User reviews

Season 1 of either Futurama or The Simpsons were never considered their best work. Disenchantment does not meet this high mark just yet. Jokes are funny but they are often rather safe and lacks some cleverness. The main characters are well acted by the young talent but Princess Bean, Luci, and Elfo come off as very one note. The Planet Express crew and The Simpson family are well defined characters but these shows had time. While I enjoy the show as a huge fan of Matt Groening, Disenchantment needs time and some thoughtful writing that made Futurama a fan favorite.

This show is not a comedy! It's a story and character driven fantasy show with jokes. And I love it! Every time the focus is on the characters or the story and world, it's awesome!!! Don't treat this show as a comedy, and kind of suffer through most of season 1, still enjoyable, but mostly one offs. This show is fun!

I was once watching someone compare latter day Simpsons to latter day Family Guy and one point they made was that while the Simpsons had fastidiously updated its subject matter year after year, it hadn't update its humor.

And sort of like how Futurama was The Simpsons but based around speculative sociology and the work place instead of the traditional family, this (as I suspect a million and seven people have already suggested) could be considered historical- arama (or something cleverer...).

But it's not quite though. It's mostly that but the Groening mind has turned away from the sitcom (and eventual movie) formula and actually had the ambition to create what was more or less a serial. We are able to see a character grow and develop across the multiple instalments and with the same humor and inventivenss.

It's too bad that at the beginning it is WAY too much like just another animated sitcom. And a bit too much like a couple in particular. I like Tia, she's an intriguing character who has grown up in great politico-economic advantage but lives in immense quiet emotional desperation. I think she's a bit wasted on the first season but it is, thankfully, in the second season as we see the show really discover its own strengths as it finally tells THE story of Tia as the ground-work has now been lain.

Gradually, this goofy (and I mean REALLY goofy at times) show actually shows a lot of tenderness and very meaningful emotional conflict that actually doesn't feel mawkish or schmaltzy because they invested in the characters and made their breakthroughs believable.

King Zog might just be the best character for this reason. I especially loved an episode about him and a bear.

Now Elfo...I think they retooled him the moment they saw the pilot. At first he was cynical and adventure hungry but as soon as he leaves the shire he becomes a sort of SpongeBob parody except even more infantile. I like him and all and I really want him to get laid but they do paint him as the loser quite relentlessly.

The world building is extravagant and satisfying with a few surprises I won't ruin. Let's just say it takes us to a variety of contrasting landscapes and in time really works on a substantial historic background that fuels conflict between a numerous peoples, aesthetically in debt to other artists of course but they make it their own fair enough.

Ultimately this was more of a Saturday Morning show than a Friday night show but as imperfect as it is, I grew to be glad for it.

Edit: I watched the finale the other day. Well...I will save the details for a review for that episode. It's hard to conclude a serial this long in a way that will please everyone. I don't feel insulted but I can't help but feel to a large extent they settled for easy answers.

But seriously, a lot of the jokes are predictable.

The animation style is just wonderful. It's like 2D in a 3D world. When you see the clips of the village, you can really see it.

Season 1 began with an episodic construct that was similar to any fraction of Futurama or The Simpsons. At the eleventh hour, it suddenly gained a multi-episode narrative that finished off with a Game of Thrones-esque cliffhanger, and suddenly it became a strange, if not interesting departure from the formulaic sitcom it made itself out to be.

Season 2 picks up right where they left off, and not only kept the narrative, but proved that it also gained a personality somewhere along the way.

Don't get me wrong, I love the first season. The plots are endearing, it's easy to binge, it's nice to look at, and the world is interesting. Is it Game of Thrones? No. Do I want it to be Game of Thrones? Absolutely no. When I see Futurama in medieval times, I want it to be Futurama in medieval times.

Futurama and The Simpsons are meant to be "soup of the day" shows, and people enjoy that. Some people have enjoyed that for 30 years. It's situational antics and shameless social commentary, and that junk is candy for the eyes and ears of your average viewer, myself included. What makes Disenchantment different from Futurama or the Simpsons (apart from only having 20 episodes so far, and a season-long plot, to boot) however, is the fact that both of those programs don't have a main character that lives to make an important statement.

I love Bean and everything she stands for. She's meant to not only be someone who rocks the proverbial boat (especially given the medieval-fantasy setting of the show), but someone who is pained, confused, complex, strong and often has valid points to make; shes a real person. She's a great character. And while I love how Homer Simpson can have a heart sometimes, I really love how Bean has a heart all of the time. She can be mean and she can make mistakes, but she can also learn, care about things deeply, and throw a punch at someone who wrongs her. I think that's someone that a lot of people secretly wish they could be.

