Mike Judge

‘Silicon Valley’ is being slammed for not tackling the tech industry’s real-world problems. But must it?

These are the last two episodes of the first season (there was one other episode produced in the first 13 episode order, “The Company Man,” but it was held over for the second season when its ending was completely re-worked). I’ll hopefully get to the second season soon, but I may do another show in between, or I might find a slightly different format for these posts — possibly one episode at a time instead of two.

The retrospective continues now with the ninth and tenth episodes of the first season, starting with the second “road trip” episode (maybe more than you’d expect for the early episodes of a comedy, but why not — an animated show can, theoretically, go anywhere).

The retrospective look at the first season of King of the Hill continues with two episodes that introduce some very important supporting characters — two of them angry guys voiced by Toby Huss.

I’ve been meaning to do a series of episodic retrospective reviews (the way The AV Club and some other TV sites do), where I look at a show that’s no longer on the air and revisit the episodes from the beginning, two at a time. I’m going to try it with King of the Hill, at least the first 12-episode season; if it works I’ll move farther along in the series.

The director of ‘Office Space’ creates a do-good family that can’t get anything right

The second episode of The Goode Family, or at least the second episode that was sent out for review (it will be the third to air) actually is quite a bit better than the pilot. It’s not exactly good; the plot is essentially a series of standard sitcom twists, but at least it makes the lead characters into something resembling human beings with emotional issues. (Even if the main emotional issue, the mother’s desperate need for attention from her mean, uncaring father, is just a King of the Hill plot with the names “Hank Hill” and “Cotton Hill” crossed out.) But it is, strangely enough, funnier than King of the Hill has usually been in the last few years. Mike Judge is funniest when dealing with characters he despises — like Beavis and Butt-head and almost everybody in Idiocracy — and the inherent basic decency of most of the characters on KotH means that most of the barbs are reserved for random guest characters. At least The Goode Family gives him and his writer-producers a chance to put their best jokes at the centre of the episodes instead of the margins.