Aubrey Plaza and Joe Wengert’s animated cat comedy is crude, slack and only fitfully funny for half of its eight episodes, and then, almost by accident, becomes a tender little series about what a pet knows. Worth the wait only if you are patient.
Kevin (Jason Schwartzman) is a New York cat, and the series Aubrey Plaza and Joe Wengert have built around him wants to be two things at once: a filthy adult cartoon about animals, and a small story about growing up. Over eight episodes it manages the second far better than the first, and the first is what it leads with. If you can get through the opening half, there is a sweeter, odder show waiting at the other end. We are not sure everyone will.
Schwartzman is the right voice for a cat. He plays Kevin as fussy, over-articulate and quick to take offence, a creature who narrates his own dignity while losing it, and the performance holds even when the writing around it does not. Amy Sedaris’s Brandi is pitched somewhere between a cocktail hostess and a threat. Aparna Nancherla gives Judy a flat, apologetic deadpan that gets the biggest laughs in the early episodes with the fewest words. John Waters, as Armando, sounds as if he has been waiting his whole life to be asked, and Whoopi Goldberg’s Cupcake arrives with the air of somebody who has seen all of this before.
The trouble is the jokes, or the first forty minutes of them. The writers’ room, which includes John T. Reynolds, Alison Bennett, Corin Wells, Peter Kelly, Jess Dweck and Marcy Jarreau, throws a great deal at the wall in the early episodes, most of it bodily, and the editing by Robert Ashe lets scenes run on past the laugh in the hope that a second one is coming. It rarely is. By the third episode we were bored, and then we were cross about being bored, because a cast list like this one is a promise and the script was not keeping it. There is also a strain of meanness in the early going, animals knocked about for a punchline, that the series has not yet earned the right to.
Then it settles. Somewhere past the midpoint the show stops trying to shock and starts paying attention to its animals as animals: what they know of their owners’ comings and goings, what an empty flat feels like to something that cannot read a clock. An episode in the second half, in which Kevin spends most of the running time waiting for a door to open, got to us more than we expected. Dan Romer’s score helps a great deal here, thin and plucked and unhurried, and the four directors, Casey Crowe, Sarah Seember Huisken, Michael Moloney and Angelo Hatgistavrou, keep the city particular: fire escapes, radiators, the underside of a bodega shelf, the view from a windowsill at four in the afternoon. The animation is flat and clean and does not try to impress you, which suits a show about a cat.
Against the best of its kind it is a late starter. BoJack Horseman taught this genre that the sadness has to sit underneath the jokes from the first episode, not arrive in the sixth to apologise for them. Kevin gets there, but it asks for a lot of credit in advance.
The few reviews so far are split wide, with one trade paper warm, another cautiously fond, and one British critic finding nothing to like at all. We can see both camps from where we are sitting. The early episodes are as crude and slack as the harshest notice says; the later ones are as gentle as the kindest. The average lands near the middle and so do we.
Watch it at home across a week rather than in a sitting; the early episodes are easier to forgive at a distance of a day. Those with no patience for a cat being sick on a rug for comedy should look elsewhere. Those who can wait will find a show that, by the end, seems to understand its own animal rather well.
