Drawn Together: Season One

Drawn Together is a one-joke series, but the joke is pretty inspired: namely, take eight animation archetypes and confine them to a house, Big Brother-style. The characters include Clara, a Disney-esque fairytale princess; Foxxy Love, a jive-talkin' “mystery-solving musician” (whom Clara assumes is the “servant girl”); Ling Ling, a sociopath Pokémon type; the aptly named Captain Hero; Toot Braunstein, a black-and-white babe from the 1930s; Xandir, an ambiguously gay video game warrior; Wooldoor Sockbat, a “wacky…whatchamacallit” out of the Ren & Stimpy school of demented characters; and Spanky Hamm, an Internet download with disgusting bathroom habits. Drawn Together has tremendous shock value, from Clara's blithe bigotry and corpulent Toot's penchant for self-mutilation to Foxxy's rocking of Princess Clara's world with a lingering hot-tub kiss (“I'm totally frenchin' a racist ho,” she sings in a ballad worthy of Beauty and the Beast). When Drawn Together isn't satirizing reality TV conventions or assaulting viewer sensibilities with profane language (uncensored on this DVD set) and behavior, it surprises with such impressive visual bits as the any-which-way M.C. Escher room. Unlike South Park's Stan and Kyle, however, Drawn Together offers no empathetic characters to anchor the rest of the wacked ensemble. “This ridiculous show,” as one character calls it, sustains viewer interest only by appealing to baser instincts. DVD extras include audio commentaries, deleted scenes, and a karaoke sing-along. Optional. (D. Liebenson)