'Out There' Brings Small Town Fringe, and Fur, to IFC
The trouble with IFC's mantra "always on, slightly off" is that sometimes the slightly off part — while skewed and intellectual — may just be so slight it might not register. (Portlandia has more than a few of those moments.) On the up side, most of IFC's original programming starts with the premise of a smart audience — they're not out to dumb it down as fast as they can.
Out There, the new animated comedy developed and directed by South Park veteran director Ryan Quincy, shoots pretty straight as it travels some coming-of-age territory. And, departing from Quincy's old show, Out There keeps the gross-out stuff, thankfully, to a minimum.
The "slightly off" angle of Out There, premiering Friday, February 22, 10:30 p.m. ET, is its location — a fringe suburban town on the edge of farm country. The series revolves around Chad Stevens (voiced by Quincy), a teen coming into his own. He's not a boy anymore, yet not a man.
Chad and his buds hang at a convenience store, Gulp 'N Go, the most interesting place in their fictional small town of Holford. It's got a video game room, a plentiful supply of processed food, truckers caps and girly mags.
As animation director, Quincy brings the strange conceit of the Stevens' family males as primitives, with molar-shaped heads completely covered in hair. In an email response to a question about the unusual characters, Quincy wrote, "I've been drawing hairy characters with animal noses, paws and claws for a while now. Whenever I see teenagers walking around, they look like misanthropic hairy headed creatures to me. It just seemed natural to place them in a suburban/small town and let them live there. How they look on the outside is how they feel on the inside."
Otherwise, Chad is a normal high school kid struggling with the usual angst of trying to fit in and coping with his teen melancholy. The first two episodes follow Chad as he meets a new friend, Chris. We see them bonding over their outcast status in school and follow them as they hunt for a private strip show they hear is being held in a field outside of town.
It remains to be seen whether Out There can bring more to the subject of the wonder years, than did, er, The Wonder Years (1988-93) or last year's FX animated series about youth on the edge, Unsupervised, which lasted only one season.
There's no doubt that it has heart, with its likable, next-gen kids stuck in the middle of nowhere but hot-wired via TV and the internet. But with other animated comedies like South Park, Family Guy, Archer and American Dad shredding the envelope of propriety and taste each week, Out There might just be a too-smart, too-polite house guest to cut through the noise and get noticed.