Earlier this month Fox announced at the 2012 Television Critics Association winter press tour in Los Angeles that the new cartoon comedy by Jonah Hill, Allen Gregory will not be returning for a second season. Allen Gregory was a show with a huge ad campaign and was part of a production deal Fox signed with the Apatow alum. Yet, with low ratings on a network with a huge cartoon comedy presence, Allen Gregory was doomed to be apart of Fox’s love for early cancellation.

When the show premiered, I never got around to watching it, but the moment I heard that Fox was cancelling it shortly after it had come on television, I had to check it out. Ever since the Firefly incident, I can’t help but distrust Fox’s decisions, and I did find the concept of the cartoon rather intriguing, it felt like it could work as another crude but funny series along the lines of South Park, Family Guy, and American Dad. However, by the second episode I realized Fox was dead-on, this show needed to end.

The problem… okay, the problems with Allen Gregory are numerous. This is a show that goes for crude and controversial, but completely misses the point of how to make a proper satire. Its social commentary satire is without directive, and there is not a single character that comes off as likable, even the few that were in a way likable, end up becoming tiring and pathetic by the end of the seventh episode (which was the last to air before the news of the show’s cancellation hit the news). From the titular character of Allen Gregory (voiced by Jonah Hill), who is a young and arrogant seven year old that is forced to go to a public school after his two gay Dad’s can no longer commit to home schooling him. Allen Gregory comes off as a brilliant and sheltered child that speaks like a 30-40 year old pretentious douche, that is until the brilliant part starts to come into question.

Hello ladies and gentlemen, you will hate me.

The way Allen Gregory speaks to the people around him is some of the most angering behavior I have seen on television. This is a character I could in no way, ever, root for. I wanted him to be shot down on every occasion, but yet, it rarely happens. Even when he does get shot down by the most popular kid in school, Joel Zadak (voiced by No Strings Attached and Get Him to the Greek‘s, Jake M. Johnson), Gregory becomes committed to the idea that all of it is in some form of good fun, and that Zadak will come around and accept him.

Joel Zadak is a character that is the usual popular kid in school that you see in any television series, he is a self-confident bully that controls his group of friends with fear, and hangs his good looks and popularity over their heads. He is not a likable character in the least, and yet, he comes off as more sympathetic than Allen Gregory. Especially in the fourth episode, Interracial McAdams that saw Gregory try to buy favor with a bed ridden Zadak by subbing for him as the leader of his social group. Somehow Gregory is able to usurp his “best friends” power by dominating the group and making them all impressed with him through kindness, while subjecting the only people that bothered to support him before this moment to abuse. I ended up wanting Zadak to come back and take the group over, and when Gregory allowed him to by saying horrendous things about all these kids that now liked him more than Joel (in order to again gain popularity with Joel and the school, which he had already attained!) I was not only baffled by the logic, but felt a slight bit of victory for that dick of a character in Joel Zadak. It just isn’t right.

That is the conceptual problem of this show, there is not a single individual to root for, and the ones you end up rooting for in anyway are just the lesser evils. Allen Gregory is dominated by aggressively despicable characters such as his own father, Richard (voiced by Third Rock From the Sun‘s, French Stewart), who is a rich and successful business man that lives with his perfectly chiseled husband Jeremy (voiced by the Cleveland Show‘s, Nat Faxon) whom he constantly berates and abuses emotionally, as well as his adopted (Cambodian?, the series never clarifies) daughter Julie (voiced by Joy Osmanski) that also takes a lot of incredibly mean and insensitive behavior by both Richard and Allen. Richard owns a large home and employs a Latina maid to clean up after his family. He is also a dim-witted prick, it is difficult to believe that he could possibly be successful, he reminds me of The Dean from Community, except if The Dean wasn’t likable at all, had nothing but flaws, and treated everyone as if they were below him.

Nothing feels at all plausible in the show, and I’m glad it addressed a few of the issues eventually, too bad all of them were done just as sloppy as everything else. Such as the issue of, how in the hell is this idiot, Richard, successful? It turns out in the episode I mentioned above, Interracial McAdams, that he was a sheltered and beloved son of a man that started the business that Richard now belongs to. He was born into money and status. The episode shows that Richard is being lied to and given simple duties that have nothing to do with the company, and shown faked newspapers about his accomplishments, while the real men run the company and make the money. These men set up an elaborate ruse when Jeremy points out the strangeness of the events at the office to Richard, and Richard falls for all of it when he flusters and nearly ruins the company (that is if any of the events he completely screwed up weren’t all faked by the company heads). So, not only is Richard an elitist bastard of a human being, he is also a barely functioning retard.

Gregory, his little weak manipulated friend, and Joel Zadak

Allen Gregory’s over-blown intelligence comes into question as you look at the influences in his life. Richard is dumber than Paris Hilton, and the man that was actually supposed to be teaching him, Jeremy is a push over that is easily manipulated and takes being abused by Gregory and Richard without a single argument (I’ll talk more about him and the other “likable” characters in a moment). There are a few particular episodes that chip away at his intelligence and instead expose him as just a sheltered kid that lacks any form of credible knowledge, and is instead just a prick with an over-blown self-esteem.

