My Thoughts on Season 1 of "Suburgatory"

Suburgatory is exhaustively filled with tropes. Its stories take place in and around the candy-coated, bubblegum pop vision of a New York suburban town that is Chatswin. A town populated with meangirls like Dalia (and still yet mean girls with outlandish names such as Kamantha); happy-go-lucky neighbors like Noah; overbearing soccer moms like Sheila; a southern belle like Dallas; and then our two protagonists Tessa and George (both a tad clichéd in their own way). Tropes are almost to be expected in the story of urbanites getting stuck in the suburbs. Early on in the show’s run, however, this played against the series. A lack of continuity and a lack of through line for characters hindered the series from rising above these tropes.

Now tropes aren’t a bad thing. When used effectively, they remind us why they exist in the first place. Suburgatory slowly began to peel back the layers on its archetypes, and in the hands of some great performers, particularly Alan Tudyk’s Noah and Cheryl Hine’s Dallas, the show became more consistent and more endearing. Consistent both in its characters and its jokes, the series became at times incredibly funny and oddly, even surprisingly touching. 

“Cartoonish” is a word tossed around by television critics often when they want to make an underhanded jab at a show they consider to have failed to be good. It’s a word that should be taken back, and re-appropriated. Being cartoonish isn’t bad, but it’s an easy insult to poke at shows that over time fail to maintain the logics and mechanics of their universe. However, some of television’s best series were very cartoonish. The Simpsons’ first nine seasons are masterful at being both hilarious and heartwarming, while also being everything one would expect (and often wonderfully not expect) from a cartoon. 

Suburgatory because of its tropes and because of how bizarre many of its characters, scenarios, dialogue, and jokes could be felt like a live-action cartoon. This was something, especially very early on, the show didn’t always handled well. Early episodes such as “The Chatterer”, “Charity Case”, and “Don’t Call Me Shirley” are rather cartoonish, but they don’t really work because we know next to nothing about the characters at this point to justify much of what takes place or for a number of jokes to land. The characters failing to be well-defined played into this problem. Typically the best comedies are those that create jokes out of character observations rather than contrived scenarios, and here the characters changed frequently from episode to episode in these early days. 

There was still much that didn’t quite click later on this season. However, the writers began to make better use of the cast and learned to balance the many, many talented performers. “Thanksgiving”, for example, is a very overstuffed episode, but the series efficiently tells the many plots without short shrifting any of them. It’s an early example of what the show would become confident and good at, incorporating many, many characters while never losing thematic cohesion or failing to be funny. There are a number of characters I never anticipated ever liking such as Rex Lee’s overly optimistic, clueless guidance counselor Mr. Wolfe and Parker Young’s hopelessly dumb jock Ryan Shay. But by the Eden story arc of the last four episodes, Chatswin had exposed the heart and sincerity underlying its façade, and the show had paid off on many of its early glimpses of promise apparent in the “Pilot” and “Barbeque” that may have gotten lost for a little while along the way. 

While if it doesn’t continue to expand itself and take risks, the praise I’m heaping on it now will have been premature. But this series charms me and I have hopes, and that’s enough for now.