Though I was disappointed with The Goode Family from the episodes I’d previewed, there was enough in it that I liked that I set up a season pass for it anyway. I ended up watching the pilot again last night, and I have to say: it still made me laugh. All the flaws were still there: the too-obvious P.C. jokes, the heavyhanded emphasis on the “it’s so hard to be good!” concept, the general flattening of the characters in service of the sharp-elbowed satire, and the structural fact that the show is so blatantly similar to King of the Hill.
That said, I have to wonder if I wouldn’t have liked it better if I had never seen KOTH, and if I was therefore holding the bar too high. There were some scenes that really clicked—Gerald and Bliss bonding in shared mortification at the purity-ring ceremony, Helen seeing the judgmental faculty wife in her wine glass—and I couldn’t not laugh at Good Dog vegan dog food “for good dogs that want to do good.” Just as KOTH is a rare show that gets American regional culture right, The Goode Family, for all the too on-the-nose jokes in the pilot, does really get the look and texture of a certain kind of left-leaning, midsized college town. (I say this as a former Ann Arbor resident.) And I’m a sucker for Mike Judge’s line readings, like the faint shading of horror he gives Gerald telling himself the father-daughter dance will be fun—”good, clean, nonincestuous fun.” Of course the little pauses he uses to deliver those adjectives reminded me of the way Hank Hill would have said the same line, so there you go.
In any case, I do hope the show sticks around a while and gets a chance to improve. People usually bet against Mike Judge, and they usually bet wrong. Also, I’ve got a million of these lame “Goode” pun headlines left. What does Tuned Inland say about it?