The Goode Family aired from May until August 2009 on ABC.
The Goode Family followed the green, vegan, politically correct pursuits of the Goodes, but showed how even the best intentions could go wrong. Even Bliss, the Goode daughter, criticized the plans of her own family. They were fish out of water in their Southern town, trying to keep to their ways but still get along with the neighborhood.
Characters:
Gerald Goode (Mike Judge, King of the Hill) was the father of the Goode family. His wife was Helen (Nancy Carell, The Office). They had an adopted son, Ubuntu (Dave Herman, Office Space), and a biological daughter, Bliss (Linda Cardellini).
The creative team behind The Goode Family included a variety of Mike Judge's professional posse, such as David Krinsky (King of the Hill), John Altschuler (King of the Hill), Michael Rotenberg (Everybody Hates Chris) and Tom Lassally, a relative newcomer.
A Review from Variety
The Goode Family
(Series; ABC, Weds. May 27, 9 p.m.)
By BRIAN LOWRY
Produced by Ternion Pictures and 3 Arts Entertainment in association with Media Rights Capital. Executive producers, John Altschuler, Mike Judge, Dave Krinsky, Michael Rotenberg, Tom Lassally; co-executive producers, Jonathan Collier, Jace Richdale, Dave Jeser, Matt Silverstein; supervising producer, Mark McJimsey; producers, Kenny, Micka; Jordana Arkin.
Voice cast:
Gerald - Mike Judge
Helen - Nancy Carell
Bliss - Linda Cardellini
Ubuntu/President Kent
Jensen/Treyvon - Dave Herman
Charlie - Brian Doyle-Murray
What "King of the Hill" did for Texas rednecks, Mike Judge and crew accomplish with Prius-driving tree-huggers in "The Goode Family" -- a smart, wryly funny animated comedy that's going to need a strong word-of-mouth campaign to flourish. The sole qualifier is that the pilot chews through so many juicy storylines, the question of how fast the best plots will be exhausted represents a source of concern; still, assuming liberals can laugh at their own foibles, ABC might just have TV's first true Obama-era sitcom on its hands.
Judge -- the vocal talent/showrunner who has already birthed limited-animation gems "King" and "Beavis and Butt-head" -- teams with former "King" colleagues John Altschuler and Dave Krinsky in crafting this half-hour about the Goodes. Gerald (voiced by Judge) and Helen (Nancy Carell) are so committed to their politically correct lifestyle that even the dog, Che, is forced to be a Vegan -- though judging by watching him salivate at the sight of small animals that keep turning up missing, the meat-free experiment doesn't quite appear to be working.
The pair's teenage daughter Bliss (Linda Cardellini) doesn't share mom and dad's zealotry, and their attempt to adopt an African baby misfired when they brought home now-16-year-old Ubuntu (Dave Herman), who happened to be from South Africa and thus, inconveniently, white. When shopping at a big-box store is mentioned, Helen objects. "They don't even have a mission statement!" she protests.
In virtually every respect, "The Goode Family" provides a tweaked mirror image of "King," where the nuclear-family humor flows from a general worldview/way of life -- there, Hank Hill's red-state good ol' boyishness; here, Gerald Goode's blue-state "save the whales" creed.
Despite seeking to be constantly enlightened, however, the Goodes are equally hapless -- unsure of what to call their African-American neighbor, flummoxed by recycled shopping bags, and determined to help each other in navigating ordinary situations consistently exacerbated by the way the couple filters everyday matters through their politics.
Ultimately, there's no substitute for amusing scenarios like the one with the dog, and clever writing, which "The Goode Family" boasts in abundance. " 'The View' is on," Gerald says trying to cheer up Helen, who's confused about what to tell Bliss regarding abstinence. "The pretty one is saying crazy stuff again."
Capitalizing upon the show's sizable comedy footprint might represent another matter. After all, the series premieres post-Memorial Day, without a natural lead-in, following a spring in which ABC comedies were roundly ignored. Moreover, its sensibility appears more obviously suited to Fox, where the program would probably run until Obama is termed out of office.
First things first, though, because with comedy, funny is funny. And at least based on its maiden voyage into TV's carbon-expending space, "Goode" is flat-out good.
