The same day, 263 times: two boys build something impossible, their sister fails to prove it, and a platypus foils a lonely inventor. Povenmire and Marsh turn the formula into the joke, and the songs are better than they had any right to be.
Dan Povenmire and Jeff ‘Swampy’ Marsh built their series on one day and then repeated it 263 times. It is the summer holidays in Danville. Two stepbrothers decide to do something enormous with the morning, their sister tries to get their mother to see it, and the family pet, who is secretly a government agent, slips out to stop a scientist across town. By dinner the enormous thing has vanished, nobody has seen it, and tomorrow they do it again. That is the whole programme. It is good, and it stays good for far longer than a formula this rigid has any business allowing.
The formula is the comedy. Phineas Flynn (Vincent Martella) announces what they are going to do today; Candace Flynn (Ashley Tisdale) phones their mother; Perry the platypus puts on a fedora; Heinz Doofenshmirtz (Dan Povenmire) unveils a machine whose name ends in -inator; the machine’s beam, knocked off course in the struggle, removes the boys’ contraption from the garden a moment before Linda Flynn-Fletcher (Caroline Rhea) comes through the gate. Every episode hits every mark, and the writers know that we know, and so do the characters. Doofenshmirtz greets his nemesis by name and with something like relief. The pleasure is in the variation, as it was when Chuck Jones sent the same coyote off the same cliff for the best part of twenty years.
Povenmire’s Doofenshmirtz is the best thing in it. He is a divorced father in a lab coat whose schemes are mostly grudges against his brother, his childhood or a garden gnome, and he tells his back stories in a soft middle-European accent that grows more aggrieved as the anecdote grows sadder. Perry never speaks; he growls, and the growl does the work. Martella gives Phineas an unbroken upward lilt, a boy who has never been told no. Ferb Fletcher, voiced by Thomas Brodie-Sangster and later by David Errigo Jr., says one line an episode, usually the best one. Richard O’Brien, who wrote The Rocky Horror Show, plays their father Lawrence as a man who has not noticed anything in years.
The drawing is plain on purpose. Phineas’s head is a triangle, Ferb’s a tall rectangle, the outlines are thick, the colour is flat and bright, and the back garden with its one tree is the same picture hundreds of times over. That plainness lets the directors, Bob Bowen, Zac Moncrief and Robert F. Hughes among them, move fast: four plots in eleven minutes, every cut landing on a joke. Danny Jacob’s songs are the other engine. There is one in nearly every segment, and between them they take in doo-wop, hair metal, Bollywood, bossa nova and light opera, with lyrics written as jokes rather than as filler. “Gitchee Gitchee Goo” is nonsense, and it is also, annoyingly, a good record.
We laughed out loud at Doofenshmirtz describing the birthday party nobody came to, his parents included, and we laughed because Povenmire lets him say it as though it were a mild inconvenience. The sadness is real and nobody on screen is allowed to notice it. We also, somewhere in the second series, found ourselves counting how many episodes were left. There are 66 in Season 2 alone. Buford Van Stomm (Bobby Gaylor) is a bully who is soft underneath, Baljeet Tjinder (Maulik Pancholy) is a swot, Isabella Garcia-Shapiro (Alyson Stoner) asks what the boys are doing and Phineas fails to notice her, and by the hundredth time each of those is the joke it has stopped being one. Candace is written to shriek and Tisdale shrieks; only her scenes with Jeremy Johnson (Mitchel Musso) let her play a person.
Season 5, which began on 26 May 2025, more than twelve years after Season 4 started, picks up as though no time had passed. Nobody has aged, the garden has not changed, and the episodes we saw were as tightly built as anything from 2008. That is what the audience wanted, and it also means the series has nowhere to go except round again.
Watch it three or four at a time, and watch it with a child if one is available, though that is not strictly necessary; more of the jokes go over their heads than land at their feet. It carries a U. The platypus will not be thanked.