The second season has a lot of heart, made me frustrated a lot, probably ended episodes rather abruptly at times but still managed to be really interesting story-wise, and develops the characters nicely to the point where I want season 3 to premier yesterday.

This series had potential to be unique, and I think in some ways it still maintains that, but overall it doesn't do well in capturing your attention. I do think it has a few redeeming qualities that would make it worthwhile to some viewers.

The show's characters aren't interesting or distinctive, which is what I believe this series misses most.

The episodes tend to have very little conflict. The stakes are typically low as well which make for boring television. Often, the main trio (Bean, Elfo, and Luci) get into something trivial, it resolved, then they're back to square one and ready to repeat it in the next episode. It's all predictable. Each episode started to blend together at about episode 6 in Season 1. I soon realized I was having trouble with episode plots and what the characters were truly doing.

As for comedy purposes, it doesn't garner laughs from me--the comedy it tries to produce isn't particularly funny.

There is some sort of charm the show possesses though. I can't quote put my finger on it exactly, but it makes for a decent show to have on in the background.

I don't think the writers are passionate about the show, unfortunately. It certainly shows in the episodes.

All in all, it's watchable enough.

Stop reviewing a show based on half an episode and acting like u can develop a world in 10 mins! Futurama and even The Simpsons took a good season or two to hit their stride. Having said that, this is its own show and it is going to be fine as long as we allow it to be its own thing and don't limit it by looking at it thru Futurama/Simpsons lenses. Go in with an open mind and don't let it become a self fulfilling prophecy by nitpicking every little thing thru comparing it to Groening's past work. It's not a remake and there is no possible physical way you can know if this show is boring or poorly paced (it's not)if you've only watched 12 mins of it, a trap I see seriously like 48% of the reviews on here falling victim to. Look for the positives, Bc they objectively outweigh any negatives. Anything in the universe u go into looking to compare to something else, you're going to be disappointed in, Bc you're putting it in a box that's impossible for it to break out of and looking for it to match nostalgia, emotions from when you were different person, that evolve as we grow. A lot of people don't understand with shows like this by creators we expect to blow us away, it's not the show they don't like, it's that they can't recapture the feeling They had when watching the older work. It's the way they currently feel they don't like, and look for anyway to deflect having to accept that. Even if they are looking at the show, With that logic, the best it can be is as good as whatever they're using to compare, Bc that's the ceiling its not being allowed to climb above. Personally, I did not like Futurama when it started but now it's one of my fav Cartoons of all time. By the time the tenth ep of Disenchantment hit I was def already into it and loved the over arching story arc. THESE SHOWS TAKE TIME TO DEVELOP! Stop hating, and holding Groening to unrealistic expectations!!! Can't wait for more!!!

With all the garbage on TV today I was more than happy to binge something light and funny that still takes time to build a fantastic world and allows stories to naturally evolve within it. The longer a show like this runs the better it gets, so let's support things like this, rather than allowing our collective need to be edgy and unique on the internet to outweigh well meaning creativity.........here's to hoping for 5-6 seaons!!! Cheers!

When I seen the series for the first time, I mean 1st season, it had interesting scenario, great characters, actors behind the screen, nice humor, amazing illustrations!

The ending of 2nd season has opened a great story of politics in the style of GoT, and it was excited and promising!

But what happened with the series by 4th season? Where is humor, scenario, characters? It turned into boring long playing animation with absolutely unclear plot and scenes of the stories. A lot of actions, but no sense at all...

Did the authors decide to make a joke and give us a real real Disenchantment?

2024 UPD: 5th season of the series even worse than 4th.

________

10 stars - for illustrations, characters, bright worlds and the cast (I love IT Crowd and Mighty Bush guys) 3 stars - for the plot.

Kept me entertained, pretty mellow but I think it'd get much better with a second season. The Episodes do slowly get better. Note: I actually watched all the episodes, unlike the most of these chums.

With this show being from the creator of "The Simpsons" and "Futurama", I was of course curious enough to give it a watch, and I thought it would be as outrageous and hilarious as those earlier shows. While I didn't think the show was terrible, it is to a degree somewhat disappointing.

First, the good stuff in the show. Technically, the show is first rate, with good animation and art design. The premise and the characters are pretty original, making the show not feel like a clone of any past TV shows. The show is certainly not boring, and is somewhat amusing at times.

