TV: O'Grady

I just caught the first couple of episodes of O'Grady, the new animated show from the people behind Dr Katz: Professional Therapist, Home Movies, and Science Court. And like all of the above, O'Grady features the same distinctive and eye-catching (though fairly static) animation and lively, low key, funny, seemingly improvised banter that made them all worth watching.

O'Grady (which airs on Noggin, or "The N," as the evening teen-oriented bloc of programming apparently likes to call itself) is about a small town infested with "weirdness," which means, using the two episodes I watched as examples, suddenly everyone might be stricken with random attacks of short term memory loss (heralded by their heads making gong-like noises), or they might all start thinking that they're cats. The two leads, Abby and Kevin (voiced by Melissa Bardin Galsky, from Home Movies, and H. Jon Benjamin, the funniest part of all of the above shows), and their best friends, Beth (Holly Schlesinger -- I think; unbelievably, IMDb.com has yet to create a page for this show) and Harold (Patrice O'Neal, of Shorties Watchin' Shorties and Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn), have to deal with the normal crises of high school life in addition to whatever "weirdness" might be plaguing O'Grady that week.

The humor partly comes from the slapstick antics generated by the "weirdness" (and the slapstick works well, especially in the memory loss episode), but primarily it comes from the excellent voice cast. I have to assume this cast (unlike many cartoons) is all together in the recording booth at the same time (or, at the very least, the two leads are); I can't otherwise explain the way they play off of each other so wonderfully, layering joke after joke on top of verbal tics and wry asides, sometimes going off on what you can tell are unscripted tangents as they seize on something that strikes them as funny and milk it for all it's worth.

The show is obviously aimed at teens (it's set in high school, and it's on The N, after all), but then, so was Daria, and everyone loved that show, not just teens, right? Right?? O'Grady hasn't quite reached the emotional heights (or depths) achieved on Daria yet, and it probably doesn't want to; it's far less about teen angst, and far more about goofy teen fun. But it is equally funny, and the characters are equally likeable. If you can find Noggin on your dial, you should check it out.

[Thanks to Reid Harris Cooper of Pop Culture Spectrum for making me aware of this show!]