Genre

Many attempts have been made over a decade or so to imitate South Park in an attempt to cash in on the money train. So far no one has been even remotely close. The industry consensus appears to be that it’s all about crudeness and pushing the standards envelope. That couldn’t be further from the truth, and Drawn Together is proof of that. Drawn Together is wickedly foul and raunchy. The problem is that’s all there is. It started out with a clever enough idea. Let’s take several cartoon archetypes and put them in the same house, Big Brother style. The first few episodes had some genuine humor to them while poking fun at reality television and pretty much anything else that gets in the way. Before long the show just began to be how much gross-out will the public take? Like South Park, the characters in Drawn Together are potty-mouthed and antisocial, but they lack any of the charm that Parker and Stone were able to infuse into their characters. Also, like South Park, the show drops a ton of pop culture references. The difference is that in South Park there is usually context that makes the references funny, but in Drawn Together they appear to be dropped from out of the blue and serve no purpose. When one of the characters kills another, the dead guy’s mom shows up and delivers Mrs. Kitner’s line from Jaws about knowing there were sharks in the water but letting folks swim anyway. Where the heck did that come from? If this had been South Park the line would absolutely have tied in to something that actually happened to the dead guy. The writing is incoherent, and usually the show is a series of nonsequiturs. Gross for gross sake isn’t funny.