For more than a year, this was an elusive Andrew Rannells thing that wasn’t readily available to me. Central Park is only on Apple TV+, I’ve never been a “sign up for the free trial, binge, and dump” kind of person, and I couldn’t justify adding a new streaming service. But then over Christmas, my brother introduced me to Ted Lasso, and we still had five episodes left by the time he left town. What was I supposed to do? Just not finish it?! Therein lies madness, I tell you!
So, for the time being, I’m seeing what there is to see on Apple TV+. I’ve already review a couple of the Oscar movies that were released there, and after I finished Ted Lasso, I knew this was the first show I wanted to check out.
This animated series, which shares some of its pedigree with Bob’s Burgers, is a musical following the lives of the Tillermans. Dad Owen manages Central Park, so they have a house inside the park. In amongst the relatively-serialized lives of Owen, mom Paige, and kids Molly and Cole, we also have a villain in the form of the uber-wealthy Bitsy, the stinking-rich owner of a nearby hotel plotting to buy the park and develop on it. In this particular episode, Bitsy’s latest bit of park sabotage is to secretly hire a master tagger to cover the park in graffiti, and Owen works to catch the perp.
A lot of times when I’m following a particular actor’s work, I’ll just dip into the episodes of a show that they’ve guest starred in, but this is one that I decided to start from the beginning. It doesn’t have a ton of episodes yet, I like Bob’s Burgers, and the cast is stellar. But so far, the show as a whole isn’t really clicking for me. The writing feels overly self-conscious at times, especially the intensely-meta humor from Josh Gad’s busker narrator. And the storytelling is a little shallow. Each main character seems to have one or two buttons that they keep hitting over and over. “Owen is anxious and super into the park!” “Paige works for a weekly newsletter but acts like she’s a one-woman Woodward and Bernstein!” And so on.
I’m hoping it gets better as it goes on, especially because it has a few things really going for it. Namely, there’s the music, which is consistently clever and catchy. Each episode has two or three legit songs in it, and the cast has the chops to back them up. In this episode, there’s a fun opening song for the narrator, and Owen leads a delightful number for the park staff trying to catch the tagger.
Speaking of the cast, that’s the other big win for the show. In addition to the aforementioned Gad, we’ve got Leslie Odom Jr. and Kathryn Hahn holding it down as Owen and Paige, with Titus Burgess (I really enjoyed him as Sebastian in the Broadway cast of The Little Mermaid) playing their son Cole. Kristen Bell plays their daughter Molly, which is unfortunate, given that they’re an interracial family and Molly is mixed. (I understand that, for season 2, she stepped down from the role and was replaced by Emma Raver-Lampman.) On the hotel side of things, Stanley Tucci is clearly having a ball vamping it up as Bitsy, and Daveed Diggs is a deadpan hoot as Bitsy’s longsuffering maid. The dialogue can be hit-or-miss, but the delivery is always on point.
Not much from Rannells yet. It’s a bit like his first episode of Welcome to the Wayne, in that his appearance is mostly just to clue us in that he’ll be a big feature next time. All I can tell you right now is that he’s playing a character named Griffin and looks well-positioned to sing in the next episode. Any TV shows with a musical element, take note: if you cast Andrew Rannells, let him sing! Otherwise, what are you even doing with yourself?
Recommend?
In General – A tentative maybe. It’s more for potential than anything else at this point. I love the songs and the actors, but the story is letting them down right now.
Andrew Rannells – Too early to tell.
Warnings
Some
gross-out humor and mild language.
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