Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Mulligan: Season 2’ on Netflix, Which Offers More Gummy Satire and Pop-Culture References For Your Shrugging Bemusement

It’s just the other side of the end of the world as we know it, and it keeps on keepin’ on for the second season of Mulligan, the animated Netflix series from 30 Rock and Kimmy Schmidt writers/creators Sam Means and Robert Carlock, with Tina Fey, Dana Carvey and Chrissy Teigen leading the voice cast. The first season established the concept: IN A WORLD where humanity has been all but wiped out by invading aliens, the 1,100-ish people left not dead in the rubble are hereby tasked with making us laugh by lampooning our current reality and making as many silly pop-cultural references as possible. The first season was pretty Gen-X/Simpsons-derivative, but funny enough at times, and the second pretty much maintains that M.O.

MULLIGAN – SEASON 2: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: President Mulligan (Nat Faxon) sits in the Oval Office, singing and dancing a musical recap of the State of Things in America, post-getting nearly obliterated by intelligent green praying mantis aliens.

The Gist: So what happened in the first season that’s worth noting here? A zillion jokes (about 51 percent of which landed), and would-be first lady and former Miss America candidate Lucy (Tiegen) dumped Mulligan because he’s a dumbass who makes Peter Griffin look like Rick Sanchez. Also, TOD-209, the brain-in-a-jar-in-a-battle-mech, is missing and presumed dead. Mitch McConnellalike LaMarr (Carvey) is still vice president of Earth, puppeting dipshit Mulligan around. Dr. Braun (Fey) is still a put-upon scientist and single mother of two. History dweeb Simon (Sam Richardson) is still treated like a dweeb by bros like Mulligan. The more things change, and you know how this one goes, etc. etc.

A fresh nonflict emerges when Mulligan and LaMarr decide that the people on the Thirsty Princess, a cruise ship that’s grounded nearby, need to get the hell off the boat and become good voting citizens of Earth. Easier said than done, because it’s a 24/7 party on board, with booze and hot tubs and a moose going down the curly slide into the big pool. Cue a big pile of jokes about what a bunch of yokels the cruise-ship people are, e.g., a perma-lit woman with crappy tattoos who used to be a hostess at a Florida TGI Fridays who says she misses walking on the beach holding her late boyfriend’s handgun.

Meanwhile, captured alien Axatrax (Phil LaMarr) learns what it’s like to get drunk on Earth alcohol, and decides he wants to feel that way all the time, and defects to the cruise ship. Braun boards the ship to use the radio to try to find TOD-209 but gets trapped in a conga line. Tasked with infiltrating the ship and encouraging the partiers to drop the beachballs and highball glasses and be miserable on shore, Lucy befriends TGI Fridays Lady and soon catches a whiff of stink belonging to the people on board who seem to be running things like fascists of fun. Is the perfect party life on the Thirsty Princess too good to be true? Not sure, but at least they’re not making wheezy Spider-Man: Turn on the Dark jokes like the landlubbers are.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? So many animated sitcoms look like Rick and Morty, don’t they? But there’s a retro-2000s element to the jokes on Mulligan, which drafts on the cram-in-as-many-gags-as-possible/cutaway snark/cynical comedy of Family Guy, Futurama and of course The Simpsons.

Our Take: The core joke here is a bit worn out: Wouldn’t it be HIGHlarious if a bro in sweatpants was the leader of the remnants of the free world? You can sense Mulligan veering away from its namesake a bit and leaning into the ancillary characters – Lucy, the beauty queen who’s smarter than she seems, has more complexity, and the embattled Braun and dweeby Simon seem on the brink of transcending their one-joke status.

Not that we’re here for the character development, mind you. Mulligan is a joke machine that’s just consistent enough to inspire a few smirks, but not potent enough to give us much that we haven’t seen already in many animated sitcoms. Gags about semi-trashy cruise-shippers capitalize on cheap stereotypes, and the socio-political satire is a bit gummy, playing off well-worn caricatures of politicians. More effective is this Fey-delivered line during a conversation about human nature with Axatrax: “Yeah, we know about hangovers but we drink anyway. We also scratch mosquito bites and get bangs.” I didn’t dislike this episode of Mulligan – it’s an easy, bemused watch – but I can’t help but think that an emphasis on joke quality over quantity might tighten it up into something more laugh-out-loud funny than occasionally smirkworthy.

Sex and Skin: Nah. Besides, you gonna get all hot and bothered over a nude cartoon?

Parting Shot: A cruise-ship director winks at Braun coyly before we cut to the credits with none of the aforementioned conflicts resolved.

Sleeper Star: I’m a fan of cross-gender voiceover casting (see also: Nancy Cartwright as Bart Simpson, a bunch of roles on Bob’s Burgers), and Ayo Edebiri is pretty funny as “General Scarpaccio,” a boy passing as an adult military general.

Most Pilot-y Line: After all the land people predictably defect to the party boat, LaMarr laments, “They’re gone. All our citizens. What am I going to fill all our prisons with?”

Our Call: I’m on the fence. But this season debut of Mulligan sets up a compelling-enough continuing conflict – a power struggle between the idiots on land and the idiots on the boat – that hopefully will push the series into fresher territory (maybe it’ll be the tiny-people-living-in-the-wall-type storyline that makes Solar Opposites a cut above the chaff). STREAM IT for now, but feel free to abandon it after another ep or two if it doesn’t kick the comedy up a notch. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.