A lot of modern animated shows are very clever creations indeed.
BoJack Horseman, Family Guy, Bob’s Burgers, King of the Hill and Archer are just five examples in a brilliantly inspired slates of shows that manage to bring together vividly-realised characters in all their authentically fallible glory, narratives that are both batshit crazy and coherently followable, witty social commentary that hits the target without overstaying its point-making welcome, and a warm hug of a found family to a greater or lesser degree.
To this list, and with gold stars for loopy warmheartedness, you can most definitely add The Great North, a show from Lizzie Molyneux-Logelin & Wendy Molyneux & Minty Lewis that over three seasons – the third is still enticingly waiting to be watched for this reviewer – comprising 55 episodes has demonstrated time and again that it fits neatly into this welcomingly clever roster of animated gems while being very much its own creation.
It’s chief claim to fame lies in the way it near effortlessly combines an almost surreal take on the world and family that takes us on wacky flights of fantasy where oven mitts can be possessed (maybe), where entire museums are dedicated to the veneration of logs and where one fisherman and family patriarch (Beef Tobin, voiced by the luminously good Nick Offerman) works out his can’t-be-at-sea-because-reasons issues by playacting in his living room with pottery figurines on a wooden boat he knocks up in no time for the purpose.
That he is joined by three of his kids – sons wilderness-loving, bear-onesie-wearing ten-year-old Moon (Aparna Nancherla) and gay teenage punk rocker Ham Piercebrosnan Tobin (Paul Rust) and success-obsessed and lovably whimsical daughter Judy, voiced by Jenny Slate who talks to a Northern Lights manifestation in the shape of Alanis Morissette for sage advice – is par for the course and just one of the reasons why it’s impossible not to adore this show.
His eldest son Wolf (Will Forte) is very much cut from the family cloth, devoted to impressing his dad, who loves him wholeheartedly and unconditionally so where this need to get his approval comes from is an amusing mystery and his wife, Black, Frenso-born Honeybee Shaw (Dulcé Sloan) who is very much her own woman, independent but as in love of her husband and supportive of him as he is, rather magically and wonderfully of her.
What is so lovely about the Tobins, who live in a magnificently sprawling log cabin outside of Lone Moose, Alaska – they are located not all that far from the exciting metropolis of Dead Cliffs – is that no matter how weird things get and how idiosyncratically strange or whimsically banal their undertakings are, they LOVE each other.
Not just a little bit and not with conditions but a LOT and without the slightest hint of judgement, conditions or any sense of expectation, a bond so tight and all-encompassing that every last one of them feels free to be themselves and to go for broke, no matter how wacky or temporarily self-damaging the mission, knowing someone will be there to catch if things don’t quite go to plan (which they often don’t but that’s much of the time of this show which never goes small when it can go big).
All the things we love and adore about The Great North are on gloriously over-the-top display in season two’s final twelve episodes which take us from a children of divorce group which Moon attends primarily to get ice cream to Wolf’s firmly believing he is waterpark-cursed, a mistaken belief that sees him trapped in a storm pipe and beset by marmots right through to Judy being cast as a stool in the annual musical production at school when she has always been the lead.
In further adventures that always manage to be both hilariously odd and yet heartfelt and human to the hilt, Ham sets out to have the dramatic, gasp-inducing coming out his lovingly embracing family denied him – its complicated by an aloof, dismissive relative and enriched by the lengths his family will go to to aid one of their own – and Beef finds himself part of a group of mums who transform this sometimes lonely man’s existence.
From the complete, unflappable acceptance of the strangest of things such as a moose falling in love with the family’s van to the fact that Wolf and Honeybee are eccentric as anything and yet tick all the relationship goals – one of the standout stories of the back half of the season is Honeybee, who has a huge heart, setting out to rectify a wrong involving a bald eagle and perceived local government corruption before realising the kinder thing to do, and the Tobins are all about kindness and love in a robustly charming but far-from-twee fashion, is to leave things just as they are – The Great North never puts a laugh-a-minute (obviously far more but that works) foot wrong.
Much of its appeal lies in the fact that things can go drastically wrong and yet they don’t defeat the Tobins; at an indoor water park in episode 21, “Slide & Wet-Judice Adventure” – every episode title ends in adventure because that’s how this enthusiastic about life family treat every one of life’s banal and not-so-banal moments; oh to be that welcoming of life’s vicissitudes and high points without hesitation! – every single family member has things go south from cheese-less nachos to mermaids’ siren songs enrapturing them to long waits for sub-par rides and yet they come together at the end, united as one and buoyed by the fact they have each other.
The Great North is delightful and hilarious, warmhearted and loopy as hell, and it works as both a satirically arch look at the world, with many of its quirks and ticks pilloried and parodied but never cruelly and always with incisive insight and empathy, and a love letter to all-inclusive family which, combined with a brief one-minute, episode-theme-nodding song at the end over the credits (with its own dedicated animation) and a warmheartedness that feels like a sustained, very funny twenty-minute hug, makes this one of the standout shows of the modern age and a potently sweet but honest antidote to the darker moments of your life.