It’s fitting that The Bob’s Burgers Movie would serve as low-key alternative fare, a charming, warmhearted, clever piece of counterprogramming to the packed houses and flashier entertainment of a movie like Top Gun: Maverick, which also opens this weekend. That’s the role it’s played on television since 2011 as the most modestly scaled, understated animated series in FOX’s Sunday night line-up, where it’s quietly become one of television’s most consistent comedies — and one of its best.
In the 2022 landscape of prestige mini-series and shows that last three seasons at best, the continued success of Bob’s Burgers—helped along by reruns and streaming—looks unusual. Created by Loren Bouchard, then best known as a veteran of Adult Swim favorites Home Movies and Lucy, Daughter of the Devil, the series has never been desperate for attention, interested in chasing trends, or eager to change what’s worked from the start. For 12 seasons and 238 unhurried, droll, often winningly poignant episodes, it’s kept a tight focus on the Belcher family, parents and restaurateurs Bob (voiced by H. Jon Benjamin) and Linda (John Roberts) and their three children: 13-year-old Tina (Dan Mintz), 11-year-old Gene (Eugene Mirman) and 9-year-old Louise (Kristen Schaal). Like the restaurant at its center, the show has mostly stayed put, waiting for customers to wander in and discover it and trusting those who find it it will keep coming back.
But eleven years ago the thought of the show lasting this long, much less spinning off a movie (to say nothing of soundtrack albums, toys, and other offshoots) seemed unthinkable. The first season of Bob’s Burgers earned some kind reviews but nearly as many mixed notices or outright pans. In the Washington Post, Hank Stuever called it “another gross cartoon where the laughs get burnt to a crisp […] pointlessly vulgar and needlessly dull” and suggested “somewhere, once again, Fred Flintstone weeps.” In TV Guide, critic Matt Roush dismissed it as “rancid,” warning viewers to “avoid at all costs.” Even those who liked the show from the start tempered their praise. At The A.V. Club, Emily St. James called it a “borderline case” worth a “very mild recommendation” on the basis of Bouchard, Benjamin, and Schaal’s track record.
Viewership mirrored the tepid critical response. The first season ratings were only good enough for the ratings site TV By Numbers to call it a “toss-up” for renewal. “We always felt we could be killed at any moment,” Bouchard told The Hollywood Reporter in 2016, attributing subsequent renewals as much to word of mouth and intangible enthusiasm as traditional factors because Fox “[wasn’t] necessarily seeing it in the numbers, but they were hearing about it from their friends and from their kids and from social media.”
Vanity Fair contributing editor Maureen Ryan reviewed the show positively in its second season (for The Huffington Post) and now says she’s glad she waited. “It was really not hard, for a while there, to find animated shows that took their inspiration from South Park and The Simpsons, without displaying the acerbic intelligence those shows have when they’re on their A game,” Ryan tells GQ now. “I think I dismissed Bob’s Burgers as just another show that was going to be a little gross and a little funny, without realizing how much heart it would ultimately have.”
If it took a bit for Bob’s Burgers to find itself, it also took a while for viewers to figure out what sort of show they were watching. Its animation style didn’t match either the Simpsons or Seth MacFarlane models of the shows that surrounded it. Its focus on an odd but rarely outrageous family more closely resembled King of the Hill, which bowed out after 13 seasons two years before Bob’s Burgers’ debut. (Perhaps not coincidentally, Jim Dauterive, a King of the Hill writer and producer, developed the show with Bouchard.)
Its characters and storytelling approach took some getting used to as well. The show’s fourth episode, “Sexy Dance Fighting” focuses on Tina’s crush on her capoeira instructor. That’s the sort of low-stakes, character-driven story Bob’s Burgers uses all the time a plot that would make sense at any point in its history. But — a contrast to some of the high concept plots that had overtaken The Simpsons and had always been at the heart of MacFarlane’s shows —, it looked unusual then, as did Tina, the rare female TV character given stories about the confusing highs of and crushing lows of puberty.
It could have been even more disorienting. The Belchers have never consumed human flesh but they almost did: Bouchard originally conceived Bob’s Burgers as a show about a restaurant run by cannibals. . Black-and-white test footage available on the first-season DVD collection shows a scene in which a blood-soaked Bob and Linda grind severed hands and feet like a pair of modern American Sweeney Todds. After losing the severed body parts, Bouchard recycled the scene twice, first for the proof-0f-concept footage that sold the show then as the pilot episode, “Human Flesh,” in which the Belchers have to fight back against rumors of cannibalism. A revisit of “Human Flesh” serves as a reminder of how little the show has changed over the years—in the best possible sense. Its consistency in its own brand of humor and commitment to its characters are the true secrets to its success. From the start, Bob’s Burgers has been driven by the easy, affectionate back-and-forth and meshing comedic sensibilities of the cast. The Belchers’ love for one another is as unbreakable as it is clear-eyed. “You’re my children and I love you,” Bob tells the kids early in the episode. “But, you’re all terrible at what you do here. And I feel like I should tell you, I’d fire all of you if I could.”
So how did such an eccentric, tightly focused show catch on and endure? “I think a huge reason,” Ryan suggests “is that the Belcher family isn’t just fully corrosively cynical. I don’t love frenetic or lazily cynical humor anywhere, but somehow in animation, it can be especially exhausting. The show began having fun with not just ideas for episodes, but it began mining the family interactions for unexpectedly sweet or bittersweet moments. Any show that can balance weirdness, humor, emotion and left-field ideas, I’m much more likely to stick with.”
While other long-running animated shows and sitcoms have tended to grow wearisome as one season piled on top of another, Bob’s Burgers has, so far at least, avoided that problem through a combination of clever stories and a commitment to keeping its characters warm and weird. All of that carries over to The Bob’s Burgers Movie, a kind of super-sized episode that shares the series’ charms and its commitment to leisurely pacing and low-stakes. (The plot involves the discovery of a skeleton in the earth outside the restaurant but it’s just as concerned with Gene’s anxiety about the direction of his musical ambitions.) It plays less like a capstone to the long-running series than another chapter in an unexpected, welcome success story that’s still very much in progress—if, as usual, one that’s unfolding a little off to the side of the main action and content to remain in a niche all its own. Its world is small, but it’s also rich and deep.