‘Strip Code’ review: Netflix’s animated legal comedy is guilty of prioritizing references over storytelling

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Although it only started working for me as an overall series in the last two episodes, it’s Netflix’s new animated comedy Sector law It is, since the first instalment, a brilliant pop culture reference machine that plays directly into Xennial sensibilities.

I’m not entirely sure that’s a compliment, but if you’re going to do something, you better commit to it fully. and Sector law is fully committed to making sure that everyone who watches it — or at least everyone who has the patience to watch more than 15 or 20 minutes of the pilot episode, which isn’t particularly funny — is provided with at least one reference that they’re convinced no one other than their five closest friends will understand. And again, a shared appreciation of ambiguity is the great unifier.

What else does the offer offer? Inside jokes about Las Vegas! But not in depth. For example, if you spend one sporadic weekend losing money at a mid-priced hotel/casino on The Strip, you’ll get those jokes. In fact, if you change planes once at Harry Reid International Airport, you’ll be fine.

And beyond that? Maybe not much. Although, as I already said, the last two episodes of the 10-episode first season – a crazy spoof of awards shows and a crazy spoof, of course, Franklin and Bash – We were finally moving in a direction that seemed more creatively and promising than just “Hey, can you point to the screen in amused appreciation if I point out, say, a not-so-great Dana Carvey comedy vehicle?” Master of disguise? (If yes, then you are the target demographic Sector law.)

Created by Late Show veteran Colin Crawford, Sector law The film focuses on Lincoln Jump (Adam Scott), the son of a Las Vegas law legend who was recently killed in an apparently bloody accident. Lincoln is haunted by: the memory of his mother; his mother’s unwanted former law partner (Keith David’s Stephen Nicholls); And his level of legal humility, a dryness that makes it difficult for Lincoln to compete against the brightest legal minds in Vegas.

After a lackluster experience, Lincoln meets Sheila Flampe (Janelle James), a sexy glamorous assistant denied the magical spotlight of the city’s old boys’ club. As one of the jurors in Lincoln’s recent loss, Sheila gives Lincoln advice on how to become a real lawyer in Las Vegas, and he hires her to combine her knowledge of the thrills with his knowledge of boring legal matters.

Joining them, in their cramped office in a mall on The Strip, are Lincoln’s niece Erin, a weightlifting teenager who wants to be taken seriously as an adult and who somehow becomes the company’s lead investigator; And Glim Blochman, an eccentric disbarred lawyer whose job at the firm is… um… to say weird things and give the show a chance to do A and B stories with two characters each.

This, by the way, is a kind of meta-exploration of what kind of TV lawyer the other thing might be Sector law Offers. It’s a show whose writers have watched a lot of TV and have a lot of opinions about what makes a good or bad canon show and just wanting to comment on those conventions rather than actually subverting them or working around them entirely.

Sector law It’s a show that prefers to keep everything very close to the surface, including a case of the week that mocks the surface level of Las Vegas — even if about half of those cases don’t have much to do with Vegas at all. A divorce case involving the parents of a teenager who died briefly as a child, and now some psychopath is pulling tricks with stories about heaven? certainly. This is vegas y. A case involving two men each claiming to be the real Santa Claus? It’s not Vegas-y at all, although it does sound like the kind of thing David E. Kelley would have done in one of his 50 Odd Shows that ran simultaneously in the ’90s and ’00s. since Sector law Has a multi-part related joke Boston PublicKelly’s actions are definitely a key part of the show’s DNA.

The references highlight a lot of this DNA, and it is extensive.

No show or movie is referenced over The Simpsonswhich is greeted by nods to individual Springfield residents, an extended segment in which a character tries to make his shots impossible for a documentary, and even obvious deleted lines of dialogue that are heretofore unattributed.

There’s an entire underdog sports episode — another one of those themes that has nothing to do with Vegas at all — that nods Mighty ducksan homage to multiple Stanley Kubrick films, and a CBS-related runner bullproving that neither quality nor real-world scandal can stand in the way of postmodernism.

Most people will at least get all those citations at the basic level.

But if you’re at that weird intersection of generations and obsession you can find laughter in the jokes about individual characters from the documentary American movieNBA legend Darrell Griffith and crime fighter Pistachio Desguise, Sector law It is yours and perhaps only you.

Unfortunately, the references sometimes feel like they’re organically designed to come from specific characters Sector lawBecause the main characters in it Sector law They are fuzzy reference delivery systems within a series representing a fuzzy reference delivery system.

It helps to have instantly embraceable voice talent like Scott, David, Root, and especially James, but there have been countless times I’ve laughed at a particularly strange reference, tried to understand why that reference was coming from that character, and decided the effort just wasn’t worth it. If you asked me to explain why I found it so difficult to build a connection to the series deeper than “I can’t wait to see what weird ’80s thing they admit to next,” it’s that, for all their trauma catalog (well summed up with gynecological specificity in the penultimate episode), none of the characters in Sector law I feel like… people. Even the extended joke about the new paralegal named Kevin, who inexplicably shows up and pisses off almost everyone because he seems to appear out of nowhere, doesn’t ring true because… no one It seems like the characters actually came from nowhere. Kevin was no more random or inexplicably involved in the story than Eren or Glim.

The familiarity extends to the animation itself, thanks to the prolific Titmouse studio. It’s a lot of funny background gags, with the general flatness exposed in an episode featuring Nevada Dates, a funny take on California Raisins that mixes up the visual style long enough to make me wish the show did more of that. Of course, with a show dedicated to references, it’s impossible to tell when part of a character’s less-modern design is intentionally derivative. Like, does Glim’s entire look intentionally pay homage to Franklin Sherman, the craziest and perhaps best supporting character out there criticOr just a shameless scam? Maybe the former, but who’s to say?

Shows like Adventure brothers, Space ghost From coast to coast and Archer We’ve proven that it’s very possible to be reference-heavy and still generate emotional investment. At the end Sector law This season, there are hints that its cumulative impact could be greater than the sum of the puns, close rhymes and esoteric shout-outs. Not that some viewers will want anything more.