“Neighbors From Hell” is a new animated comedy that will be appearing at 10 p.m. June 7 on TBS Monday. The premise of the show revolves around culture shock. A nuclear family of demons is forced out of its natural element to live in the suburbs of an American town to stop a drill from drilling into Hell. Molly Shannon from “Saturday Night Live,” Will Sasso from “MadTV,” and Patton Oswalt from Disney’s Ratatouille lend their voices to the characters. The voices are believable to the characters portrayed, and the words they speak seem to be one derogatory, racist statement after another.
“There are ways to make comments about offensive racial things that are supposed to be ironic but I don’t think this was that,” said Railee Johnson, a senior at Eastern Michigan University majoring in women’s studies. “I mean, they named a goldfish the ‘N’ word.”
Johnson is referring to a scene in the show where a character said, “We named our black goldfish a name that starts with an ‘N’ and rhymes with a character from ‘Winnie-The-Pooh.’ ”
“I didn’t like it,” economics major Brian Halloran said. “The show felt like it was trying too hard to be funny. It was constantly bringing up other shows trying to make jokes on that.”
The time TBS chose to premier the show does not overlap an EMU student’s schedule, where the latest classes run until around 9 p.m. Even with the optimal time slot, Johnson does not foresee “Neighbors From Hell” having long-term success with the EMU community.
“In an ideal world, it wouldn’t be successful, but there is a growing market for just dumb humor,” she said.
Television viewing parties have become a mainstay for EMU. Shows such as “Lost” and “Mad Men” have been the subject of weekly viewing parties attended by EMU students. Students were gathered in a similar fashion for an early showing of “Neighbors From Hell” to gauge their response. Johnson attends ”Lost” and “Trublood” viewing parties.
“Viewing parties give you a chance to hang out and you still have something to talk about,” she said. “You are all part of the same plot line and part of the same situation. Viewing parties suit themselves to shows that suit themselves to any sort of discussion following it, like ‘Lost.’ ”
“This show isn’t intelligent enough [to have a viewing party],” said Mikesch, who regularly attends a “Mad Men” viewing party. “If you get invested in the characters, then people are going to want to sit down and talk about it. With this show, the characters are very flat.”
An example of that in the show would be when a character who plays a white male in the show said, “Oh, you are all dark meat to me. Gobble, Gobble.” This was after another character corrected him, saying he was not a turkey, but from the Republic of Turkey.
“Honestly, my favorite character was the suicidal poodle, because it was the only one recognizing how absurd the situation was and it was trying to escape it by hanging itself,” Johnson said.
Halloran is not enthusiastic after seeing an early showing of the show’s first episode.
“I would not seek out the show. I would watch more episodes if it was 1 a.m. and I was bored.”
“I would watch another episode just to see if it was a ridiculously offensive shock value type thing,” Johnson said. “I would not watch it with the intention of enjoying it.”
“I am shocked that TBS actually picked that up,” Mikesch said. “There are so many shows out there that are cool that are not getting made because they want generic shit like that.”
“I feel like TBS is trying to be more edgy now,” Johnson said. “They’ve got the George Lopez show and aren’t they getting Conan O’Brien for a night show? I think that [“Neighbors From Hell”] is a poor way of getting that.”
