Thursday 9 June 2016

Confessions of a Family Dog Viewer: An Introduction


If you've heard of Family Dog at all, then odds are that it's by way of a visual gag in The Simpsons episode "Treehouse of Horror III" from Season 4, in which Bart and Lisa visit a pet cemetery and the camera pans past a collection of tombstones bearing the inscriptions "Fish Police", "Capitol Critters" and "Family Dog".  Anyone well-versed in the history of US animated television might recognise this as The Simpsons' backhanded memorial to a trio of prime-time cartoons which were spawned in the wake of its own success, and which all failed miserably to provide even the mildest of competition (on the DVD audio commentary for the episode, Al Jean comments upon what good fortune it was, from The Simpsons' perspective, that all three shows happened to be about animals, so that the joke actually made sense in a pet cemetery setting).  Fish Police, produced by Hanna-Barbera and adapted (albeit very loosely) from a series of comic books by Steve Moncuse (note: Moncuse himself is not a fan), aired on CBS in 1992 and lasted a measly six episodes.  Capitol Critters, the work of Steven Bochco Productions and Hanna-Barbera again, aired on ABC in 1992 but was pulled after just seven episodes (the remaining six would later see the light of day on Cartoon Network in 1995).  Family Dog, which aired on CBS in June 1993, was the last of this early wave of 90s prime-time animations and proved every bit as unfortunate.  CBS quickly twigged that viewers were widely dismissing the show, if they noticed it at all, as an ersatz Simpsons, and burned through all ten episodes of its first and only season as hurriedly as possible.


Ironically, the characters in Family Dog actually predated the Simpson family, albeit by only a very narrow margin - the show had its origins in an episode of the Steven Spielberg-produced anthology series Amazing Stories (entitled "The Family Dog"), which aired a good month and a half (16th February 1987) before the Simpsons made their grand debut in the first episode of The Tracey Ullman Show on 5th April 1987.  In addition to Spielberg, the Amazing Stories episode boasts some pretty impressive names in its credits.  It was written and directed by Brad Bird, who went on to work for The Simpsons and is now most famous for directing cult animated feature The Iron Giant (1999) and the Academy Award-winning Pixar films The Incredibles (2004) and Ratatouille (2007).  Character designs, meanwhile, were contributed by Tim Burton (no coincidence that Sparky, the dog from Burton's 2012 stop-motion animated feature Frankenweenie - a film which disappointed me immensely, by the way - bears more than a passing resemblance to Family Dog's four-legged hero), while Danny Elfman provided music with Steve Bartek.  It depicted the daily life of a dysfunctional family, the Binfords, from the perspective of their unnamed dog, a runty, rat-like terrier who was constantly having to endure their negligence and misdirected anger.  A family who continuously mistreat their dog aren't likely to be the most sympathetic of characters (an issue which always boded quite badly for the scenario's potential as an ongoing TV series), but it worked well as a one-off installment, with "The Family Dog" being one of the most popular and best-remembered episodes of Amazing Stories.  Compared to the notorious early crudeness of the Simpsons shorts featured on The Tracey Ullman Show, the animation of the original "The Family Dog" episode was also quite expensively budgeted and looked absolutely stunning, a rarity for television animation at the time.

