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Bob's Burgers aired from January 2011 until ? on FOX.

The series follows a third-generation restaurateur, BOB (H. Jon Benjamin), as he runs Bob's Burgers with the help of his wife and their three kids. Bob and his quirky family have big ideas about burgers, but fall short on service and sophistication. Despite the greasy counters, lousy location and a dearth of customers, Bob and his family are determined to make Bob's "grand re-re-re-opening" a success.

Even though business is slow, Bob gets to work with his family. His wife, LINDA (John Roberts), supports Bob's dream through thick and thin (but truth be told, she's getting a little sick of the thin). Their eldest daughter, TINA (Dan Mintz), is a 13-year-old hopeless romantic with minimal social skills. Middle child GENE (Eugene Mirman) is an aspiring musician and a prankster who serves up more jokes than burgers. Their youngest, LOUISE (Kristen Schaal), is the most enthusiastic about the family business, but an off-balance sense of humor makes her somewhat of a liability in the kitchen.

During the second season , Bob and the family test-drive the food truck industry, dive into the world of synchronized swimming, search for treasure in an abandoned taffy factory and get tied up with a very needy bank robber.

A Review from The New York Times

This Family Restaurant Is All About the People
By MIKE HALE
Published: January 6, 2011

Watching “Bob’s Burgers,” Fox’s new Sunday night cartoon, is a good-news, bad-news proposition. The bad news is that the show, the network’s latest dysfunctional-animated-family comedy, is at best mildly funny, at least in the first episode (the only one provided to critics). The good news? It’s not another grating half-hour from the mind of Seth MacFarlane, who already occupies three of the five slots in Fox’s “Animation Domination” lineup.

“Bob’s Burgers” indulges in some of the same gratuitous boundary pushing found on MacFarlane shows like “Family Guy” — flatulence, crotch itch, cannibalism, child molestation, overweight children and the appeal of overweight children to child molesters are all comic fodder in the pilot episode.

But the mood and pace of the new show, set in a family-run burger joint near a beachfront amusement park, are different from those of either the MacFarlane oeuvre or “The Simpsons,” which serves as its lead-in. “Bob’s Burgers” has a lackadaisical vibe; its humor, no matter how anarchic, slides by in a deadpan monotone.

The low-key approach of “Bob’s” is reminiscent of the series whose former time slot it occupies, the still-lamented “King of the Hill,” but without that show’s lived-in, realistic texture. Viewers with long enough memories may be reminded of another gently droning animated comedy, “Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist”; as it happens, Loren Bouchard, the creator of “Bob’s Burgers,” was a writer and producer for “Dr. Katz.”

Cementing the connection between the shows is the voice of the actor H. Jon Benjamin, instantly recognizable to “Katz” fans as that of the doctor’s slacker son, Ben. Mr. Benjamin is now the star, giving exasperated voice to Bob, a Ray Barone gone to seed whose top-chef dreams have been reduced to the concoction of daily burger specials like the New Bacon-ings.

Drawn in an elongated manner that makes them look like sentient carrots, the family members include three children — strange daughter, crude son, slightly evil younger daughter — and their mother, Linda, the show’s best comic creation. Voiced by John Roberts, Linda is a petulant but good-hearted chatterbox — Marge Simpson’s Italian-American cousin who grew up at the shore.

In Sunday’s premiere episode, the grand re-re-reopening of the burger joint — after a fire, a rat infestation and a collapsing telephone pole — is threatened by a rumor that the meat is coming from the funeral home next door. For a half-hour absurdist sitcom, there’s a lot of plot, involving a health inspector who carries a torch for Linda and a busload of foodies eager to try human flesh. There’s also a surprisingly sentimental, we’re-all-in-this-together ending, which doesn’t necessarily bode well.

Along the way there are some genuine laughs, as when Bob announces, to no reaction whatsoever, “Your mother and I have to go downstairs and grind the meat”; the shoe drops later in the episode, when one of the children tells the inspector, “That’s not a euphemism — they’re really grinding the meat.”