TV Review | 'The Goode Family'
A Clan So Virtuous Even Its Dog Is Vegan
By GINIA BELLAFANTE
Published: May 26, 2009
Like “South Park,” “King of the Hill” arrived in 1997 as one of the indelible culture-war comedies of the Wal-Mart versus Williams-Sonoma era. Created by Mike Judge and Greg Daniels, “King of the Hill” forged a brilliant neutrality, affectionately portraying the common-sense, ranch-house life of a Christian family in Texas while mocking provincial mediocrity enough to appease the yen for regional condescension on the coasts. You could love it in Cambridge; you could love it in Little Rock.
Everybody won until everybody didn’t: just a few days before the November presidential election, Fox canceled the animated series after 13 seasons, its ratings in decline, testament perhaps to a national exhaustion with values-bashing, even when the weaponry produced few scars and little bloodshed.
Mr. Judge, though, apparently still feels the gentle combatant’s calling. His new animated comedy, “The Goode Family,” created with John Altschuler and Dave Krinsky (beginning on Wednesday on ABC), shoots from a different tactical angle, similarly striving to alienate no one. As if he had been required by the Federal Communications Commission to devote equal time to jeering at liberal pieties (which, by the way, he did plenty of on “King of the Hill”), he has produced the Goodes, a family of zealot, vegan, recycling nut cases who don’t fight over paper versus plastic because they believe in neither.
“I know a lot of people are comfortable shopping with reusable bags,” Helen Goode (the voice of Nancy Carell) explains as she piles her groceries into her arms in the checkout line of a pseudo Whole Foods. “But I’m not. They’re made in sweatshops.” The Goodes have a dog named Che who leers at rodents because he isn’t allowed to eat meat, and an adopted teenage son named Ubuntu (David Herman) who they thought was black but who turned out, once they got him from South Africa, to be the blond child of Afrikaners.
To compensate for Ubuntu’s racist lineage, the Goodes dress him each day as if he were being sent off to a parade in honor of Nelson Mandela. His brand-new driver’s license identifies him as African-American.
When he apologizes for using too much gas during his initial spins around town, his father assures him that it is not really the consumption that matters: “It’s O.K., Ubuntu, what’s important is that you feel guilty about it.”
The voice of the patriarch, Gerald Goode, an administrator at a community college where even students qualify for tenure, is provided by Mr. Judge, who could not have improved on his tone of narcoleptic earnestness if he had apprenticed for “All Things Considered.” He is exceptionally funny in the role (as he was playing Hank in “King of the Hill”), and a lot of the writing is too.
But the show feels aggressively off-kilter with the current mood, as if it had been incubated in the early to mid-’90s, when it was possible to find global-warming skeptics among even the reasonable and informed. Who really thinks of wind power — an allusion to which is a running visual gag in the show — as mindless, left-wing nonsense anymore?
Mr. Judge, who remains obsessed with the absurdities of political correctness, still has his head very much in the Clinton years, and it is possible to watch “The Goode Family” feeling so thoroughly transported back to another time that you wonder where all the Monica Lewinsky jokes went. Sometimes you’ve just got to grab your cup of free-trade coffee and move on.
A Review from The LA Times
TELEVISION REVIEW
'The Goode Family
Mike Judge's new show works best when the cultural potshots give way to human needs.
May 27, 2009|ROBERT LLOYD, TELEVISION CRITIC
Mike Judge, creator and star of the estimable "King of the Hill," recently canceled by Fox after 13 seasons, has a new animated comedy, created with "King" vets John Altschuler and Dave Krinsky, premiering tonight on ABC. A rather narrowly conceived spoof of what might be called, in a liberal way, liberal concerns, "The Goode Family" is about a family that lives by the question "WWAGD? -- What Would Al Gore Do?." That is, the Goodes try to tread lightly upon the Earth. Hilarity fitfully ensues.
With the natural world being rapidly undone by our thirst for convenience, it seems an odd time to mock hybrid cars and reusable shopping bags. Sanctimony and hypocrisy and narcissistic virtuousness, sure, because those are things that always deserve mocking, no matter what agenda they're attached to. ("We're gonna hang out at the mall and make fun of people who hang out at the mall" is a good line.) I have mocked a hippie or two in my time -- they made you, to get into punk clubs. But the Goodes are merely well-meaning and, in the three episodes I've seen, do no harm, except perhaps to their dog, who'd like something to eat besides "organic flaxseed dog food," which he supplements by devouring the local small wildlife.
