This Just In

Caught two episodes of Spike TV’s new “topical” cartoon series recently – and not only do the guys at South Park have nothing to worry about in the cartoon satire competition, the folks on Strippella can breathe easy, too.
Created by Steve Marmel & Kevin Key, This Just In centers around a trio of barfly buddies: Brian Newport (Marmel), a loudly opinionated conservative columnist, and his two pals – one, a milquetoast married man, and the second, a black guy who’s primary function seems to be to establish that right-leaning Newport is not a racist asshole, too. There’s also a left-leaning Latina barmaid who wastes a lot of time arguing with Newport, generating the requisite Spike TV quota of leers and single entendre cracks from our barely animated hero.

This Just In advertises itself as a conservative satire, so Newport gets most of the “best” lines, the bulk of which are easy shot insults aimed at the usual lib suspects (hey, Teddy Kennedy’s a drunk!) and celebs. This week’s episode, for instance, contained two Courtney Love one-liners (did you know she’s a skank?), while a promo for the upcoming entry included yet a third. Way to bitchslap those sacred cows, guys!
The show’s being produced in Flash Animations, purportedly so each episode can be written to catch current events. But neither of the two entries I watched seemed to capitalize on that fact, instead doing broad CNN-Is-Too-Liberal Jokes so a part of conservative conventional wisdom that they could’ve been written five years ago. Do you really need the shorter lag time to write jokes about Al Jazeera’s anti-western bias?

There are a few good chuckles on the show – I snickered at an Al Franken parody that captured his delivery beautifully – but most of the material’s pretty toothless. (Oh lordie! They’re making fun of women’s cable network programming! What cheek!) Perhaps if I were personally more politically conservative, I’d find the show funnier. But even then I don’t think I’d laugh at tired lines like the one calling an achtung-ing Arnold Schwartzenegger the “governator.”