Quirkiness and whimsy are big in modern animation.
It makes sense – we’re in a postmodern world where casting an ironic, self-knowing eye on things is prettymuch demanded of everyone and where sincerity is often squeezed out in favour of having a great deal of idiosyncratic fun with something.
What is so wonderful about The Great North, apart from almost everything (yes, there is a real chance of gushing in the offing), developed by Lizzie Molyneux-Logelin & Wendy Molyneux & Minty Lewis – the Molyneux sisters have written for Bob’s Burgers since 2012 – is that manages by a miraculous gift of creative alchemy to be both gloriously silly and intensely heartfelt without either element ever once coming close to cancelling out the order.
It begins as it means to go on in the first episode, “Sexi Moose Adventure”, where patriarch of the family at the centre of the show, Beef Tobin (Nick Offerman) is determined to throw the bets possible sixteenth birthday party for his supremely geeky daughter Judy (Jenny Slate) who is hilariously awkward around any potential love interest, loves the idea of painting a mural at her school showing off fingers from around the world, and spends her more meditative moments communing with a giant imaginary Alanis Morisette who appears in the Aurora Borealis and helps young Judy with all kinds of vexing teenage conudrums.
He is clearly an invested dad who loves his family deeply and who wants them to have the very best of everything and his devotion is reflected in how close he is, sometimes mirthfully so, to sons Wolf (Will Forte), who works with his dad on the fishing boat, The Great Kathleen, gay son Ham (Paul Rust) who loves baking and is such nine months older than his sister, bear onesie-wearing and Bigfoot true believer Moon (Aparna Nancherla) and, of course, Judy.
This is a family that eats together, does movie night together – except for the one night when Beef and Wolf go off in search of their community access Bear Grylls-like outdoors survival idol Tusk Johnson (J. K. Simmons) and the rest of the family get addicted to 1980s Dynasty via old VHS tapes – games night together and even manages to survive being lost in a blizzard together (well, eventually).
It’s that willingness to mail the family’s love and acceptance for each other to the mast that sits at the heart of this warm and sweet-natured but also very silly show.
Without a hint of irony or reservation, they wholeheartedly embrace the fact that Ham is gay and that he’s taken on the role of town of Lone Moose’s “cake lady”, that Moon has trapped a flightless grouse in the hope of teaching it to fly and which accepts that Wolf and his effervescent fiancée Honeybee (Dulcé Sloan) met on an internet board devoted to movie quotes and that these will form the basis of their wedding vows (like every series worth its matrimonial salt, The Great North ends its 11-episode first season with a Titanic-themed wedding).
Judy as the only daughter is allowed full rein too to be her own adorably kooky self.
When she’s not proposing out there ideas for the school mural and awkwardly trying to avoid committing to kissing her accidental crush Steven Huang (Kelvin Yu), Judy is the extrovert engine of the family, breathlessly championing all kinds of ideas with an enthusiasm drawn from a well so deep there appears to be no end to it.
They don’t know her bestie is an imaginary giant backlit Canadian singer but if they did, there’s every chance they’d love every last geeky, loopy she does because they are that kind of family and the best part? It never once feels ever remotely cheesy.
In fact, it’s a delightful relief to have a show that draws its humour from the ridiculous and the absurd but also from a gentle parodying of its characters quirks which is never done maliciously but always with a keen and loving acceptance that everyone is a little strange and odd and that’s okay.
Even the four siblings get along brilliantly well, each always supportive of the others, their willingness to give their family members not just the benefit of the doubt but expansive embracing of last weird tick and strange attribute a shot of reassuring happiness to the heart that doesn’t pretend everyone has it together but happily goes along with the fact that that is just fine.
The Great North is blissfully and humourously at ease with the fact that, as ABBA put it, “everyone’s a freak” and rather than seeing the Tobin family’s idiosycracies as a weakness or a point to be made fun of, gathers them all into its warmhearted, inclusive fold and celebrates them with an endearing jocularity.
That doesn’t mean the show doesn’t know how to get deadly down and serious.
There are more than a few moments, notably in the first and final (“My Fart Will Go on Adventure”) episodes where the great open wound at the heart of the family is given a chance to be free.
The truth is that Beef has never gotten over his wife Kathleen leaving and while it’s generally agreed she was grossly self-centred, rampantly unpredictable and not even close to good mum material – by way of contrast, Beef is the very best dad could ever ask for (one thing worth noting is that Offerman’s real life wife Megan Mulally plays Judy’s employer at the mall, Alyson Lefebvrere and she is every it as good as you’d expect in role that’s daffy and nurturing all in one) – he misses the great hole she ripped in his life and their family.
At the time of The Great North opening, she’s been gone about four years or so but that doesn’t mean the grief has abated and the show’s writers explore with thoughtfulness and heart, and a great deal of absurdist because what heartache doesn’t deserve healthy does of reparative black humour, what it means to be a happy family with some great sadness at its core.
Beef’s wife’s departure explains in part why he’s such a good dad and why he is so anxious to have the family close to him at all times and why any sense they night be drifting apart such as in “Games of Snownes Adventure” is a cause for alarm for him.
Rather than make fun of his understandable insecurity, The Great North has a great deal of fun with the way it manifests itself, again sweetly acknowledging that while we all might do strange things at times because of pain we have suffered, that doesn’t mean there is anything necessarily wrong with us.
It’s a recurrent them throughout this show, which shifts effortlessly from the heartfelt to off-the-wall without once crunching a gear, which draws its humour from a general existentialist idea that we are all struggling to make life mean something but we all need a loving and unconditionally accepting family.
We have them in the Tobins, who like The Addams Family before them own their strangeness and their quirkiness, while being presented as like anyone else, a mix of the accomplished and the not, the weird and the “normal” and who are exactly who we need in the middle of a pandemic where it’s all too easy to think that the bad things well and truly outweigh the good.
They don’t and The Great North is a joyously silly reminder of how good and caring and wonderful family can be and how our lives are all richer for having one, biological or found, and throwing ourselves without reservation into their dysfunctionally loving and whimsical embrace.