In a “Rain Man” homage that’s sure to draw some angry e-mails, the son, Gene (Eugene Mirman), throws three matches on the floor in front of his older sister, Tina (Dan Mintz), who claims to be autistic. When she says there are a hundred matches, her siblings are scornful: “You’re the worst kind of autistic.” “You can’t even count.”

Some viewers won’t find much of anything in “Bob’s Burgers” funny, but in fairness it’s at least partly a question of style — of whether you respond to the show’s minimalist, conversational, antijoke aesthetic.

“My crotch is itchy,” Tina says.

“Come here, let me see,” her mother replies. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

BOB’S BURGERS

Fox, Sundays at 8:30, Eastern and Pacific times; 7:30, Central time.

Produced by 20th Century Fox Television. Created by Loren Bouchard. Mr. Bouchard and Jim Dauterive, executive producers.

WITH: H. Jon Benjamin (Bob), John Roberts (Linda), Dan Mintz (Tina), Eugene Mirman (Gene) and Kristen Schaal (Louise).

A Review from The Los Angeles Times

Television review: 'Bob's Burgers'
Fox's latest animated series revolves around a family that runs a struggling hamburger joint.

January 08, 2011|By Robert Lloyd, Los Angeles Times Television Critic

Fox welcomes another animated family to its Sunday-night cartoon block this weekend, and for once it has not been thought up by Seth MacFarlane, the "Family Guy" guy. The less phenomenal but more interesting Loren Bouchard, who produced "Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist," co-created "Home Movies" and created "Lucy: Daughter of the Devil," is the responsible party, working now, as before, with H. Jon Benjamin, who heads a cast of names familiar from the world of New York comedy, and New York-based comedies: Eugene Mirman, Kristen Schaal, John Roberts and Dan Mintz, whom you will have seen hanging around "Flight of the Conchords," "The Daily Show" and "Important Things With Demetri Martin." Jim Dauterive ("King of the Hill") developed the series with Bouchard.

In "Bob's Burgers," Bob Belcher (Benjamin) and family run a struggling burger joint in what looks like a mid-Atlantic seaside town; as the curtain rises, the place is having a "re-re-re-opening," with annoying son Gene (Mirman) dressed as a hamburger on the sidewalk and precocious younger daughter (Schaal) creating her own daily special: the Child Molester ("It comes with candy"). Later there is a visit from the health inspector, who has heard a rumor that there is human flesh in their meat and cautions Bob he will shut him down if he finds "anything above the 4% allowable by the FDA."

Of the shows with which Bouchard has been associated, this is the most conventionally premised and, as if to propitiate Fox, possibly the least sophisticated: There is the family name, Belcher; an undertaker named Mort; some bathroom humor; genital jokes. The premiere is nonetheless diverting, if not immediately impressive, and there are nice rhythms and sharp asides and some other things to be said in its favor: It's a show about the working class — or perhaps better put, the barely surviving entrepreneurial class — that is actually about work. And though the Belchers are hapless, they are not freaks, and though they are often at cross-purposes, they are not dysfunctional. "You're my children and I love you, but you're all terrible at what you do here," Bob tells his kids. "I feel like I should tell you, 'I'd fire you if I could.'"

Although the animation is certainly limited, it's "Fantasia" compared with "Dr. Katz." Still, apart from the fact that characters look funny — they have goggle eyes and a chinlessness that gives them the aspect of turtles — the comedy is primarily verbal: You could just as easily film the script with live actors. At the same time, what gives Bouchard's series their special life is the way that the loose delivery — the actors record their parts together, and there's improvisation allowed — bumps up against the inevitable formality of the animation, which is painstaking by nature even when characters don't move much. That contrast has become the stylistic hallmark of a younger generation's adult cartoons, and the irritated deadpan that is Benjamin's signature the very sound of its comedy.

For a Page dedicated to Bob's Burgers go to http://timvp.com/bobsburgers.html

To listen to the theme song of Bob's Burgers go to http://www.televisiontunes.com/Bobs_Burgers.html