Six years after the original Amazing Stories episode, the Binfords and their still-unnamed dog returned with their own spin-off TV series, which was produced by Spielberg and Burton, but Bird, sensing that the project was doomed from the outset, was notably absent.  Although originally scheduled to air in March 1991, the series was beset with production problems which set it back for over two years.  Animation was initially provided by Taiwanese animation studio Wang Film Productions, but dissatisfaction with the results led to delays as episodes were outsourced to Canadian studio Nelvana for retooling (The Simpsons experienced similar troubles with their very first episode, "Some Enchanted Evening", which came back from the AKOM studio in South Korea looking little like the show that the producers envisioned and had to be redone, but fortunately they were a lot happier with how the rest of the series turned out).  Despite the extensive retooling, the animation was still an obvious step-down from the quality of the original Amazing Stories episode.  Of the thirteen episodes initially ordered, only ten ever completed production, meaning that Family Dog does have three "lost episodes" that I've yet to uncover any information on.  By the time the series received its belated debut on 23rd June 1993, it appeared that goodwill toward the original Amazing Stories episode had all but petered out, and that the Simpsons had completely stolen the thunder of the Binfords, who seemed like such a shallow and insufferable bunch by comparison.  The show received weak reviews and was quickly gone, although a LaserDisc box set was released with all ten episodes, and six of the ten saw the light of day again on VHS (there has been no DVD release to date, however).  Also noteworthy is that The Simpsons episode "Treehouse of Horror III" first aired on 29th October 1992, a substantial number of months before the Family Dog spin-off series had even debuted.  Clearly, The Simpsons writers had the good intuition to recognise that this show would be dead on arrival.


The triple failure of Fish Police, Capitol Critters and Family Dog ensured that animation was banished back to Saturday mornings, or at most to cult viewership for a number of years.  The Simpsons continued to thrive on prime-time, of course, but for a long time was seen as the exception.  There were a few more attempts made at adult animations throughout the middle of the decade, with varying degrees of success - Mike Judge's Beavis and Butt-Head was a big hit with the MTV crowd, Everett Peck's Duckman: Private Dick/Family Man (produced by Klasky Csupo) attained cult status and enjoyed a fairly decent run on USA Network, while Al Jean and Mike Reiss's The Critic failed to gain any kind of substantial viewership on ABC or Fox, despite a crossover episode with The Simpsons on the latter.  It wasn't until the late 90s that a fresh new wave of adult animation arrived, in the form of King of the Hill, South Park and Family Guy, and really helped to push the concept into the mainstream.

Part of the problem with those early attempts at churning out animated competition for The Simpsons is that they clearly had very limited insights into what had made The Simpsons such a break-out success in the first place.  It wasn't simply a case of "huh, adults these days like to watch cartoons apparently."  Audiences of all ages were drawn to The Simpsons because of its smart writing, sharp observations about modern suburban life and because it was genuinely very fresh, innovative and offbeat.  Two shows from that triad of would-be Simpsons competitors tripped up because they were essentially bland and ordinary children's cartoons trying, unconvincingly, to get into an adults' club.  To say that Fish Police was far from the worst thing that Hanna-Barbera ever produced would surely be damning it with faint praise, but there honestly isn't a lot else you that can say about it.  It's not an atrociously awful cartoon but has very little to recommend it, the only particularly stand-out feature being that they managed to snag some amazingly big talent for its voice cast.  Capitol Critters, on the other hand, has to be one of the most astonishingly misguided attempts at creating an "adult" cartoon that I've ever come across.  It looks and feels, for all intents and purposes, like your typical late 80s/early 90s Saturday morning kids' cartoon, only with stories structured around heavy-handed political allegories about race, drugs, guns, etc (it also takes itself ridiculously seriously for a cartoon about anthropomorphic rats and cockroaches living in in the White House - Fish Police at least had the good sense to see that it was silly).  Really, it's not clear to whom exactly they expected the end-result to appeal.  That leaves Family Dog as the sole entry with anything remotely zestful going for it.  Likewise, the show has some very distinctive flaws, although it's flawed in a very different way to the two series that it's destined to forever be lumped with, and does offer up a few intriguing moments and ideas along the way.