Episode 5, Full Blown Maids, deals with Allen Gregory’s racism towards Hispanics, and how he finds it hard to believe that not every Hispanic is in the janitorial service. Not only does he fire the Latina maid after he walks in on her in the bathroom (a joke aimed at the movie, The Help, maybe?); an action that gets a ‘good job’ from Richard, but also tries to fire one of his fellow students when he refuses to clean up spilled milk. When his teacher, Gina (voiced by fellow Apatow alum, Leslie Mann) tries to get him to write an essay, Allen Gregory belittles her exercise and her person in general (as he often does, him making fun of this actually quite nice teacher, is a running theme). Instead he decides to write a play to tell his side of the story. A play that does in fact make that Hispanic student a janitor who acts like a student to save his job, it also suggests that he was fired because he didn’t do his job, not because he was Hispanic. It was such a loopy and ridiculous scenario that only served to prove that Allen Gregory was indeed a horrible racist. Yet, he gets away with it all when the slandered Hispanic student gets on stage and confronts the audience and the play to explain his side, and how racism is really bad. Everyone cheers him for presenting the correct message, and allows Gregory to take credit for coming up with the idea. Gina on the other hand is left holding the bag and looking like an idiot for just “not getting it.”

Talking about Full Blown Maids reminds me of another bad aspect of the show. While other crude shows like South Park confront controversial issues, they do so in a way that is clever and ends with a message (often dealing with both sides of that subject) that leaves the audience considering the issues. Allen Gregory instead goes at these controversial issues and just tears them apart, such as the racist episode above. It didn’t send any message, other then that the bastard racist gets away with it, and anyone that tries to step in his way will get stomped on in the process.

Gina, Gina, Gina... listen, I suck.

Episode 3: Gay School Dance, deals with a constant theme on the show, homosexuality. When Gregory decides he has to continue his ploy to get into the social graces of Joel Zadak, he gets his father to make the school make it a Gay Dance, where girls can only ask girls and boys can only ask boys. While there was a few snicker worthy moments as the kids bought into the idea, since they were freakin’ SEVEN, and asking a same-sex friend was so much easier, the message the episode tried to present when Gregory’s plans fail is that the students should be allowed to choose. They can experiment, and if they like it, maybe they can choose to be gay. It was a horrid speech, and when someone went up to correct the message, they were cut-off by the resolution of another dumb side story in the episode. Thus leaving that message in the open. Now, of course it is known by most viewers that this was satire, and Allen Gregory is a misguided individual. The problem is, the satire isn’t funny, it isn’t clever, and when offensive comedy isn’t funny, it is just offensive. Every time this show attempts to be controversial and tackle some offensive comedy, they forget the funny, and just leave the offensive. That is a big problem.

There are a few characters that could have been likable and started out with the intent, yet all of them just allowed the events to go on with minor protests before either Richard or Gregory shot them down and put them back in their weak victimized like states. The sick relationship between Richard and his husband, Jeremy pushes any likability out of the otherwise kind-hearted Jeremy. The fact that we find out he had a wife and kids that he loved, but that the stalking and harassment of Richard got to him, and he left them all through the pervasive actions of such a horrible individual is just… well it is implausible as much as it is tragic. Gina simply allows Gregory’s belittlement of her go, and is somehow outsmarted on multiple occassions by him. Julie kind of fights back, but mostly deals with the abuse, and her two friends just go along with whoever is talking to them at that moment.

The other simply gross and unnecessary angle is the love story between Allen Gregory and his principle, Gottlieb (voiced by veteran actress Renée Taylor). Gottlieb is an obese elderly woman who is in a common law marriage with the schools guidance counselor. From the pilot episode Gregory falls in love with her and has sexual fantasies regarding his seven year old self and this grossly large woman, and consistently comes onto her in a revolting fashion. Episode 2, Night in Gottlieb deals with Allen Gregory claiming that the two of them have a sex tape in order to gain popularity. None of these kids know what a sex tape is, but his persistence gains the ire of the adults, and it all comes of as just a gross predicament. By the final episode, Van Moon Rising, Gottlieb has enough of Gregory’s antics during a time that she was dealing with a personal crisis and smacks him out of frustration. This leads to Gregory blackmailing her into going on a date with him, and ends with her running out on him regardless of the circumstances. It is just all badly handled, oh and the end of the episode? Gregory makes his teacher Gina take the fall for hitting him, and it looks like Gottlieb just lets it happen.

WTF!?... I give up.

Final Call: Jonah Hill has finally been given his own project, and if this is what he finds funny, than he is a horrible douche and deserves Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah’s couch level of hate. Fox can not cancel this show fast enough, and anybody who likes this crap is beyond help. Also, I mentioned South Park earlier, well another thing these writers glazed over about dislikable characters is that we like to see them lose. Sure, people like Cartman because he is in your face and horribly misguided like Gregory, but he is also on a show that has some likable characters, has mostly good comedy, and tends to have Cartman’s plans blow up in his face. If South Park was the Cartman show, and all the other characters were Cartman’s lackeys that took his belittlement rather than calling him on it, and Cartman was allowed to constantly win, South Park would be a horrible show. Allen Gregory is a horrible show, it even tried to make date rape funny! thank god it is over.

1/5 this is a bad show, it is offensive, it is not funny, and it sucks. Oh, I'm sorry, it sucked. past-tense, it is over. Never thought I'd say this, but thank you Fox for cancelling a show.

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