Venture Bros: Season 2, Episode 1

Maybe I’m just buzzed, but that didn’t feel like a new episode of The Venture Bros.  That felt like a completely different show.  The pacing, the complexity, the multiple layers of action and interaction, all with the typically dense saturation of pop-culture references from Batman to Poltergeist. 

It’s like the concepts from Season One have been folded up, crushed into a forge and pounded with a pneumatic press to form just the bones of the new season, and then there’s actually another show on top of it.

Far too much information to take in in one viewing.

It feels like the gloves have come off.  The subtext has become the text.  It’s no longer hinting at ideas or alluding to them, it’s coming right out and saying “This show is about ideas, and then it has to be funny, and then there has to be some kind of adventure plot.”

Startling to see a half-hour comedy, especially an irreverent, scatological half-hour comedy supposedly produced for an audience of teenage stoners, suddenly go from episodic television to mega-narrative.  The mega-narrative was always there, but it felt like if the Sopranos had started out like, say, Law and Order and then suddenly turned into the soap opera that it is.

The science/religion argument that goes by in an instant, a dozen multiple deaths in ten seconds, a prison break, introspection, a drug-laced pacifier, a jungle babe, zombies,  the monarch’s makeshift costume, the look on Dr. Girlfriend’s face as she gazes longingly out the window, and that covers maybe a sixteenth of the moments that make this dizzying, electrifying television.

Special kudos to the voice work, specifically Mr. Urbaniak’s newly confident reading of Jonas Venture.  It’s great to see a show not sit still but rather unfold in a dozen delightful, unpredictable ways.