To those who would call this MTV cartoon the boob tube at its most puerile, I have but one rejoinder: You said “boob.” This show’s fart-knocking, frog-smashing anarchy might have put it on the list alone, but B&B was so much more. It was a surreal comedy (“I am the great Cornholio!”). It was one of TV’s great inside critiques, peeling back the MTV fantasy of unattainable cool and personifying the sugar-buzzed idiot-children who paid the channel’s bills. Like creator Mike Judge’s later King of the Hill, Office Space and Idiocracy, it was an unsparing, minutely observed and surprisingly good-hearted picture of consumer America. And to the list of great philosophical dialectics—good/evil, yin/yang—it added another: “That’s cool” / “That sucks.” B&B was on the right side of that one.