"Being good is so hard," says wife-mother Helen (Nancy Carell); she wears a "Meat Is Murder" T-shirt, which might also, of course, mark her as a Smiths fan. It's true: Goodness is a job at which most of us fail spectacularly, and to the extent the show explores that striving it's on to something good. Yet it's not quite clear whether we're supposed to regard the Goodes as deluded or as just too hard on themselves. There's something old and obvious about the countercultural shibboleths the show advances: yoga, vegetarianism, ceramics, sexual frankness between parent and child, animal rights, playing the mandolin, spiritual confusion, not shopping at a certain store because "they don't even have a mission statement," hypersensitivity to racial and gender issues masked as indifference to racial and gender issues.
Judge, sounding nothing at all like Hank Hill, plays dad Gerald Goode, vegan-thin and dressed always in bike shorts. (For work, he adds a poncho.) Linda Cardellini is daughter Bliss, who reads the Economist and just wants out. Teenage son Ubuntu (David Herman) is the African baby they adopted, who turned out to be Afrikaans and white. He is dressed in native garb, nonetheless, and is a bit of an ox, though with a talent for driving.
"I'm sorry I used so much gas, Dad," he says, having driven to rescue his father and sister from a Christian purity ball. (Judge and Co. do not save all their barbs for the Goodes.)
"It's OK," says his father. "What's important is you feel guilty about it."
But this is not something Gerald would think or say; it's a joke imposed on him from on high. "King of the Hill," for all its broadness, works so well because its characters are imagined from the inside out; they are not merely caricatures of small-town Texans.
A sitcom premise is a kind of booster rocket, meant to get the show into orbit. It's there to serve the characters rather than the other way around, as is largely the case here. "The Goode Family," which is nicely acted and well animated, works best when the cultural potshots give way to the more basic human needs of its characters: a mother's desire to be close to her daughter, or to her father (Brian Doyle-Murray as the resident voice of political incorrectness), in spite of "a lifetime of crippling negative comments," and a father's willingness to go outside his comfort zone to make his son happy, as when Ubuntu joins the football team. There's a show there.
An Article from Newsbusters.org
Newspapers Bristle at Thought of Liberalism Being Mocked in 'The Goode Family'
By Mitchell Blatt (
Wed, 05/27/2009 - 17:09 ET
ABC’s new series "The Goode Family" poking fun at liberalism and political correctness has predictably been greeted with disdain by the establishment media.
The running theme in reviews of the series is that it is unoriginal, flat, and not funny. Not that the folks at the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle are able to laugh at themselves, anyway…
The Times’s Ginia Bellafante said:
But the show feels aggressively off-kilter with the current mood, as if it had been incubated in the early to mid-’90s, when it was possible to find global-warming skeptics among even the reasonable and informed. Who really thinks of wind power — an allusion to which is a running visual gag in the show — as mindless, left-wing nonsense anymore?
The Chronicle’s Tim Goodman said:
Story Continues Below Ad ↓
Yes, making fun of people who shop at a market not unlike Whole Foods is pretty easy. Same goes for hybrid car drivers, liberals who tear themselves up over what to call minorities, recycling, etc. Too easy, really.
If it is so easy, why aren’t there any other shows on network television engaging such topics?
It’s easier for television networks to attack conservatives, like they do on "It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia," "30 Rock," "Rescue Me" and late night television.
Hybrid drivers, liberals who tear themselves up over what to call minorities, and Whole Foods shoppers have become the status quo—in Hollywood at least—so isn’t it pushing the envelope more to parody the progressive academics who can’t be seen in church than to throw up the same tired jokes about uptight Christian conservatives and their irrational belief in abstinence?
Just last month, Miss USA judge called Carrie Prejean a “dumb b****” for her views against gay marriage. CBS has been attacking her viciously over personal matters. After making an issue of Bristol Palin’s pregnancy during the election, CBS is still using her to attack abstinence.
