It has tonally shifted into hard-sci-fi, Black Mirror-esque stories to fruitful results (telling new stories in a reboot, what a concept!), it actually has some stuff to say about emotionally enjoying things (Pinky) versus intellectually hating things (Brain, the rest of the 2020 Animaniacs), and it has some delicious physical comedy and surprisingly smart joke-writing - it's no exaggeration to say if Hulu had rebooted Pinky and the Brain as a series of 10ish minute episodes while scrapping Animaniacs entirely, I'd be writing a very different review. The new version of Pinky and the Brain, a short of which was in every episode watched for review, is pretty much a constant win. Its shorter tags consistently delivered, especially one riffing on the nonsense of sports press conferences that hits the sweet spot of effective meta-jokes pretty damn well.
So, here's what's positive about the 2020 Animaniacs: No episode featured a one-off gag I didn't at least chuckle at. That's a lot of negativity to expound on a cartoon, no matter how designedly negative the cartoon is.
At one point, a caricature of Seth Meyers is seen drinking from a mug that reads "Smug," which is about as explicit a "pot calling kettle" moment as I've ever seen on television. Instead of successfully having bite, it plays more like obviously fake vampire teeth - and it sidelines three of our most splendidly wild animated comedy characters into delivering arms-folded, uninvested wisecracks about stuff happening to them, rather than making stuff happen. The scripts stare at our modern world with a head on a swivel, eager to poke at every single aspect (especially if it involves a modicum of progressivism, but also if it involves joked-to-death topics like Russian trolls and Trumpism) and call it dumb.
"Woke jokes" run rampant, with trite and hackneyed observations about current-day hipsters and how sensitive they are. The opening crack about how wild and funny it is that bathrooms have gender-neutral signs is only the tip of the iceberg of this strangely conservative-leaning shift in comic voice. Here, the returning cast and new showrunner Wellesley Wild (of Family Guyfame, which brings a lot of this show's venomous new tone shift into context) paint the Animaniacs as our voices of reason our figureheads of intelligence reacting to a world gone mad our Jim Halperts, not our Michael Scotts.
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