Fear Paul Bunyon

When last we checked in on President Curtis, during its series premiere episode, I noted that the show was amusing but that it lacked a distinguishing factor that made it feel like a must watch television series. Rick and Morty works, even now, because it’s so weird, so over the top, and so willing to commit to whatever ideas come its way that it has vitality to it. And while President Curtis certainly has many of those same ideas at play, it struggles to find a way to differentiate itself from its parent show.

Put another way, what makes an adventure following the team of President Andre Curtis (Keith David), Chief of Staff Rho Banks (Stephanie Beatriz), and Special Agent Francis O'Doyle (Jim Rash), special enough that we feel like they’re the only people that could handle it? In a world where Rick Sanchez and Morty Smith exist, where they battle aliens and demigods, playing in the Multiverse on a regular basis, why do we need the President and his team tackling these threats? As amusing as their adventures are, the series hasn’t yet given me that answer.

And, honestly, it hasn’t yet found a way to be weird in its own way that feels different enough from a Rick and Morty B-plot. Take the finale episode of this season, “Timber”, where the President has to battle a cannibalistic Paul Bunyon. After beheading the beast, the head is then taken over by trees and a wooden Paul Bunyon then goes around, continuing to kill people until the President shows back up to defeat the beast again. That’s all decent stuff, but it feels like the kind of thing Rick could take care of with the flick of his wrist before moving on to important matters. It’s a blip in the world but President Curtis has to treat it like an A-plot because it doesn’t have anything better to do with its story.

But it could. Its set up actually gives it an angle that could be interesting, and the best episodes of this season play to those strengths. Rick isn’t bound by this Earth, and he doesn’t have to worry about this plane of existence if he doesn’t want to, but the President of the United States does. He has to actually care about the country and focus on the people. The times where we see Curtis do this (like when he plays a Fortnite clone online so he can talk to his constituents) we feel like we understand his character a little better. It’s moments like this which hint towards what the show actually could be.

Another example actually comes at the end of “Timber” where Curtis has to bite the bullet and take the blame for something so that the country can rally together and start doing things for good. Curtis isn’t actually at fault, but he realizes that letting the country think he’s the bad guy so they can continue doing good things is worth the price, even if it eventually costs him his job. That’s a bit of a political twist and it shows that the series could do something more interesting than Rick and Morty B-plots. It could be a sci-fi twist on The West Wing.

This is, honestly, what I think the series is grasping for, it just hasn’t found a way to do it yet. The episodes that work best in this season are the ones that actually focus on the President being the President. Take “Synths”, a story about how the Christmas spirit is draining out of the populace, and if it disappears humanity will stop feeling jolly. So they team up with Hallmark to produce synthetic humans who can spread real holiday cheer. It’s a weird premise, but it works. And then when an evil Santa shows up and starts killing synths, you feel like the series has earned its weirdness while also finding the right angle into the story.

Or take “Knox”, an episode where Special Agent O’Doyle is framed for a robbery at Fort Knox, only to realize that it was the work of his mother, a leprechaun trying to unite the twelve leprechaun clans. This is a solid, character-focused story that relates a little bit of the political landscape of the show into a story of weirdness and fae creatures. It works because it has spent time developing the characters, working to make us care about the central trio while also understanding them as people.

This is a story Rick and Morty wouldn’t do, in part because its characters wouldn’t care about this situation at all. Rick would say, “you lost all your gold? Who cares?” before transmuting trash into gold and walking away five minutes later, not caring that he just invented tech that would crash the world’s economy. But It’s an important story in “Knox” not because of the gold but because of what it means to the characters. That’s what makes this episode vital.

As the season goes on it finds more ways to do this, to ground its story in the characters and make the plotlines relevant to its world, but it could do more. I like the tales that are centered on the White House, and I appreciate it when the President’s actions are then discussed by characters outside his central sphere. When the series gives us a chance to see his actions and understand how they affect the world, that’s interesting. That’s something new for this franchise. It needs to do this more.

But the show seems to get stuck trying to find the right balance between being weird and being interesting, and it hasn’t worked it out yet. Some episodes are brilliant, like “Synths”, while others reach for greatness and miss the mark, like “Timber”. And unfortunately more episodes still miss the mark than hit it. There are a few episodes this season that were laugh out loud funny, but more often than not an episode would end one week and I’d think, “well, that was amusing, but it could have been funnier.” Worse are the times I think, “Rick would have solved that in five minutes in a cold open,” and I realize the show has really stumbled .

I almost wonder if this show would be better if it were set in a parallel world where that version’s Rick Sanchez and Morty Smith were dead? But then we couldn’t have those characters make cameos once in a while to boost ratings, and you can tell this show still needs to keep that ace up its sleeve. So we have a series that is hamstrung by the fact that it can only tell B-plots of interesting adventures that Rick could solve in seconds otherwise, all while still not quite finding a way to make its own character-driven stories feel truly relevant. And if they aren’t relevant, they certainly can’t be as funny as they should be.

President Curtis is a show that could be great. You can feel it, somewhere under the surface, that the series is grasping to be bigger and more interesting than it is. Something is holding it back, some twist of its formula that isn’t letting it reach its full potential. I’m hoping that since this first season had to be developed in one big group of episodes (due to how long animation takes) we can treat it as a pilot season and that the next will be better. Maybe the production team will take the notes from reviews like this and rework their ideas, expanding the series and finding a way to give it a sense of vitality that isn’t just a cheap clone of Rick and Morty. If they can do that, this series will be amazing.

For now, though, it’s the kind of show I put on when I don’t have anything else to watch and I realize I’m a few episodes behind and probably could catch up binge in an evening. I don’t hate the show, but right now, in its current form, President Curtis isn’t appointment viewing, not like Rick and Morty.