My TV and movie viewing tastes are pretty much the same as they used to be. If anything, they’ve expanded. The problem is that I rarely feel like I have it in me to sit down and watch a movie, never mind start watching a TV series. And so my Netflix queue just grows and grows.
In fact, the majority of my TV consumption lately has just been watching BoJack Horseman again and again for some reason. Because I want to watch something light and fluffy, and animated shows tend to appeal to me more than live action. And there aren’t many animated sitcoms on Netflix other than Futurama, American Dad!, and Family Guy, all of which I’ve watched already, and have far too many episodes for me to be able to just choose one and throw it on.
The other night, though, I found the perfect thing. Mike Tyson Mysteries. I was hoping for (but not expecting) a little more, but it ended up being just another stupid Adult Swim thing with 11-minute episodes. Fortunately, I ended up enjoying it far more than I probably should have.
Mike Tyson is obviously the star, along with a merry band of mystery-solving sidekicks: his adopted Korean daughter Yung Hee, the ghost of the Marquess of Queensberry, and a talking pigeon named Pigeon.
I don’t want to call a honeydew a cantaloupe here; Mike Tyson Mysteries is a stupid show. Mike is a good-hearted moron, which is fine, but sometimes goes a bit too far. Like, even more unbelievably stupid than the average dumb sitcom guy. Pigeon is generally just annoying, and he gets more “jokes” than anyone else. Yung Hee just blends into the background most of the time, and hasn’t gotten enough lines yet to be anything other than the straight man to Mike’s fool.
I don’t have anything bad to say about Marquess. He’s voiced by Jim Rash, and that’s more than enough to make him infallible in my eyes.
There’s good stuff too, though! The stories are generally quite insane, and Mike’s stupidity entertains me just as often as it makes me facepalm. In one episode, for instance, he thinks that he’s unwittingly become a serial killer of astronauts, and has to go to the moon to discover a major government secret. Another one has him searching for proof of magic to restore an old wizard’s faith. A good portion of the jokes are quite funny, and I found myself very surprised at how often I was laughing out loud.
So it’s like a lot of other Adult Swim shows, where you’ve got to take the good with the bad. For example, in the first episode, there’s a running gag where Mike can’t pronounce the word ‘chupacabra.’ I was thinking that it was a missed opportunity that he always just sort of mangled it, and never pronounced it ‘chimichonga.’ But then, one of the funniest lines of the episode ended up being Pigeon’s earnest “‘Chupacabra’ is a really hard word for him.” I laughed and laughed. On the other hand, Marquess makes a really off-colour joke at one point in the fifth episode, and while the show goes to lengths to acknowledge that it’s a really bad joke (Marquess is distraught over it for the rest of the episode, Mike and Yung Hee ignore him for days afterward), it still sort of soured the entire episode for me.
There are only five episodes on Netflix as of this writing, as the show began airing in October and they didn’t just dump the entire run on there all at once. I’m likely going to be keeping up with this one, as like I said before, I enjoyed it far more than I should have. So go boot up Netflix and set it to Mike Tyson Mysteries next time you’ve got some time to kill. You might just like it too.