Loren Bouchard’s Central Park Struggles to Hit the Right Notes for Apple TV: Review – AppleTV 4 Jailbreak (appletv4jailbreak.com)

The Pitch: Apple TV+ has been searching for a big show to serve as its first hit, since unveiling the streaming service last November. Could it be Central Park, a half-hour animated musical comedy from the creator of Bob’s Burgers and featuring a massive voice cast including Kristen Bell, Josh Gad, Stanley Tucci, Daveed Diggs, and Leslie Odom, Jr.? The streaming service’s metaphorical fingers are tightly crossed.

Breaking Into Song: Any fan of the Fox animated sitcom Bob’s Burgers knows that the show isn’t shy about having its characters break into song, or about having music be an overall major part of its wacky hijinks in a seaside town where the eponymous restaurant resides. The Belcher family is very, very weird: there’s burger chef Bob, his gleeful wife Linda, his boy-obsessed teenage daughter Tina, his keyboard-obsessed son Gene, and his bunny-ear-wearing youngest daughter Louise. After nearly a decade on the air, Bob’s Burgers has established itself as one of the funniest, most underrated comedies on television. So, anything new from creator Loren Bouchard and writer Nora Smith should be a cause for celebration.

Central Park (Apple TV)

Central Park is the result of Bouchard and Smith coming together with what feels like a fairly free rein, with a perhaps unlikely co-creator in Gad, best known for providing the voice of the most chipper snowman in the world, Olaf from the Frozen movies. At first blush, it’s easy to see some of the parallels between Bob’s Burgers and Central Park. Both shows focus largely on a family unit, with a straight-man dad, exuberant mom, a boy-obsessed daughter, and an outrageous son. In both shows, there’s an oddball rich character voiced by one of the great actors of his generation. In Bob’s Burgers, it’s Kevin Kline. In Central Park, it’s Tucci in a gender-bending role as a grouchy socialite with the goal of gutting NYC’s Central Park, and the aforementioned Tillerman family trying to fight back with dad Owen, who serves as the park manager, leading the charge.

Pay Attention: That premise is, you may note, where the similarities end. Central Park, through the first four episodes (the first season is 13 episodes long, but just four installments were made available to critics at press time), is a somewhat serialized show where you need to pay attention to what’s going on, a slightly odd fit for Bouchard and Smith. That slightly odd fit extends to some of the characters, such as the street busker voiced by Gad. He serves as the show’s narrator, a role that is so unnecessary that half of the songs and dialogue featuring are dedicated to clarifying that his character definitely serves a purpose. The more time that Gad’s character tags along with members of the Tillerman family,…

https://consequenceofsound.net/2020/05/tv-review-central-park/