However, "somewhat amusing" is about as funny as the show gets. The humor of the show lacks significant comic jabs to make it truly laugh-out-loud funny. The show seems to be content to move along with an amiable attitude instead of really trying to be hilarious. There are other problems with the writing as well. The creators of the show seem to be having difficultly moving from a 22 minute episode format to a longer version; you can really feel some blatant padding at times, especially with the first episode of the show. Also, the show is very slow in explaining details of the characters and situation at times. For example, Bean's half-brother is not clearly identified or given a chance to speak until about halfway through the show's first ten episodes.

This is not a bad show, but currently it's not reaching its full potential. It's possible the writers will manage to improve things should the show be renewed. Until then, I would say give the show a chance by watching the first three episodes. If you like what you see there, you'll probably find the rest of the episodes amusing enough. If not, then I would say skip the other episodes.

Before I begin I highly recommend that you watch the show fully. No matter how you feel about the start of the season (Which could go either way), the ending episodes will make you understand why you should watch all the way through.

Nonetheless I believe that we are witnessing the birth of what could be an amazing serialized show. Future seasons could tell an amazing story that will set out in a world that could be quite expansive and deep and thrilling, while remaining funny and interesting. At least that is what they set up for themselves.

The season starts off sort of slow, which personally I like. It introduces us to the characters and gets us familiar with them while providing good entertainment, showing their strengths and weaknesses, adding detail to the part of the world that we are in, and setting up storylines.

I'm personally glad that they stayed in the kingdom for as long as they did, I feel connected to the Kingdom and will feel for whatever happens to it. The main trio is expanded upon marvelously. Especially Elfo and Beane as we see what makes them, them. They have flaws and character quirks, but they have beauty in them. They feel like what characters should feel like. They are neither perfect, nor are they completely useless. Lucy also gets a surprising amount of development. Even the King gets developed as the season comes to an end, which I enjoyed.

Chekhov's Gun is in full effect which I enjoy, as characters are rarely discarded outright making the kingdom feel alive and interconnected.

Overall I would say don't worry about people saying that it starts out slow, this isn't a movie, this is a series that should stay for a long time. This first season brought us into this world and gave us a shovel. It didn't waste ten episodes by running all around and barely scraping over everywhere. We have places to explore, people to meet, and a home to come back to that will be familiar and loved.

In the end the ball is in the Creators' court. Hopefully the prove me right and use the rest of the show's seasons to expand upon this world they developed, to take chances, and to crack some good jokes.

Damn this is going to be a long year to wait.

It's a struggle watching Disenchantment - I have a deep and endearing love for Rough Draft studios and their animation game is strong here. In fact, Groening's aesthetic has never looked nicer - beautifully painted backgrounds, huge complex CGI sequences seamlessly integrated with the 2D stuff. You've got all your favourite voice actors and some nice cult British comedy casting, you've got the legendary Mark Mothersbaugh crafting a fun score to keep it rattling along. It's a serious shame then that it's so let down by some wildly inconsistent plotting and some absurdly sketchy characterwork.

In trying to flex from a syndicated-style comedy animation to a multi-part fantasy epic Disenchantment manages neither very well - and the weight of the story is let down by the flailing plot tendrils and stop-start character arcs that drift in and out of focus seemingly entirely randomly. It's like a big fantasy book where each chapter is being written by different people who each had a brief half-forgotten conversation with the person who wrote the chapter before. It's frustrating, and you find yourself going "wait, but what about this thing from seven episodes ago? Did they forget about it? Will it ever be referred to again?! IT SEEMED IMPORTANT AT THE TIME."

So it's a hodge-podge show really - magnificently polished on the one hand - but incredibly sketchy on the other. Like when a load of artists fold over paper and pass it to another to draw a strange hybrid creature, sure it all sticks together but it doesn't quite work as a whole. It's a show sort of fighting itself and my own mind is doing the exact same thing when I'm watching it. Was Futurama this frequently awkward and hit-and-miss? Is my whole life a lie?! Well perhaps but I'll stick with it for as long as Netflix does (or will the resurrection of Futurama on Hulu spell the end?) - for a deep love of what was and what may or may not ever end up coming to pass.

I've watched the first three seasons but couldn't tell you a single plot point, storyline, or memorable gag.

The characters come together, get separated, overcome some minor conflict, then find each other again to repeat the cycle.

Most jokes fall flat or make zero sense in the context of the fantasy world in which they exist.

Rewatch Futurama instead of wasting time on this show.

