Another animated role—Andrew Rannells has been doing a lot of animated work lately. I’d never heard of this show before, and I was only meh on the episode, but Rannells does a nice job in it.
HouseBroken follows a gaggle of pets. In this episode, poodle Honey and St. Bernard Chief are sent to a sheep-herding farm while their owner is on vacation, and Honey gets way too competitive about the sheep-herding races. Corgi Elsa is also present, and she’s forced to confront her tragic past as a sheepherder. Elsewhere on the farm, pig Max researches for a role playing a “pig-pig” in a movie, and one of the farm pigs helps him confront himself.
There are a lot of familiar actors in this show, but for me, the episode is just okay. The jokes and the story are fairly middling, without much to hang onto. Lisa Kudrow voices Honey, while Nat Faxon (the Swede from Our Flag Means Death!) plays Chief and Clea DuVall is Elsa. While Chief is all about working together and having fun in the sheep-herding races, Honey isn’t down with his touchy-feely approach. “Just to clarify, what winning actually means is beating the other teams,” she tells the sheep after Chief gives them a feel-good speech. And Elsa keeps seeing the specter of a sheep from a traumatic incident in her past.
Other voice actors who appear in the episode include Will Forte, the always-welcome Melanie Lynskey, and Paul F. Tompkins, who I know best as Mr. Peanutbutter from BoJack Horseman.
Tony Hale plays Max, who comes to the farm with a lot of stereotypes about what regular pigs are like. When he first approaches the pig pen, he addresses them with slow, dumbed-down speech, and he thinks he’s too good for slop.
That’s when he meets Rannells’s character, a pig named Ennis (with a stylish head of hair!) Ennis tells Max, “Pigs are intelligent creatures who do more than eat and lay around in their own feces. Although we do love that.” He shows Max the ropes of being a pig-pig while also urging him not to be ashamed of his true self. Oh, and just for fun, he shades Jimmy Fallon.
What’s most notable about this role is that I got through most of the episode without figuring out who Rannells was playing. Ennis’s voice sounds very different than his, much deeper and with a southern accent (plus, he’s not named until later in the story, so knowing his character’s name from IMDb didn’t help me out.) Most of Rannells’s characters sound pretty much just like him, so it was neat to realize that he was doing a very different sort of performance here.
Recommend?
In General – Eh, not necessarily. I don’t have any urge to watch more of this show.
Andrew Rannells – A soft maybe. It’s not a demanding role, but like I said, it’s outside Rannells’s usual type, which is cool.
Warnings
References to dead sheep, some grossout humor, and mild thematic elements.
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