Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Universal Basic Guys’ On Fox, An Animated Comedy About Philly-Area Brothers With Too Much Time On Their Hands

For some reason, Fox tends to give its “Animation Domination” series room to grow, often giving them multiple season pickups before they even hit the air. Maybe it’s because of the long lead times animation requires, leading the network to order new episodes ahead of time so there are no gaps in the schedule. But sometimes these quick renewals make us wonder, like the second season pickup Fox gave Universal Basic Guys , an adult animated series that is just starting to roll out its first season now.

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Opening Shot: Three guys are sitting on a sofa in a garage. One asks if the painting one of the others is holding is a Van Gogh, when it’s actually a silly painting of a dog.

The Gist: As we see in the show’s opening credits, Brothers Mark and Hank Hoagies (both voiced by Adam Malamut) used to work at a hot dog factory in a South Jersey burgh called Glantontown. But when they were laid off due to the factory using AI to make hot dogs, all the workers were given $3,000 per month under a Universal Basic Income program.

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This means that the Hoagies brothers have a modest income and way too much time on their hands. One thing that Mark is doing is getting annoyed that the birthday present he got for his wife Tammy (Talia Genevieve), the dog painting he thinks she’ll find hilarious, is being eclipsed by a gift by a handsome doctor at the hospital where Tammy is a nurse. Of course, he thinks that gift is being used as a way for the doctor to get into Tammy’s pants.

After seeing David (Fred Armisen) being too forgiving of his “girl dog”, the brothers’ friend Mernft Man suggests that Mark get Tammy an exotic pet, pointing them to one of those breeding zoos we saw in Tiger King. Mark thinks a chimpanzee is a good idea, but the only one he can afford is a very old and sick chimp who’s been experimented on many times. The chimp is in such bad shape that his eyes randomly fall out of their sockets.

Of course, Mark ignores the warnings about chimps getting violent, and he gets his face ripped off by the agitated and sickly chimp. He hides his bloody face from Tammy, checks himself in under an assumed name, gets temporary skin grafts from a pig’s scrotum, then refuses to get cutting edge reattachment surgery because the doctor is the one he thinks is hitting on Tammy. Meanwhile Hank, who is bringing the monkey back to the zoo, finds out that the monkey can communicate via text-to-voice.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Universal Basic Guys is Family Guy -ish, but everyone has Delco accents.

Our Take: Created by Adam and Craig Malamut, Universal Basic Guys is a show that elicited more mild chuckles than we anticipated. But “mild chuckles” isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement for the show. It mostly feels like a show that we’ve seen before, just with characters using different accents. That would be fine if it were funnier.

Mark is a fat, stupid guy doing fat, stupid guy things. He’s somewhat suspicious of anyone who’s not like him, like his definitely less fat and stupid neighbor David. Hank is a thin, stupid guy who’s more obviously stupid than Mark but seems to have a sense of decency that Mark doesn’t have. Hank’s day with the sickly chimp is supposed to invoke feelings from the viewer that the show is about more than just these brothers being idiots with too much time on their hands, but it just made us feel sorry that the monkey had to spend his last days with the Hoagies brothers.

There doesn’t seem to be much of a chance that any of these characters will go much deeper than their archetypes because the Malamut brothers seem to be enamored with just how Philly these guys are (which makes sense, since that’s where they’re from). We don’t even get a commentary on how these guys are living off UBI and trying to figure out where they stand in the world. It’s just dumb guys doing the things dumb guys do when they have too much time on their hands.

Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode.

Parting Shot: Hank enjoys a spa day with the money the monkey gave him. Yes, the monkey gave him money.

Sleeper Star: Um, no one? We guess we could pick Fred Armisen, because we wonder how much Fox and Sony offered him to be a regular voice on this series.

Most Pilot-y Line: Every time Mark eats with or sticks his tongue out of the side hole on his temporary face, we cringed a bit, and not because it was gross.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Simply put: Universal Basic Guys is a deeply unfunny show. And when it’s not funny, then all of the other problems the show has are amplified.

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.

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