The Venture Bros., “All This and Gargantua-2” Special
(January 2015)
Watching The Venture Bros. is a bit like having a world-travelling relative who only visits every once in a long while, but usually has some interesting stories to tell you when they do. Since 2010, there have been three-and-a-half seasons aired, two or three years apart, and heavily serialized in a way that’s even more intricate than even the heavily serialized shows that dominate the TV landscape. Yes, despite not having a set schedule, they still sometimes expect you to remember what happened five or more years ago. Normally, that sort of thing would irritate me, but VB has maintained a high level of quality, being consistently funny and exciting, and its continuity threads are at least constructed in a way that is rewarding and doesn’t just jerk your chain constantly. When you suddenly have a Halloween episode or a one-hour special two years after the last season aired, it’s a great surprise.
You know your television show must be doing something right when the network allows you to air this sporadically (in total, seven-and-a-half seasons over fifteen years)—and also when you maintain a small, devoted audience of longtime viewers that you feel confident will remember things that happened years ago so that you can reference them directly (I am kinda sorta one of those people, although my memory isn’t always great.) It probably helped that, in a lot of ways, VB was way ahead of its time when it comes to presenting a postmodern critique of decades and decades of genre fiction while also fannishy embracing it, in a way that goes beyond mere parody like a lot of Adult Swim shows had done before. That sort of encyclopedic knowledge and self-reflexive attitude existed in prose and comics, but this show brought it to another medium, and now it seems like most mainstream entertainment is based on the idea that comic book-style convoluted backstories are normal, and that you should knowingly wink at the audience about the tropes you still use and the things you homage/rip off. But even then, this shows remains in a class of its own—its pop culture knowledge is all-encompassing, broad in scope and hyper-specific in details, and for all the fanboy spectacle contains, it still has actual things to say about the objects of its homage, while developing actual characters.
Venture Bros. is also the most boys club show for boys out there—you can tell that almost every aspect of the show is decided on by two nerdy middle-aged white men—but it is at least intelligent and critical about it. As much as it loves all the boys adventure tropes it uses for comedy—the show only uses a surface parody of Johnny Quest and The Hardy Boys to get to any other type of story they want to pastiche—it doesn’t embrace them without qualms, about how the vision of the future the old pulps presented was built on a foundation of corruption, and that the violence and conflict at the centre of good versus evil has real costs. The heart of it, though, is the idea that one generation of self-centred, messed up men will proceed to mess up another generation, leaving them with nothing but empty promises and nostalgia for something that didn’t exist. The seasons that aired this decade especially seemed to emphasize the sadness found in most of its characters, and how screwed up their lives are (my personal favourite examples being the 2010 episode “Everybody Come to Hank’s”, which is sublimely dark, and the 2013 season finale “The Devil’s Grip”), with lead character “Dr.” Rusty Venture being the key, as a person who has had a terrible life, mostly because of a terrible father figure, and who has in turn been a terrible person, and a terrible father figure, more often than not. It’s smart…but of course, being about the problems men create for each other, it doesn’t have a lot of time to explore the lives of the female characters on the show—of which there are a few, and crucial ones at that. This isn’t necessarily something that detracts from it for me, but it only reminds me how much I appreciate that shows like Tuca & Bertie exist now to offer some variation.
The genuine character development seen on Venture Bros. can happen because the show is completely willing to upend the status quo, which it has done multiple times. Those changes are often long in gestation, coming after years of plot development and teases before being rolled out in satisfying bursts. This is not a show that keeps central mysteries around for as long as possible, but answers questions and then sets up new ones on a regular basis to keep it all interesting. One of the reasons the seventh season (from 2016) was kind of a letdown was because some of the payoff was delayed to the next season (which was a big improvement.) On the other hand, the reason why the special “All This and Gargantua-2” worked so well was because it was all character and plot pay-off, basically pulling together numerous subplots and concepts from the previous years, while still being funny and entertaining on its own. It felt like the biggest Venture Bros. had ever been, in terms of the stakes and just how much of the show’s massive cast it used (and used well!) We not only get some of the most bombastic action set pieces the show has ever done (because this show is as much about kinetic hyperviolence as it is about continuity), but there’s also important moments between Dr. Venture and his son Dean, the big finale for the villainous Revenge Society (my favourite member being Fat Chance, whose successful self-actualization allows him to become “Fat Choice”), and a great send-off to some important recurring characters, like Dr. Venture’s much more successful brother and the mysterious Sovereign (who, as it turns out, is not actually David Bowie…which is a revelation that, a year after the special aired, probably saved the VB team a lot of trouble), and then some pretty earthshaking changes to the series that paved the way for the next two seasons. More impressively, it did all that—which might be a season’s worth of narrative movement on another show—in one hour. It was a good reminder of why I had stuck with the show from the beginning—when they go all out, they rarely hit a bad note.
The qualities in the special and the other top-notch episodes are why VB has become, and will probably remain, the last thing approaching real “geek culture” that I still follow. It manages to avoid a lot of the problems I find in that world: the extremely hollow or extremely sinister nature of the navel-gazing, triviality, regression, and complacency I often see in people who think referencing Star Wars constitutes a personality (and sometimes even VB is guilty of this.) For all the references that the show makes, both cultural and to its own continuity, it usually includes as many things that are legitimately engaging—it’s a series with a real sense of itself, and doesn’t let empty familiar signifiers define it entirely. Whenever it makes its sudden phantom appearances on Adult Swim, it almost always gives you something to chew on.
A Scrapbook of Infinite Noise 