Fox’s new animated series, Bless the Harts, begins with a mailwoman delivering a bill and some bad news to Jenny Hart (Kristen Wiig), a waitress living in North Carolina: that her water will be shut off in three days. “Damn, Norma,” Jenny says, “You’re not supposed to be reading people’s mail.” But, as Norma explains, she didn’t open the envelope. “It’s just that when you’re this late, they put the threats on the outside.”
The scene mainly serves to introduce Jenny’s precarious financial situation, which extends to everyone who lives with her: Betty (Maya Rudolph), her zany mother, who prints out hard copies of memes; Violet (Jillian Bell), her purple-haired and reclusive artist daughter; and Wayne Edwards (Ike Barinholtz), her bumbling but gold-hearted boyfriend. Our introduction to the Harts also places the episode—the only one made available to press ahead of the show’s premiere—in a reality slightly removed from ours. Norma ends the conversation by saying that she has to keep moving, “or the government will zap my collar.” She laughs, then Jenny laughs, and then we hear an off-screen electric shock as Norma walks away. It’s an early indication that there’s something surreal about the Harts’ world. By the time that Jesus (Kumail Nanjiani) himself appears to Jenny, it’s difficult to tell if he’s a figment of her imagination or if he’s really there, speaking with a waitress at a seafood buffet called Last Supper.
The episode mostly stays grounded in realism, though, exploring the relationships between the various Harts. It’s almost a shame that Wiig, Rudolph, and Barinholtz, three actors with superb physical presence, are reduced to their voices. But while Wiig, Barinholtz, and Bell put in straightforward performances, and while their faux-Southern accents render them nearly unrecognizable, Rudolph is as distinctive and riotous as she is in Big Mouth. She stretches Betty to absurd extremes, dotting her lines with perfectly bewildering pronunciations—“scarcity” is “scar-ci-tee”—that come out of nowhere, like quick jabs to the ribs.
You can feel Bless the Harts figuring itself out in its first episode. There are bits that go on for too long; Wayne’s internal monologues, for one, move at too relaxed a pace and result in little comedic payoff. But the episode also features promising signs of the madcap humor that the series will hopefully settle into. The episode’s central plot consists of Betty’s plan, approved by Jenny, to sell a collection of vaguely Teletubby-esque (and highly flammable) “Hug N’ Bugs” dolls that she’s amassed. The dolls are pop culture mash-ups, such as “Tamagotchi O.J. Trial,” which holds a digital pet toy in one hand and wears a bloody glove on the other.
When Jesus tells Jenny that the plan is doomed to fail, he utters the episode’s best piece of dialogue: “People go crazy for fads, and then they move on. I’ve seen them all come and go: leg warmers, pet rocks, flappers. There was this thing called the Bronze Age…” Nanjiani’s characteristic soft-spokenness is a remarkable fit for a lesson that Jesus would casually impart at a seafood buffet. Jesus doesn’t overshadow the show’s namesakes, thanks to Rudolph’s standout performance and flashes of sharp dialogue from the other Harts—but with a Jesus this endearing, Bless the Harts could do worse than giving him the wheel.
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