first season. I say this because you could feel the show try to find it's footing, balancing which characters to showcase, who was funny, and how small/large to make the world of Woodcrest feel. I will say personally I felt as if the Huey centric-episodes were by far the most interesting, and I did enjoy his dynamic with Jazmine. On the other hand, while Mr. Freeman had some funny gags, I'm sorry I just could not bring myself to care much about what he did this season. When it came to Riley I was more hit or miss, but there are only so many times you can feature a character like Gin Rummy and Ed Wuncler III before you want to take a break from them.

Final Score: 75/100

    I think I'll be starting the second season soon, but also The Bear just released their final season, and I kind of want to find a video game to sink my teeth in again, I'm just not sure which one. There's a Steam sale on so it can't be that hard. I also don't know if I should impose some sort of length minimum to review a work. I say that because I just read Dark Ages by Tom Taylor, which was decent, about a 70 or so I'd say, and it does do a bit to shake up the usual apocalyptic stuff, but also it was six issues. Could I really review something that short? I mean Luther Strode was 18 issues, but it felt a decent bit longer than that. So who knows, we'll see what I review next.

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