Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Praise Petey’ On Freeform, Where A Woman From New York Inherits Her Father’s Cult Down South

When a comedy starts off with an episode or episodes that have a lot of sharp gags, you laugh and enjoy yourself, but then the gags stop hitting and you wonder why you’re not laughing anymore. It’s because the characters haven’t been developed enough to generate reliably funny lines and situations. That’s what we found with a promising but confounding new adult animated series on Freeform.

PRAISE PETEY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Scenes of New York. Lots of Duane Reade signs. “New York City. Ever heard of it?” says Petey St. Barts (Annie Murphy).

The Gist: Petey seems to be enjoying her quintessential New York life, which includes getting coffee while on line for coffee and avoiding the subway piss bottle. She’s engaged to a piece of wood named Brian; he’s literally shown as a piece of wood. She’s a senior assistant editorial assistant at a huge fashion magazine, a position she’s had for eight years. She hasn’t gotten promoted because she’s so unsure of herself that even when she makes good suggestions at meetings, she says it quietly, calls herself stupid, and does a little dance.

She’s summoned by her wealthy mother White (Christine Baranski), who barely acknowledges she has a daughter. As a wedding gift, she gives Petey a VHS tape she’s been hiding from her. It’s of her father (Stephen Root), who died some time ago. He’s left her an entire town in West Carolina, called New Utopia. “We need fresh blood around here,” he says.

In short order, Petey finds that Brian has been cheating on her with her best friend, her apartment burns down from too many candles, and she loses her job because she called herself stupid. So, there’s nothing keeping her in New York anymore.

She tries to hail “a taxi to the South,” but takes a rickety bus to New Utopia instead, and immediately falls into a mud puddle when she gets off the bus. She’s pulled out by a handsome stranger named Bandit (John Cho). He knows exactly who she is, and tells her to go back home before she ruins her hometown like her father did. She just thinks he’s negging her as a way of flirting.

When she gets into town, everyone is there to greet her. It turns out that the town is a cult and her father was the supreme leader; she’s the “chosen one” to lead them now. She finds out she has an assistant named Mae Mae (Amy Hill), and that almost everyone in town is there to serve her. But she also needs a friend, so she latches onto Eliza (Kiersey Clemons), the owner of the local watering hole, who just happened to be one of her father’s wives — though they divorced before he died. But Eliza keeps that from Petey, who immediately calls Eliza her “bestie.”

While weirded out by the fact that everyone worships her, Petey starts to think that this is the chance to be the kind of leader she always wanted to be but was too afraid to try.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Think of any outlandish, pop-culture-reference-filled animated comedy of the past few years, like Inside Job or Little Demon, and it’ll be similar to Praise Petey.

Our Take: While we were watching the first two episodes of Praise Petey, created by Anna Drezen (SNL, Girls5Eva), we had an odd feeling: We were enjoying what we were seeing, but found ourselves laughing a lot less than we were expecting, especially during the second episode. More than likely, it was because the gags from the first episode hit, but the ones from the second didn’t.

That’s what happens when you spend more energy on gags then on developing characters. We know a bit about Petey, mainly how on the outside she seems like the prototypical confident New Yorker but on the inside she has zero confidence and even less self-esteem. But the rest of the characters, even the major supporting characters like Bandit and Mae Mae, are gag machines. Then, we find out in episode 2 that the townspeople have weird jobs that are purely to serve the leader, like the erudite man who is a human shih tzu.

Yes, those gags can be funny. But the hit rate of those have to be high in order to make a particular episode be worth watching. More attention to character would have made things a bit easier, because character-based humor fills in a lot of gaps between gags, and the best comedies, whether they’re live-action or animated, know this.

That being said, the idea that this “city girl” is going to try to reform the cult her father started is an interesting one. We just home that Drezen and her writing staff start to realize that making Praise Petey a gag-heavy show isn’t going to keep people interested.

Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first two episodes, except for Petey’s best friend having a splinter on her lip from making out with Brian.

Parting Shot: As she’s being carried down the town’s main street on the hands of everyone in town, Petey wonders just how long this crowd-surfing will go on, and if she can wrangle someone from Freeform to be a celebrity member of the cult.

Sleeper Star: Alan Tudyk plays himself, a character actor that has joined the cult and becomes the first human sacrifice after Petey’s arrival, since the rules state a character actor must be sacrificed to the new leader.

Most Pilot-y Line: Tudyk’s dying words: “This is what a feminist dies like!”

Our Call: STREAM IT, but we’re definitely giving you the head’s up that the gag-heavy first few episodes of Praise Petey may turn you off as you also realize that you haven’t laughed much during a particular episode.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.