So it is fitting that attitudes such as these are lambasted in "The Goode Family," where daughter Bliss’ parents are shocked to find that the "Purity Ball" they take her to involves a pledge of abstinence and where they are less concerned about her being exposed to the Pussycat Dolls than to “some sexually repressed religious fanatics.”
The dismissive attitudes of the Times and the Chronicle frame the comedic necessity of this show perfectly. As Ms. Bellafante’s review suggests, liberals think no “reasonable and informed” person should ever question the “scientific consensus” of manmade climate change. The left needs to lighten up. It’s refreshing to see a show that takes shots at these targets like no other show will.
—Mitchell Blatt is the editor of the foreign affairs blog Bombs and Dollars.
A Review from FoxNews
New Animated Comedy 'The Goode Family' Pokes Fun at Political Correctness
Published May 28, 2009
Gerald and Helen Goode live by a simple motto: WWAGD.
Translation: What Would Al Gore Do?
The politically correct couple lead a carbon-footprint-free family in the new animated comedy "The Goode Family," premiering Wednesday night on ABC, which pokes fun at all things holier-than-thou.
Produced by the extremely un-PC "Beavis and Butt-Head" creator Mike Judge, and his "King of the Hill" partners John Altschuler and Dave Krinsky, "The Goode Family" could succeed as an antidote to the raft of PC-leaning network comedies, says one media expert.
“It is good counter-programming. TV networks are understandably under enormous pressure to create buzz and bring back a young audience,” Michael Levine, Director of Levine Communications, told Foxnews.com. “It is always hard to know which match will start a fire, but the idea of creating controversy is a good strategy.”
The show's first episode could generate some heat. In it, mom Helen is unhappy when their daughter, Bliss joins an abstinence group to get her mom to stop talking to her "girlfriend-to-girlfriend" about sex, then asks her horrified hippie-dippy father to accompany her to the group's purity ball.
But that's not all. Their dog, Che, has been raised a vegan, so he now craves meat to such an extent, he is eating every squirrel, bird, and pet cat that dares stray into the Goodes' yard.
And in a swipe at politically correct overseas adoption, the family's 16-year-old son, Ubuntu, whom they adopted from Africa as a baby, is in fact white. It turns out he was from South Africa, and they forgot to check the right box!
But can a show that so aggressively tweaks the values and heroes of liberal Hollwyood establishment ever get the guest stars that stop by Tinseltown-friendly animated shows like "The Simpsons" and "Family Guy"?
“If the show is successful then most stars would actually find it beneficial to their careers," Levine says. "It creates controversy and is of the moment.”
"The Goode Family " premieres Wednesday at 9 p.m. EDT on ABC.
FOXNews.com's Hollie McKay contributed to this report.
This photo gallery contains pictures for sitcoms of the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s and today, as well as dramas, soaps, reality shows, cartoons, game shows, variety shows, talk shows and late night tv photo galleries.
Please note that all pictures uploaded between August 6-31, 2009 were lost in a database crash. While the photos are still on the server, the information (title, description, number of views, who uploaded them, etc.) attached to each photo was lost. In addition, any photo edits, moves or any other account changes from this period were lost. Our apologies to all members who are missing photos and for the downtime. We appreciate you taking the time to share them with us. Click here for archived files by category which are no longer in the database. We would appreciate it if the original uploaders could re-upload them when they have the opportunity. Thank you.
To upload photos, please choose the appropriate category and login with your existing
message board username and password. If you are new, you will need to
register before
uploading any photos. Only ".jpg" files will upload - ".jpeg", ".gif", ".png" or any other image
format will not work. You will need to convert them to ".jpg". Please upload only sitcom
and tv related photos.
To request any photos be removed, please use the "Report Photo" link that is the bottom of
every photo if you are registered and logged in. This is the quickest and easiest method. You can also
send an e-mail with the url of the photo(s). We will also gladly credit or
link to any site that is the original source of any photos.
If you have any questions, comments, requests for new categories, etc. - please contact us.
All images, logos, and other materials are copyright their respective owners. No rights
are given or implied.
Powered by: PhotoPost PHP Copyright 2004-2012 All Enthusiast, Inc.
