Animal Control Is Too Declawed to Score Big Laughs

Earlier this month, the final episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm aired on HBO. Talk about the end of an era. “No Lessons Learned” didn’t just bring Larry David’s loosely autobiographical sitcom to a close after 12 seasons and twice as many years. You could also say that it waved goodbye to the kind of antagonistic humor in which the star-creator specialized, a comedy of confrontation, awkward misunderstanding, and faux pas. Larry was rude to the bitter, irreverent end. That made him something of an outlier in the small-screen landscape of the 2020s — an unfashionably unsentimental crank, the anti-Ted Lasso.

For a sense of a sensibility more widely in vogue on TV screens today, look to one of the sleeper success stories of the last broadcast year, a show just winding up as David’s premium-cable staple winds down: the Fox comedy Animal Control, starring Joel McHale as an ex-cop wrangling rogue wildlife in Seattle alongside a staff of coworkers with big personalities and bigger hearts. 

While Curb reveled in discomfort, this network series aspires to something like the opposite. It’s classic comfort food, a cozy sitcom of the sort David was determined not to make with Seinfeld — and a workplace comedy reminiscent of any number of fellow primetime hits about kooky surrogate families forged on the clock. Apparently there’s a healthy appetite for that sort of thing: Animal Control scored the best streaming premiere ever for a scripted Fox series last February, and it seems to have held on to its audience, as the network recently renewed the show for a third season… mind you, before its second had even begun. 

Midway through that sophomore year, Animal Control remains perfectly likable, leaning on its game cast and settling into a steady groove of tame animals-gone-wild hijinx and equally tame banter. But it hasn’t quite evolved into something special yet, or pushed past the smiles and light chuckles of its first season to bigger laughs. What’s missing, most crucially, is an element Larry David provided through nearly every conversation his fictionalized self stumbled into: conflict.

Animal Control has the basic ingredients of a good single-camera workplace sitcom. The professional milieu is unique and promising. And the characters are well-defined, if not exactly complex. As a foil to McHale’s cynical, self-proclaimed loner, Frank Shaw, there’s his rookie partner, Shred (Michael Rowland), a former professional snowboarder with a beamingly earnest outlook on life — a kind of Golden Retriever of a man. The two work for Emily (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s Vella Lovell), a cheery Type-A pushover who’s new to the whole boss thing. And their fellow officers include overtaxed family man Amit (Ravi V. Patel) and Kiwi party girl Victoria (soap star Grace Palmer).

Most of these characters, as well as their dynamics, emerged fully formed in the pilot. So did the show’s gentle comic spirit. When Amit, in that first episode, hops on the phone to sing an encouraging potty song to his youngest child, the whole office joins him on cue. The joke is that they’ve heard him perform this instructional diddy so many times that they, too, have memorized it. What the gag really communicates, though, is an impatience to sell the audience on its new TV family; we’ve barely met these people and we’re already being tagged into their summer-camp singalong, backed into a precinct kumbaya.

In so much as there was a tension at the start of the show, it was Frank’s disinterest in having a partner — a supposed standoffishness that clashes with Shred’s eager friendliness, his naked desire for a pal and mentor. For Community fans, it’s fun to see McHale back in the wisecracking game, doing an older, less slick variation on Jeff Winger. But that show wasn’t afraid to sell its main character’s saltiness and anti-joiner attitude. We believed Jeff as a guy who wasn’t looking for a group hug, which made it more affecting when he inevitably leaned into one. Frank, by contrast, comes across as someone doing an unconvincing imitation of an anti-social jerk. Is that failure of nerve McHale’s or the show’s? You can sense a general hesitancy to make him even a little unlikable; his “mean” quips don’t leave a mark, and he doesn’t so much reject Shred as lightly haze him.

There’s even less friction in the show’s other squad-car pairing: For all their lifestyles differ as, respectively, a harried father and an unattached extrovert, Amit and Victoria get along swimmingly. And Lovell’s Emily mostly shrugs off the insubordination of her goofball employees with the barest whiff of exasperation. Even the office antagonists — uptight receptionist Dolores (Kelli Ogmundson), rival precinct boss Templeton (Gerry Dee) — are more annoying than contemptible. Again, this might be one key to the show’s popularity, by whatever metric that’s measured: It’s a comedy too good-natured to ever raise anyone’s blood pressure. It will not risk unpleasantness for the sake of drama.

But even the coziest of appointment viewing benefits from a little drama, and a little unpleasantness, too. One might think of Cheers, the ultimate workplace sitcom, and the definition of a show that made its giant audience feel like regulars, warmly received at a bar where everyone knows your name. The vibes were always good on Cheers, but that didn’t depend on the characters always getting along. Carla genuinely loathed Cliff. And Sam and Diane stayed famously at each other’s throats for years, stumbling through a romance that was love-hate and on-off as each season or new episode dictated.

Speaking of which, Animal Control has its own version of a will-they, won’t-they: a mutual but as-yet-unconsummated attraction between Shred and Emily. As the nicest characters on a very nice show, the two are so temperamentally well-suited to each other that there’s no real spark between them. It’s like the opposite of opposites attracting — or, in Seinfeld terms, like when Jerry gets together with Janeane Garofalo, and realizes he’s dating himself. That the third point of the love triangle, Frank’s old partner Rick (Kevin Bigley), is also a total mensch only compounds the problem. The show seems to be hinting at another potential romance between Frank and Victoria, but their easy, quippy rapport similarly lacks much in the way of friction; there was more of that in Frank’s Season 1 hookup with Doelores, a scenario the show burned through in a single episode.

For all the novelty of building a comedy around this particular line of work, one has to wonder if the occupation of the characters is actually part of what’s keeping Animal Control on a leash. The premise is an admittedly clever workaround — a way to do the stake-out, case-of-the-week camaraderie of a traditional cop show without the uncomfortable optics. (No one could accuse this show of being copaganda.) But because every call the team responds to involves some kind of weird, wacky animal on the loose, those “cases” rarely have any dramatic or ideological stakes: They’re just little bursts of beasts-do-the-darndest-things slapstick to break up the interpersonal stuff. It’s a workplace comedy where the workplace stuff ends up feeling rather incidental.

Animal Control isn’t alone in its aggressive niceness, its idealistic outlook. In fact, it’s less explicitly feel-good than a lot of its kindred spirits in that department, like Ted Lasso, Abbott Elementary, and its plainest influence, the workplace sitcoms of Michael Schur. (Ten bucks says that creators Bob Fisher, Rob Greenberg, and Dan Sterling cited both Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Parks and Recreation during early pitch meetings). But while Animal Control may not fly the nice flag as proudly as those other shows — it’s not looking to extol the virtue of kindness, or salute tireless educators and civil servants — it also doesn’t complicate its warm-and-fuzzies with head-butting the way they do. Lasso, Abbott, and Parks have all taken their licks for pushing a supposedly cringey worldview, but there’s drama beneath their essential sweetness that derives from a clash of values.

By contrast, Animal Control seems content to coast on good vibrations. Halfway through its second season, with a third in sight, it’s comfortable serving as easy viewing — a hangout show determined not to harsh anyone’s mellow and willing to settle for amusement over hilarity. Of course, not every sitcom needs to embrace antagonism the way Larry David did for a dozen seasons of Curb. There’s room for a little comfort food in a TV watcher’s diet. But watching a show as mild as Animal Control could leave anyone hungry for something with a little more spice.

A.A. Dowd is a writer and editor who lives in Chicago.