The folks over at BigHo got themselves all hopey-changey this past week anticipating the debut of Mike Judge’s new prime time cartoon, The Goode Family.

As EDITOR-IN-CHIEF John Nolte put it:

In the closing sentence of her New York Times review, Ginia Bellafante damns Mike Judge’s new series, “The Goode Family” — which appears to mercilessly mock everything anyone employed at the Times holds dear — with the harshest of criticisms:  

Mr. Judge, who remains obsessed with the insanities of political correctness, still has his head very much in the Clinton years, and it is possible to watch “The Goode Family” feeling so thoroughly transported back to another time that you wonder where all the Monica Lewinsky jokes. Sometimes you’ve just got to move on.

Ouch.

In the world of pop culture-dom, to be accused of not being cutting-edge is bad enough, but the Times engages the nuclear option by dismissing the new series as passé, outdated, antiquated, behind the times… Pick your poison.

If the goal here is to strangle this ideological apostate of a cartoon in the crib, withholding outrage, confessing it’s funny and then burying it as dull and out of touch is a pretty genius way to go about it.

BigHo contributor Pam Meister, who was one of those people sleepwalking in their Birkenstocks until 9/11 CHANGED EVERYTHING at which point she discovered Ronald Reagan, God, and fear, watched the show with her former hippy husband and 16 year-old daughter, VirginiaDareSchlaflyAynThatcher (formerly Moonbeam) and they thought it was a real hoot:

Lighten Up, Libs!

After seeing video trailers for Mike Judge’s new show The Goode Family online last week, I was looking forward to seeing the show. Who couldn’t appreciate jabs being taken at a vegan family who wanted to adopt an African baby to show how much they “care” but end up with a white South African baby and name him Ubuntu? (There’s an inside joke in there for computer geeks, which my husband got but I didn’t.) Whose poor dog, Che, also on a vegan diet, is so desperate for meat that he eats all the small animals in the neighborhood he can get his paws on? Who wonder “What would Al Gore do?” when Ubuntu wants his driver’s license even though driving cars and burning fuel is evil? It helped too that I liked Beavis and Butthead and King of the Hill.

[...]

As my husband and I watched the show with our 16-year-old daughter, he told her, “Your mom and I were like that back in the ’90s.” To a certain extent, it was true. We used cloth grocery bags, we were vegetarians (but not vegans), we voted Democrat and saw Republicans as evil incarnate, and drove a Geo Metro, all the while patting ourselves on the back for being so caring and progressive. I even had Greenpeace checks, with a portion of the fee to buy them going toward the organization (shudder). My husband mowed the lawn with a no-gas lawnmower, huffing and puffing as he pushed. One of our neighbors, often when he’d been enjoying a beer or two, would hop on his rider mower and mow our lawn for us, laughing at us – in a good-natured fashion, of course. (When we returned to hilly New England from the flat Midwest, that people-powered mower went the way of the dodo pretty quickly.)

So as my husband and I laughed at the Goode Family, we were also laughing at ourselves and how self-absorbed we were at one time about being “good.” The reason for our “transformation” is fodder for another article at another time.

To be called 9/11! 9/11! 9/11!!! Jesus Fucking Christ! Kill Some Fucking Brown People Already, For Fucks Sake!!! : A Mother’s Odyssey

To be fair, humor, or what constitutes teh funny is a matter of individual taste best left to the individual (at least when Richard Cohen is not around to provide guidance), so here’s a taste of The Goode Family so you can make up your own mind.

Somebody at ABC is going to be ritually disemboweled for green lighting this. All thirteen episodes.