Political Correctness to be Spoofed by the King of Spoofers

I am so excited, although sad that I missed the premier Wednesday night, about a new animated show that spoofs the politically correct crowd: "The Goode Family" aired on ABC. (Wow! On a major network, no less!) The show's creators are Mike Judge, John Altschuler, and Dave Krinsky -- creators of "Beavis & Butthead" and "King of the Hill."

The focus of this animated spoof is the Goode family made up of PC-minded people, achingly green-minded and obsessed with "What would Al Gore do?", a play off of the WWJD movement, as they struggle to live a carbon-footprint-free lifestyle. The family characters are Gerald Good, an administrator at a community college who hails from a "long line of over-educated academic liberals." His wife, Helen Goode, is a local activist who laments how hard it is to be good while embarrassing her daughter Bliss with a "girlfriend-to-girlfriend" approach to discussions about sex. Their son, Ubuntu, is adopted from Africa, but is actually white. It turns out he was from South Africa, and they forgot to check the right box! The vegan family has raised the family dog Che to be vegan as well, who craves meat so much that wreaks havoc on the neighborhood wildlife, occasionally devouring a squirrel or cat that strays into the back yard.

Robert Lloyd, television critic of The Los Angeles Times, describes the new series:

"Being good is so hard," says wife-mother Helen (Nancy Carell); she wears a "Meat is Murder" T-shirt, which might also, of course, mark her as a Smiths fan. It's true: Goodness is a job at which most of us fail spectacularly, and to the extent the show explores that striving it's on to something good. Yet it's not quite clear whether we're supposed to regard the Goodes as deluded or as just too hard on themselves. There's something old and obvious about the countercultural shibboleths the show advances: yoga, vegetarianism, ceramics, sexual frankness between parent and child, animal rights, playing the mandolin, spiritual confusion, not shopping at a certain store because "they don't even have a mission statement," hypersensitivity to racial and gender issues masked as indifference to racial and gender issues.

Judge, sounding nothing at all like Hank Hill, plays dad Gerald Goode, vegan-thin and dressed always in bike shorts. (For work, he adds a poncho.) Linda Cardellini is daughter Bliss, who reads the Economist and just wants out. Teenage son Ubuntu (David Herman) is the African baby they adopted, who turned out to be Afrikaans and white. He is dressed in native garb, nonetheless, and is a bit of an ox, though with a talent for driving.

"I'm sorry I used so much gas, Dad," he says, having driven to rescue his father and sister from a Christian purity ball. (Judge and Co. do not save all their barbs for the Goodes.)

"It's OK," says his father. "What's important is you feel guilty about it."

These characters sound a little too much like some individuals I know! I gotta tune in!!

[You can go here to see some episodes.]