The Venture Bros Season 1 Review

Medium: Television

Release date: Pilot released 2/16/2003; 13 episode Season 1 released weekly 8/7/2004 - 10/30/2004

Review date: 10/10/2024

Score: 6/10

It's never great to have to recommend a show to somebody with caveats; I understand some shows do take a while to find their footing and really hone in on what makes them special, but as a viewer, the proposition of sitting through possibly multiple seasons of middling television just to get to the good part of a show is very unappealing. I don’t want to watch a bunch of mediocre episodes so that I can watch the good episodes - I just want to start with the good stuff. And I always do wonder with those shows, do they actually get good, say, three seasons in, or is that just the point where your sunk cost investment into the series becomes so great that you have to say the show gets good or face the fact you just wasted your time watching an unremarkable TV show?

Anyways, you can skip “The Venture Bros” Season One if you’re not feeling it, the show doesn’t actually get good until Season Three.

Ah, “The Venture Bros,” talk about an interesting little series. A show I’d catch brief glimpses of on Adult Swim as a child and go “I didn’t like that, that was weird.” Dressed in the clothes of a Saturday morning adventure or superhero cartoon, “The Venture Bros” looks the part but talks like a former gifted program Gen X burnout. The end result is a little abrasive, especially in Season One, but I do think there is something to the show’s premise: Doctor Thaddeus "Rusty" Venture is the son of the former globetrotting, villain fighting super scientist Doctor Jonas Venture, and said former boy wonder is now suffering from some serious imposter syndrome and jealousy to his more accomplished father (think “Jonny Quest,” but with Oedipal issues). Rusty lives in the shadow of Jonas, with him constantly being compared to Doc Venture Senior, leading to a massive inferiority complex and bizarre neuroses that Doc Venture Junior then unleashes on his own children, Hank and Dean Venture (the titular Venture Bros), along with the doctor’s incredibly masculine bodyguard Brock Sampson and an entire host of nemeses and super villains. That’s the basic premise of the show - taking children’s adventure cartoon setups, “Oh no, the Venture space station is malfunctioning, we have to fix it,” and then slap it in the face with hereditary failure and like, pill addiction. When laid out like that, I can see how “The Venture Bros” might really turn off some viewers, but I promise the show does get genuinely interesting and good.

Just maybe not in this season.

“The Venture Bros” probably puts its worst foot forward with its pilot, which revels in a lot of the baser and cruder elements of the series to little return (which makes the fact that Adult Swim used to broadcast it so frequently growing up even more bizarre; I would catch bits of this episode so much more often on TV than any other “The Venture Bros” episode, and it's one of the show’s worst! Maybe licensing wise it was cheaper to rerun the pilot than other episodes, who knows). I had watched the series all the way through about eight years ago, and remembered the show being pretty empathetic even through all the jokes, but my experience with the pilot (and honestly the rest of Season One) is now making me question some of those memories. Season One of “The Venture Bros” punches down for its comedy a lot more than I remembered, and while the fan in me wants to say that was just how American culture was in the 2000s and that “The Venture Bros” wasn’t any more extreme than its contemporaries, it's hard for me to excuse a lot of the racism and ableism 20 years later. The pilot, "The Terrible Secret of Turtle Bay," is just an extended unfunny joke about Asian people having a tech fetish and nothing really more. In fact, the episode’s B-Plot involving Hank and Dean is somehow almost worst; one of the more questionable of the show’s elements is how maturely Hank and Dean are portrayed. Age wise, they appear like they are in their early to mid teens, but the show often has them behave like they are mentally seven or eight years old. Now there is a narrative reason for this, as the brothers are shown to be very sheltered children with very little real world experience or friends (and later seasons expand on and explain this disconnect even more), but the show often plays this mismatched maturity for cringey humor that I’m not particularly fond of, like how in the pilot the boys are incapable of recognizing they’re speaking to a prostitute and are unable to understand what she’s offering.

The main season is much better though, thankfully, but that wasn’t exactly the highest bar to clear either. Season One mostly sticks to parodies of well known comic and cartoon characters and tropes, to mixed results; we get parodies of the Fantastic Four, the “ghost pirates” from “Scooby-Doo,” “The Six Million Dollar Man,” Walt Disney, Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” Doctor Strange, and more. There are some standouts - Episode Six "Ghosts of the Sargasso" and Episode Nine "Are You There God, It's Me, Dean" were my personal favorites, but I found most of the episodes this season to be middling, with one or two duds (looking at you Episode Eleven "Past Tense"). There’s not really a season-long plot for “The Venture Bros” Season One, with most of the narrative that will have an impact on the following season (like the Monarch being in jail, Dr. Girlfriend joining up with the Phantom Limb, Rusty now having a long lost brother, Hank and Dean dying in a fiery hoverbike accident) taking place mostly in the last two episodes of this season, so it's a little hard to pretend serialization plays too much of a role on the show quite yet.

Season One of “The Venture Bros” is fine, I think. Yeah, I’m damning it with faint praise, but honestly, Season One really only deserves faint praise. There are good ideas present that will be explored in very interesting ways in later seasons, but the series hasn’t quite nailed those elements by the end of the first. There are funny jokes, but there are just as many unfunny jokes as well, and the aforementioned 2004 style of humor can get old pretty quickly, depending on the episode. I was a little disappointed by how much punching down there was this season, as it was more common than I remembered, but I don’t think it ruins the whole production - it just makes it harder to recommend to anyone who is not already a fan of the show.

Check out “The Venture Bros” Season One if you want, but if you don’t, I don’t blame you.