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The bizarre animated escapades of pseudo-heroic scientist Dr. Rusty Venture, his competent, high strung bodyguard, and his two over-enthusiastic sons.
This might be the best chance you have to start “The Venture Bros.” mid-series. Not that you should even think of bypassing what’s come before – over the course of its five seasons (and a handful of specials), the show has proved itself to be one of the smartest, funniest, and most ambitious programs on television. If you haven’t seen it from the beginning, remedy this immediately. Use a sick day – several if you have to. But the show has explored (or at least alluded to) so many characters and events that its story bible probably has a gravitational pull, so it’s remarkable that the start of the sixth season can feel so…accessible.
The episode moves quickly to establish new surroundings (New York City) and new characters (there’s a Kingpin-esque villain next door, and a group that Hank immediately nails as “pretty much the Avengers”). The core group is here, but we don’t see many of the secondary and tertiary characters who have been introduced over the last few seasons. Taking place not long after the events from “All That and Gargantua-2” – a sort of post-season finale to the fifth season – Rusty Venture and his sons have inherited a massive fortune, a mammoth corporation, and a spacious penthouse. After so many seasons of increasingly pitiful circumstances, the Ventures are more or less what they appeared to be at the start of the series – a super-scientist family with limitless resources at their disposal, and a knack for putting themselves in danger. It feels a bit like hitting the reset button on the series, but the character growth seems to be intact.
Since this might post before the actual episode premiere, I’m keeping plot details to a minimum, to avoid spoilers. It looks like the move to NYC might have inspired show runners Doc Hammer and Jackson Publick to draw more this season from superhero comics than pulp science fiction and ”Johnny Quest”-type shows, though Rusty’s newfound control over one of the biggest tech companies in the world makes it likely we’ll still have some super-science. “The Venture Bros.” has featured a number of costumed heroes and villains who fit the comic book mold, so this isn’t virgin territory, but the current ubiquity of superhero entertainment has given them plenty of new material to draw from. The introduction of their new superhero squad was fantastic, and one of the funniest parts of the episode.
The show may be making an effort to downplay some of its more forbidding history (for now, at least), but the comedy is as crisp and unapologetically clever as ever. It still looks great, too. By the end of the episode, we get a vague sense of what’s going to happen in the sixth season. That being said, “The Venture Bros.” spun its loose parody of “boy adventurer” serials into a brilliant, tragic, and pop-culture savvy meditation on failure and self-loathing – expect things to be anything but predictable.
“The Venture Bros. Season Six” Premieres Sunday, January 31st at Midnight (ET/PT) on Adult Swim
