The Best of Two Worlds?
To me, the appeal of Bob and Margaret falls somewhere between the American series The Simpsons and King of the Hill, and the British Crapston Villas and Pond Life. Like the American works, it centers on domestic family life as experienced by a rather ordinary couple who don't accomplish much. Fine says, "Real people just keep doing the same dumb things over and over. Real people don't always develop, real people stagnate, just like Bob and Margaret." Well, that formula worked for the immensely popular American live-action series Seinfeld -- and to some extent the same formula is employed in both The Simpsons and King of the Hill, though they also tend to tackle `issues' of some sort.

However, within the United States, differences in the exhibition of the three series affect their content to some extent. In contrast to the two American animated series, which are shown on public airwaves by a network broadcaster (Fox) and thus are subject to the government Broadcast Standards and Practices regulations, Bob and Margaret is being aired on a cable network, which is not bound to the same level of censorship. As a result, it can be somewhat more `broad' in its comedy than even The Simpsons and King of the Hill, and the Fox network pushes the limits of network television. For example, the Burglary episode manages to work in nudity, bathroom humor and at least the possibility of gruesome violence during a scene when Bob is shown disrobing and sitting nude on a toilet. Since he's taken off his glasses (those 40-somethings don't see as well as they used to), he doesn't realize that the burglar robbing everything in his house, while the sleeping Margaret drools on her pillow, may at any moment bludgeon him with a meat cleaver! I know it doesn't sound funny the way I write it, but I swear it works in the show.

Other things struck me as humorous just because of how they are played out. A great example occurs in an exchange between two lethargic cops who are supposedly investigating the burglary. At one point, one of them gets a toffee from her colleague and finds it's all fuzzy with lint -- but she eats it anyway! It really does play more funny the way Fine writes it. For American audiences, the Britishness of the characters alone is likely to earn the series some points. The police officers and the robbers are particularly appealing; I thought the supporting characters in the episode provided most of the humor. It will be interesting to see whether Snowden Fine's decision to make each episode a `stand alone' show, without links between the episodes or the supporting casts (which add so much to the popularity of The Simpsons), has any affect on the series' success overall.

A mouth's eye view: Bob the dentist. Courtesy of Comedy Central.

The comedy in Crapston Villas and Pond Life and the overall appeal of those two series would seem to be a lot more specialized than that of Bob and Margaret. There was some concern among `consultants' that Bob and Margaret would not be of interest to young viewers, due to its focus on an angst-ridden couple who are in their 40's. Based on seeing one episode, which admittedly is not much of a sample, but with the benefit of knowing Bob's Birthday and other works by Snowden and Fine, it seems to me that the series actually has the potential to attract a fairly wide audience. In any case, it seems a wider range of `family' viewers would be drawn to the everyday experiences of the characters in Bob and Margaret, than to the raucous raunchiness of Crapston Villas (see the AWM article "Jill McGreal's `Out of the Animation Ghetto: Clare Kitson and Her Muffia" for a bit of dialogue), or the female-centered narratives of Pond Life, which is subject to that old `men won't watch women's stuff' argument.