Disenchantment, the new fantasy animated series from Simpsons creator Matt Groening, premiered on Netflix Friday, August 17, with all ten episodes of Season 1 available for streaming.
The show follows the misadventures of binge-drinking Princess Bean (Broad City's Abbi Jacobson), her elf companion Elfo (Nat Faxon) and her personal demon Luci (Eric Andre of The Eric Andre Show). Other voice talent includes John DiMaggio, Billy West, Maurice LaMarche, Tress MacNeille, David Herman, Noel Fielding and many other familiar voices who had worked with Groening before.
Disenchantment is Groening's first show since Futurama and his first production away from Fox. The animation matches the style of his previous two shows. The series is set in the crumbling city of Dreamland, where Princess Bean desperately tries to escape an arranged marriage. It's a satirical take on the fantasy genre, much like The Simpsons is a satire on the life of a working-class American family and Futurama was a satire on the science fiction genre. In Disenchantment, the oddball trio encounters ogres, sprites, harpies, imps, trolls, walruses and many human fools, according to the show's press release.
Within a day of its official release, Disenchantment has received mixed reviews. CNN described it as "a slightly watered-down version of Monty Python and the Holy Grail." Disenchantment utilizes the same dry, sarcastic humor of The Simpsons but crawls forward without a sense of pacing or comedic timing. The pilot, written by showrunners Groening and Josh Weinstein, "plays like an extended first act rather than a discrete episode," according to The AV Club. What the show lacks in plot, it gains in the artwork, according to Rolling Stone, which described it as "visually splendid."
"Ultimately," Matt Groening said in a press release prior to the show's release, "Disenchantment will be about life and death, love and sex, and how to keep laughing in a world full of suffering and idiots, despite what the elders and wizards and other jerks tell you."
Disenchantment received a 60 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with the Critics Consensus being "the show's overall familiarity and disappointing willingness to play it safe may not bode well for future seasons."
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