This evening, my daughters and I finished watching the whole series of Greg the Bunny.
I couldn't stop laughing. This is by far the funniest show I've ever seen. Blows away the Simpsons. Better than Arrested Development (though very similar in style of humor).
The premise: the world is inhabited by puppets as well as humans. They act on TV shows, but they have their own lives off-screen and they suffer from all the same ups and downs (and weaknesses) as people. The show revolves around the cast and crew of "Sweetknuckle Junction," a low-rated kids' TV show a la Sesame Street. Half are people, half are puppets. Greg the Bunny is the best friend and roommate of the director's loser son Jimmy and both end up getting jobs with the show (Greg in the cast, Jimmy as a gopher). Everyone is an eccentric caricature of some classic sitcom character: the airhead, the unappreciated intellectual, the angry gun fanatic, the neurotic network exec, the old guy who doesn't deal well with change. It definitely takes risks; one of the characters is "Tardy Turtle" who is "slow" (in all ways) but is one of the most endearing chacters in the show and has many of the best lines. A sitcom could never have a human character like Tardy turtle, but as a puppet, it plays.
The comic timing in this show is amazing. The staging and cinematography is fantastic; they get great shots that almost make you forget that the puppets are... well, puppets. The humor is very quirky; early on it's easy to just pay attention to the "puppets are real" jokes, but then you quickly realize that there's a lot more subtle humor packed into the show, and it just picks you up and carries you along.
The show is rather PG-13. Lots of talk about sex, drinking, drugs, etc. Definitely not a little kids' show, and there were a couple of times where I felt a little uncomfortable letting my kids watch it.
Alas, the show only lasted one season -- if it were pitched today, I think that the Comedy Channel would pick it up in an instant, but a few years back, the networks just couldn't deal with it. But Netflix has it, and you shouldn't miss it.
9:18:00 PM 
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