Bob's Burgers

Bob's Burgers, on FOX, Sundays at 9PM
Adult Swim; A.V. Club; BCDB; FOX; IMDb; Sitcoms Online; TBS; TV Tango; TV Tropes; Wikia; Wikipedia
streaming sites: Amazon; Google Play; Hulu; iTunes; Vudu; YouTube

Well, I heard of this show quite awhile before it premiered. I wanted to check it out because it stars H. Jon Benjamin, whose voice work I have enjoyed in many animated series for many years now. Also it was made by Loren Bouchard, who made some other stuff I liked. But I wasn't really expecting to like this. And actually I'm a bit torn, but I thought the first episode was good enough to watch some more of the show, and it has grown on me over the weeks (and then, years). Anyway, it's about this guy, Bob Belcher (Benjamin), and his family, who run a burger joint. Bob seems pretty passionate about his job, certainly more so than his family. But aside from the one quirk of thinking making hamburgers for a living is a dream job, he's by far the most normal, sensible person on the show. (Except at Thanksgiving.) He's also really funny, in a straight man kinda way, how he reacts to the craziness of everyone around him.

He has a wife named Linda, who is supportive, but... well, I dunno what to say. Her own interests and personality don't seem very compatible with Bob's, as far as I can tell. I'm not exactly sure why they love each other, but I guess they do. They have three kids. The youngest is Louise (Kristen Schaal), who is my favorite character on the show, and I think the funniest. She has some twisted ideas of what's fun... she's kind of dark, in a way, but it's a very peppy sort of darkness. (She always wears bunny ears, which now that I think of it, she kind of reminds me of Happy Bunny.) Also I should mention that Bob likes to come up with unique varieties of burgers with different themes for each day's special, and sometimes Louise changes what the chalkboard says to her own twisted ideas for burger specials. (This is probably the least twisted thing she does.) And Louise is kind of a diabolical mastermind... at least, she seems to be in control of any activities she and her older siblings get up to (she's definitely smarter than either of them). The middle child is Gene, who um... I basically think is just weird. Everyone on the show is weird, but his weirdness is just sort of plain, to me. He usually has a synthesizer for sound effects. He seems to think he's funny, I guess, though personally I think he comes off more "special." The oldest child is Tina, a 13-year-old girl who's shy and awkward, and she has sort of typical 13-year-old girl interests but mainly she's just... weird, and often mopey. I dunno what else to say about any of the kids but that they're all just weird, each in their own way. And then there are various weird secondary characters we might occasionally see, like a regular customer named Teddy, and Mort, who runs a morgue next door to Bob's Burgers. (On the other side of Bob's is a building that houses a different business every week, as seen in the opening credits.) Also there's a restaurant across the street run by a guy named Jimmy Pesto, who is Bob's arch enemy. Though Tina has a crush on his son, Jimmy Jr (also voiced by Benjamin).

Anyway. Not much else to say about the show. Basically just a relatively small cast of oddballs getting into odd, yet fairly mundane situations each week. It's hard to explain... the contrast of how the plots can be simultaneously ridiculous and mundane, but of course this lends itself to very low-key, deadpan humor. With a shot of ADHD. It really can be quite funny, but it doesn't seem the same as the other animated series FOX airs Sunday nights. (It's more like something I'd expect to see on adult swim, which isn't surprising, given some of the people involved.) But anyway... the more I see of it, the more I like it.