Disenchantment had high expectations from its audience, but the outcome is really disappointing. A cool new setting for Groening's style and a pretty cool cast of characters, but it just lacks in quality, especially when compared to Futurama and the earlier seasons of The Simpsons.

Plaudits for creating a series-long arc with continuation of a story across all episodes, but as it spans anything that might be in a fantasy genre, it doesn't really hit the mark with anything. Watching the seasons, or 'Parts', as they are released is an issue too. Nothing from the story is particularly memorable, and so if a character is brought back from two seasons ago, you've completely forgotten who they are. Maybe it'd all come across better if you binged the entire thing at once.

There are all the same voices from Futurama but none of the quality jokes. You can argue that it's not a comedy, but it's definitely joke-driven, but they're weak, and never cause an actual laugh. Developing emotion across a story is new to Groening, but it doesn't come close to the success of the emotion in Futurama. Maybe harsh to compare, and whilst Disenchantment is an okay series, it does fall flat a lot.

Everything about this show is great except for the comedy which is it's main purpose. It has a really intriguing story but I feel it could have done better but the jokes kinda fall flat.

Disenchantment is completely different from the other shoes from Matt Groening, and that's a good thing. This show would be a disaster if it was a standard sitcom with nonsense comedy and a lot of characters. Instead, everything is more complex here, the story is progressing and dynamic and most of the comic situations leave with questions and thoughts on aspects of our society and history, especially on religion. Disenchantment is a smart show, one that all the people who loved Bojack Horseman will also appreciate it. I am happy that Matt preferred to experiment instead of being stuck in a format that would have been boring.

And now I'm waiting for the third season. Its not funny, its not something special but its fun to watch and i really like the animations.

I would recommend this show to anyone who enjoyed Simpsons or Futurama. It's very much different from those two shows but it's still incredibly entertaining, and actually has me wanting to see how the story progresses through each season. Give it a chance!

It's not bad. But it's not good. I know other people are saying, "well Simpsons and Futurama didn't hit their stride in the first few episodes, it took them a few seasons to really get going." But I just kind of feel the opposite. Like, Simpsons came out in 1989. So they've had almost 30 years to perfect their craft. This show doesn't feel like 30 years in the making. Some of the animation is off, some of the sound design is off. There are scenes where characters are walking and there are no walking sound effects, scenes where someone gets hit with a sword and there are no swinging or clashing sound effects. There is a bar fight scene, where you can only really hear the character's voices, there is barely any background noise at all. The writing feels really bland. All of the jokes are really expected, and most of them fall flat. Overall, this show is not bad, but it certainly isn't Simpsons, nor is it Futurama. Maybe it will hit it's stride later but currently I don't think it's worth watching.

Those expecting a strong growth curve like Futurama, or strong insider humor like Simpsons are in for a bad time. Unfortunately the main character is a terrible person surrounded by enablers leaving no room for growth and the showrunners are to afraid to teach this Mary Sue any actual lessons. All the best jokes are background characters, as though the writers room is divided by a single writer writing the main character, Bean, and the rest of the writers trying to keep the audience entertained. The storyline suffers from what seems like them not intending to get this far, with every new episode creating more plot holes and throwing past episodes into the trash, and worse yet, as they kill off character after character, they fail to replenish the void left by their absence with new replacement characters. By the last episode of the 3rd season, the cast is literally just the throw away characters trying to carry the episodes. Fun concept out of a great studio, but just falls apart. Looking forward to Covid being a thing in the past so I can have other things to do when season 4 comes out.

I watched all five seasons and I can tell one thing: at the end I didn't care, I just wanted that it ended, and soon. In the last season I smiled barely twice in ten (ten!) episodes. This was a torture, at the end I couldn't care less about the characters, the deaths and their fate. I barely remembered the plot from the previous seasons. Everything was so devoided of any tension, any build-up. Characters supposed to be in absolute danger just were going around the castle as if there was no menace at all. It was so disappointing, and the music made it even worse. The last season tried to smooth down some of the flaws of the previous seasons, but the damage was already done. What an amount of wasted potential, this is my biggest regret. Repeating the same jokes 100 times doesn't make them funnier, just more and more boring. Where are the brillant writers of the first seasons of Futurama? Or of the Simpsons? This show pales compared to them. And yes, Matt Groening lost his magic touch nearly 20 years ago, it's a fact.

Started off slow but a few more episodes in amd it picks up, defo room for improvment but the simpsons and futurama were the same.... give it a chance