Review: Season Two of Tuca & Bertie Easily Flips Between the Topical and the Surreal

The series alternates between internal reflection and bizarre comedy, one impossible to imagine without the other.

Tuca & Bertie
Photo: Adult Swim

Less than two years after being unceremoniously canned by Netflix, Lisa Hanawalt’s Tuca & Bertie returns for a second season on Adult Swim. Aside from a few expected TV concessions, like a shortened theme song and less leniency toward nudity (the bouncing boobs on a building’s façade are a notable casualty of the clipped intro), the cult series about two anthropomorphic, B.F.F. birds, Bertie (Ali Wong) and Tuca (Tiffany Haddish), makes the switch largely unscathed, still crackling with a surreal energy that’s neatly contrasted—and sometimes commingled—with its characters’ anxieties about life beyond their 20s.

The season’s first episode, “Bird Mechanics,” finds the high-strung Bertie, concerned that her issues are burdening her loved ones, looking for the “right” therapist among several candidates, some helpful and some total crackpots. She imagines herself transformed into a haunted house, reluctant to let in people like her boyfriend, Speckle (Steven Yeun), before the place has had a thorough de-ghosting. Inspired by Bertie’s search for a therapist, still-sober party animal Tuca takes a meet-them-all-at-once approach to dating by creating an untelevised game show, Sex Bus, where animals vying for her affections compete in increasingly arbitrary categories like portrait painting and game-show commentating.

All the while, Tuca & Bertie keeps one foot planted firmly in the preposterous delirium of cartoons wonderfully untethered from the constraints of realism. Packed with colorful designs and sight gags, the series revels in how little sense its world makes, with animals who act like people coexisting with animals who still act like animals. The second episode, “Planteau,” finds Tuca and Bertie attending a bachelorette party in a plant-based city with a similarly bewildering divide between humanoid plants and regular plants, where one of the party birds takes a bite from the beefy chest of a tomato-headed stripper.

Advertisement

In another episode, “Kyle,” as part of a therapeutic exercise, Bertie pictures a version of herself that can handle a brotastic workplace culture and manifests her own bro, the eponymous Kyle, who lounges on her brain while spreading his legs to scratch his crotch. Eventually, Kyle becomes an entirely separate physical entity who interacts with the other characters and nudges Bertie to take her flagging baking business in an edgier, more confrontational direction. In a rather homogenous sea of adult animation content to skew reality rather than dismantle it, the comedic invention and visual boldness of Tuca & Bertie lets it stand apart.

But the show also doesn’t quite escape the recurring problem of the issues-oriented approach to comedy, where the heart-to-heart talks about feelings don’t easily mix with rapid-fire wackiness. As in the prior season, moments of insight fight the onslaught of weird jokes for screen time, and the jokes often win at the expense of dramatic grace and clarity. The most effective bits of emotion are the ones built up in the margins across multiple episodes rather than problems of the week hastily sorted out via extended monologues. Similar to how a show like Big Mouth saw diminishing returns once it branched out into topics more complex than puberty and basic sex ed, Tuca & Bertie struggles to spin tidy summations out of complex, multifaceted problems. Sometimes, as when Tuca drops everything to help Bertie and ends up feeling resentful, the series acknowledges this messiness, but at other times it seems to strain for a solution that isn’t really there and falls back on its surrealism like a crutch.

The otherwise hilarious Kyle episode, for example, ends with a bit of a shrug and never locates a satisfying answer for Bertie’s plummeting sales in the face of a returning nemesis, who has spun being “canceled” last season into a new business strategy. If the moments where characters simply apologize for whatever bad thing they did aren’t quite as ambitious, basic human (or, in this case, animal-person) obstinance and insensitivity are at least easier to plausibly address within the half-hour timeslot of a TV comedy.

Advertisement

A great deal of the show’s appeal, though, lies in that sometimes overreaching ambition, which insists on tackling the difficult topics that exist even within this vibrant and inscrutable universe. In that regard, the series remains genuine and insightful even when it doesn’t always quite succeed. The things that are funny and endearing about the characters—Tuca’s wild spontaneity and Bertie’s often overpowering worrying—are so cohesively tied up in their emotions that the series is able to effortlessly flip between modes of internal reflection and bizarre comedy, one impossible to imagine without the other.

Score: 
 Cast: Tiffany Haddish, Ali Wong, Steven Yeun, Nicole Byer, Richard E. Grant, John Early, Reggie Watts, Shamir Bailey  Network: Adult Swim

Steven Scaife

Steven Nguyen Scaife is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Buzzfeed News, Fanbyte, Polygon, The Awl, Rock Paper Shotgun, EGM, and others. He is reluctantly based in the Midwest.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.