tek's rating: ½

High School USA!, on FOX
BCDB; IMDb; TV Tango; TV Tropes; Wikipedia
streaming sites: Amazon; Hulu

This is one of the first two shows to premiere on Fox's ADHD programming block, in July 2013. Each episode is about 12 minutes long. The show is kind of brilliantly meta. It was created by Dino Stamatopoulos, who is best known to me for creating a couple of adult swim shows, Moral Orel and Mary Shelley's Frankenhole, as well as playing Star Burns on Community.

So, this is basically a spoof of high school shows, or whatever. Generally, it's compared to "Archie" comics, with which I am barely familiar. Anyway, there's this group of kids who are all basically over-the-top stereotypes. Marsh is a bland, cheerful, nice guy. Brad is a dumb, aggressive jock. Blackstein is a token twofer (black and Jewish), though that doesn't seem to be at all important to his character; mostly I guess he's just a nerd. Amber is a dumb, shallow blonde. Cassandra is... pretty much like Amber, but Asian. You wouldn't expect any of these kids to be friends with each other (except maybe Amber and Cassandra), but they are. Though I use the word "friends" loosely, because I don't think any of them actually like each other. But I'm not sure any of them completely realize that they don't. (Or maybe they just completely fail to equate liking people with friendship.) But whatever, each episode has some typical "lesson" type story, the kind of thing you'd see in any number of 1980s teen shows or afterschool specials or whatever. Except here, the moral of the story, in fact the whole theme or social issue, is always twisted, or turned on its head, or whatever. In fact, sometimes there may be side issues within an episode, that may be completely ignored; that is, things that in a normal show would be serious problems, but here it doesn't even occur to anyone to consider those things problems. So... the whole show is just redonk, yet clever and amusing.


animation index
Animation Domination High-Def