I'm not trying to suggest that Family Dog is legitimately a good show, mind.  At its very worst, it serves as a chilling vision of how The Simpsons might have turned out in lesser hands.  It's certainly the case that the humans in Family Dog are not particularly well-defined or likeable characters, and that three of the four Binfords are built upon much the same kinds of archetypes as we see in the Simpson family, only considerably flatter - the father, Skip, is a pot-bellied oaf, the mother, Bev, is long-suffering and privately dissatisfied with her lot in life, the son, Billy, is a hell-raising brat (is this all sounding familiar?), while daughter Buffy, the only Binford with no particularly obvious Simpson counterpart (she's too one-dimensional to invite comparisons with either Lisa or Maggie), is a mindless preschooler (one hopes, anyway) who can barely construct sentences meaningfully or coherently.  Unlike the Simpsons, the family in Family Dog really are a deeply unpleasant bunch, the kind of neighbours you pray you don't get stuck with, as opposed to being hilariously relatable like Homer and his clan.  Like the Simpsons, the Binfords also have a one-sided rivalry going on with their own neighbours, the Mahoneys, an insufferably cocky and well-presented family who nevertheless feel like they'd be infinitely better companions to be seated next to at any social event.  Family Dog's take upon modern suburban life is decidedly colder and more nihilistic than that of The Simpsons, which didn't necessarily have to be a bad thing (a purposefully darker or drier series might have been able to pull that degree of cynicism off just fine), but the show blatantly has no idea just how overwhelmingly drab its outlook is, let alone how to use that to its advantage.

And yet, in spite of its many, many failings, I actually quite like Family Dog.  Unlike Fish Police and Capitol Critters, it doesn't play like a generic kids' cartoon with adult gags and themes forced awkwardly in, and it does have traces of its own style and character.  For one thing, cartoons revolving around animal characters who don't talk and who act recognisably like the animals they're meant to be are rare beasts indeed, and there's something about the show's reliance upon visual storytelling and the physical mannerisms of the titular dog that I find to be immensely charming. The dog, for lack of a better expression, is the most "human" character of the lot, and whenever the focus is on his perspective (and when the human dialogue is regulated, appropriately, to being little more than inane chatter in the backdrop) the show assumes a life of its own and becomes rather enjoyable.  Certainly, I think the series does a decent job of bringing us into the world of the dog and making us identify with and feel for him.  The tripping point, again, proves to be the humans, who are so unpleasant toward their meek and totally innocuous pet that it merely decreases their likeability factor even further.  Clearly, we are supposed to accept that the Binfords love and care about their dog (and one another) deep down inside, and that's why not only the dog is able to tolerate them but why the audience is expected to do so too - only, I don't think that comes across for much of the time.  Fundamentally, the Binfords are jerks.  In some respects, the show's depiction of suburban bitterness and banality, shown from the perspective of a character who's squarely at the bottom-most rung of this particular hierarchy and has no means of overcoming that, makes it nightmarish in ways that prove strangely alluring.  What a gut-wrenchingly bleak - if totally unintentional - depiction of all-out suburban hell the production team have crafted.

All in all, I think of Family Dog as being more of an interesting show than a great one, the mistakes it made being every bit as fascinating, if not more so, than what it managed to do right.  Ultimately, Brad Bird was proven correct in his intuition that the concept wouldn't work as a TV series proper, in part because the Binfords are simply too tedious and unpleasant to spend a prolonged amount of time with, although I do wonder if an additional season might actually have enabled it to fix some of those bigger issues.  Perhaps the humans could have been fleshed out a bit more, given time, although it's hard to envision the show offering a huge variety of different adventures with the dog always at the forefront.  Obviously, the main character was never going to partake in a great deal of development - his charm was in his simplicity, in the fact that he was, at heart, always a dog, with distinctly canine desires and motivations, and as such I think that there were definite limits as to what could be done with him.  Blatantly, this thing was never destined for the same (at this point, downright insane) kind of longevity as The Simpsons, and as such, I think that the ten episodes we got are more than sufficient (although I would still be curious to learn what was planned for the three unproduced episodes).  Combing through all ten of those episodes, as I intend to do for my upcoming retrospective, promises to be a fun experience, for, as this introduction has hopefully demonstrated, I can be so very critical of this series and yet so warmly-disposed toward it at the same time.  There are some lovely (if slightly soiled) bones buried in this drab suburban wasteland, and unearthing them upon these pages will be my laborious mission for the coming months.

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