"Robot Chicken" [Green-Senreich, 2005] Season 2 [Apr.- Nov. '06] [TV-MA]

A friend of mine, one Connolly Dietrich, once described this show as "boring." But of course, at the time knowing scarcely anything about it, I would not believe him. How could a show that clearly works so hard at being so offensive and outwardly abrasive possibly fail at it, I wondered? But now, having seen it, I understand what he meant, and feel that this sketch-comedy deserves not to be listed as the origin of Tim and Eric, but the other way around. In a fashion that begs a Musical Genome comparison to Bon Jovi, Seth Green and Matthew Senreich put on in their show an apparent display of offensivenss (and, as distinct from Bon Jovi, bizarreness) while in fact removing the most genuinely offensive elements--this practice leads to an end result that like so many should be best described as inoffensive. That, my friend, is how this show--or any at all, for that matter--manages to be so unbelievably, mind-numbingly dull, in an astonishingly similar way to Bon Jovi. However, it is certainly a much less abject case of the aforementioned inoffensiveness than Bon Jovi are, as there is still some genuine offense-inducing stuff here, by its very nature as an extreme-sketch-comedy--hence the higher grade. However, I should still note that like all of my other comparisons, this one makes sense solely within the context of [Adult Swim]. Grade: B