Three Busy Debras and Beef House are the newest shows on Cartoon Network’s late-night Adult Swim lineup. They are a broadly copacetic pairing. Both shows are set in the suburbs. They each center on ensemble casts. They utilize a loud visual style and absurd humor to convey a dark worldview. The distinctions are just as notable. Debras is female-centric; Beef House is male. Debras is made by and stars newcomers; Beef House is the work of Adult Swim veterans Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim.
Since 2004, Tim and Eric, as they are better known, have established themselves as distinct and divisive figures on the already bizarre programming block. They are dexterous with the televisual form — as confident with animated series as they are with sketch and anthology shows. Over the course of their tenure, their humor has evolved from madcap to menacing, but it is always rooted in middle-aged male malaise. If their aesthetic could be narrowed, I’d call it pleated pants camp. It is a world of polo shirts tucked into khakis, disillusioned or absent wives, and nonfunctional consumer products.
Beef House would seem like a culmination of the Tim and Eric brand. It is framed by one of their favorite formats, the multicamera sitcom, and it comes just as its creators are approaching middle age. The show is centered on five men (played by Tim, Eric, and three of their recurring nonactor troupe) who share a house in suburban Florida. With the exception of the unhappily married Eric (they all use their real first names), all of the men are single and jobless. They form an out-of-college fraternity with their own traditions (such as an Easter fashion show) and a propensity for the zany high jinks and sticky situations well-known to the format.
Fit with a laugh track and the unnatural line delivery to accommodate it, Beef House riffs on sitcoms about adrift, benignly malcontented men such as Kevin Can Wait and Last Man Standing. In this case, the men are much more adrift, and the malcontentedness is not so benign. In the first episode, an Army buddy of Tim’s (Michael Bowen) appears at the house unannounced, turns the group’s living room into a camo-patterned encampment, insults Tim’s awful musical aspirations, and tries to destroy Eric’s drain-circling marriage. Their solution is to drive Bowen out by triggering his combat trauma. As expected, by each episode’s end, the antics have run their course, and the status quo is returned.
An important rounding out of the cast is The Sopranos’s Jamie Lynn Sigler as Eric’s wife. She is the house’s sole breadwinner and presents the enthusiasm of someone under foreign occupation. She is disdainful of her husband, resigned to his freeloading friends, and the only one not oblivious to her reduced situation. She is also an appropriate cipher for people who absolutely hate Tim and Eric.
For the Tim and Eric fan, there is nothing here that would counter their expectations. Whether that’s an asset or a liability depends upon how eager any given fan is for more than they already have. Beef House is not quite as funny as Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! — nor is it as surreal as anything on Tim and Eric’s Bedtime Stories. Their past work is strewn with the duo’s long-evident contempt for formulaic entertainment of any kind. Beef House does get under the viewer’s skin in one respect, presenting the multicamera sitcom as a version of Sartre’s No Exit filled with mandatory fun. Perhaps not the best trope to subvert while half the Earth is on lockdown.
Three Busy Debras is as rooted in parasitic codependence as Beef House, but it at least it has more space to carry it out. The titular Debras (Sandy Honig, Mitra Jouhari, and Alyssa Stonoha) each have their own spacious homes, but like the men of Beef House, they have nothing to occupy their time with except getting into group mayhem. The Amy Poehler-produced show skewers the upper-middle-class enclosure (the show is set in Connecticut) through three of its most entitled residents, who, without surnames and in all-white wardrobes, present themselves more like an apex species than a clique. It is a land of perpetual brunch, overly manicured and flag-strewn lawns on streets named “Boulevard Lane,” imperious neighbors, cops as concierge, and privilege that is as bottomless as it is unquenchable. In contrast to the pleated pants camp of Beef House, the tone of Debras is forced smile (or maybe internal scream) energy.
Debras is verbally sharper than Beef House. The Debras speak to each other in acerbic one-liners, with sincerity and enthusiasm constantly affected through gritted, perfectly white teeth. “Debra, your hilarious story reminded me that I have a better one.” “I know it’s expensive. Why else do you think I came to an emporium?” “[Being unable to do a cartwheel] is nothing to be embarrassed about. It’s something to be ashamed of.” “It is so nice to be recognized for all of my skin.”
The show is also visually richer, turning the pruned, sterile McMansion landscape into a pastel snake pit of status anxiety and invasive vigilance. The Debras live on the knife-edge. They can treat anyone below their station as they please, but “make a mess in public,” an intrusive male neighbor reminds them, and they’re at the mercy of the town tube-tier (not a euphemism). Three Busy Debras is bound to be compared to the earlier female-directed suburban satire Greener Grass, which focused on two young mothers in a similarly surreal neighborhood. But whereas Greener Grass channeled the ambient dread of The Stepford Wives, Debras relies on a more manic pace and anarchic humor. It’s the sort of momentum forced by the show’s brief run time, but which also comes, I suspect, from watching lots of Animaniacs and Airplane! instead of studying.
The show’s critique of upper-middle-class white womanhood will not be not unfamiliar to readers of Jezebel, Reductress, or Thorstein Veblen. But Debras is less preoccupied with social commentary than with creating an unapologetically silly world that makes fun of a soulless place while accomplishing the singular job of any comedy: eliciting laughter. Watching the second episode, in which two Debras are accepted into an exclusive cartwheel club, I completely lost it at the introduction of its mascot: “Wheelie the Cart,” a shopping cart with cartoon eyes pushed quickly on and off camera by a metal band roadie.
If, like a prefab home, Beef House offers cozy familiarity, Three Busy Debras is comparatively more bespoke, willing to violate as many zoning ordinances as needed to complete its vision.
Chris R. Morgan is a writer from New Jersey. Follow him on Twitter: @CR_Morgan.
