There are few things that make me more nervous than television revivals. Unfortunately, I’ve been burned by more than one revival that’s so bad it makes me wonder why they brought it back in the first place. The Frasier revival removed everything fans loved about the show except for Kelsey Grammar, and the result was a painfully unfunny trainwreck. Star Trek: Picard turned the optimism of The Next Generation into a grimdark slog of depression and grief. As for the X-Files revival, it was so freaking awful that it retroactively ruined the entire tangled mythology of the original show.
That’s why I started sweating when I heard that Mike Judge was bringing Beavis and Butt-Head back. The original series was a riotously raunchy staple of braindead ‘90s television, one that freaked out parents and teachers even as it enthralled an entire generation. How could a revival possibly capture the anarchic spirit and unabashedly edgy humor of the original? To my delight, though, Judge’s dimwitted duo is funnier than ever, taking swings at everything from escape rooms to the afterlife. With a new season now streaming on Netflix, now is the perfect time to dive back into the raunchiest and most irreverent cartoon ever made.
Somehow, Beavis And Butt-Head Returned
There isn’t any real ongoing story to Beavis and Butt-Head. The title refers to a pair of idiotic teenagers who live together in the same rundown house. When they aren’t failing one high school assignment after another, they are just chilling at the house and joking about whatever comes on the TV. As with the original show, the boys spend a fair amount of time waxing philosophic about music videos.
However, in a fun twist, they now watch YouTube videos, and there’s something wonderfully surreal about watching Beavis and Butt-Head reacting to bizarre viral videos. Another fun twist is that the newer show also features stories of the boys all grown up, and while age hasn’t made them any wiser, it has made some of their exploits (watch Butt-Head try to become too fat to get evicted!) that much more amusing. Maybe Judge took a page out of Mac’s book from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia; sometimes, fatter is funnier.
They Want Their MTV
The genius of Beavis and Butt-Head was always that it was much smarter than it appeared. It’s easy to dismiss the show as dumb dreck because the titular duo spends all their time obsessing over sex and bodily functions. However, all of this is part of Mike Judge’s insanely sharp satire. Beavis and Butt-Head is an echo of his thesis in Idiocracy: namely, that the country is in a constant race to the bottom, fueled by brainless teens chasing their next bit of stimuli. Beavis and Butt-Head are not meant to be outliers or outcasts; instead, they represent what modern teenagers become if everything they learn comes from a screen and not a book.
In another creator’s hands, Beavis and Butt-Head would be a very mean-spirited satire, one that served as a prolonged excuse to rant about kids these days. But Judge clearly has great affection for his wayward television sons, and he revels in putting them through a series of misadventures. In a weird way, every episode feels like a What If…? version of a teen drama. The challenges the boys face are always low stakes, like dealing with a bully or trying to flirt with girls. But everything is filtered through a central question: “what if a complete idiot were trying to do this?” The answer is, of course, complete hilarity.
Cramming In Plenty Of Laughs
There’s honestly not much more to say about Beavis and Butt-Head. The new show will easily appeal to fans of the original; after all, it retains all of the biting humor while sporting better animation and, shockingly enough, better animation. But even if you didn’t watch the old show, this series will appeal to anyone who loves down-to-earth animation. There’s none of the unhinged zoomer humor of shows like Smiling Friends and none of the tangled, overcooked lore of Rick and Morty.
It’s just funny situational humor featuring two of the stupidest characters in TV history, and watching a few episodes feels like hanging out with your dumbest high school friends. You know, the ones who always knew exactly how to make you laugh. Want to get that feeling back? Well, unless you’re gonna score tonight, all you need to do is put down the nachos, grab the remote, and stream Beavis and Butt-Head on Netflix.
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