Eco-satire on the ‘The Goode Family’

Are politically correct environmentalists ripe for mocking?

Maybe tonight’s premiere of “The Good Family” will provide an answer. The animated comedy on ABC pokes fun at a lefty, granola-ish clan.

“You look at them and you say, ‘Oh yeah, I know those people,’” creator Mike Judge, of “King of the Hill” and “Beavis and Butthead” fame, says on a promotional video (see below). “They’re hanging out at every Whole Foods, having a hybrid — just kind of feel forever guilty about being a human being on the planet. … It’s something that I think is pretty relate-able and that the time is ripe for.”

I’m not so sure about that. The dialogue in a couple of clips seems  dated — more like: You hear that joke and you say, “Oh yeah, I’ve know those punchlines.’”

Maybe, I’m being an overly sensitive treehugger. Or maybe I’m being influenced by a not-so-favorable New York Times review:

[T]he show feels aggressively off-kilter with the current mood, as if it had been incubated in the early to mid-’90s, when it was possible to find global-warming skeptics among even the reasonable and informed. Who really thinks of wind power — an allusion to which is a running visual gag in the show — as mindless, left-wing nonsense anymore?

I’ll reserve judgment until I see the whole thing. It airs at 9 p.m. Eastern time”King of the Hill,” with its stick-figure-ish style and deadpan humor, kind of grew on viewers, and it stuck around for 13 years. Still my sense is that satirizing political correctness is about 20 years past its prime.

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