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Thoughts on Moral Orel
May. 6th, 2024 05:40 pmMoral Orel is an adult swim show from the 2000s that starts off as a black comedy satirizing christian fundamentalism in America and seamlessly transitions into psychological drama in its second half. I recently watched this show for the first time and it impressed me enough that I thought it would be worth recording some thoughts. I appreciated that the show used its format to not only attack its subject matter but to make it clear that laughing at dysfunctional normatives does not make them go away but gives them the ability to become more damaging in blindsight. The first season is played for laughs, the second plays with hints of drama and the third season is just depressing. It's an effective drama and its interplay with comedy is excellently complemented in its stop motion visual style which by its nature combines cartoon designs with real world lighting and textures. It goes a long way towards making the overall arc of the show palatable and stark. There's a tension being explored there between the presentation and the story and it's very poignant.
The second episode of the television show is about the 11 year old protagonist masturbating into a pastry bag and using it to inject his sperm into sleeping women because the Reverend told him God doesn't want him to waste his sperm. Oh, did I just write that sentence out of the blue? I didn't mean to. It would be a stretch of a second episode if the first episode weren't about the 11 year old protagonist raising zombies from the dead because the Reverend did a sermon about how God doesn't want us to waste the gift of life. Spitting in God's face, that's what it is, and Orel happens to have a necronomicon. Well, everybody deserves a chance to get their footing. Did I mention this is serious business? My favourite thing about these first two episodes is that they're revived not so much like zombies near the end of the second season in an episode where Orel hosts a stop-motion feature of his own creation in the backyard. Therefore giving them plausible deniability. They're also referenced as things that actually happened in an episode from the third season.
They're not actually bad episodes. The claymation style and writing make them a palatable start and they have value for being as far as they are removed from the darker tone the series later adopts. Mostly I think they're worth writing about because if you watch them and find them tasteless you're not getting the whole picture. The show doesn't really reveal its maturity until the end of the first season and then only in atmosphere. Because when Orel's parents fight in the season finale it isn't played for laughs and is instead used as an opportunity to bring into perspective for the first time just how dysfunctional the family is. Which is something you should know, as a spectator, watching any episode of the show. But it's not clear to Orel and it's not clear to the show's lighthearted tone for the first nine episodes. That is lighthearted insofar as you want to read a black comedy as lighthearted; it's still laughing at christianity and it's still laughing at sexual abuse. So they are topics in the radar, but they are not treated with weight at first. It's lighthearted in tone and the brilliance of that is how it seems to be acknowledging as much with the tonal shift in the third season. Because everything the first season points at to laugh is eventually turned around and explored meaningfully later on, which is something I'd like to stress when recommending this show. Although it bears mentioning that it does not literally explore the consequences of what happens in the first season, and a lot of the more outlandish scenarios that would have led to disaster are acknowledged but not acknowledged therefore TV magick.
The show is about how the things we teach our children affect them and shape their worldview, and how that can lead to disaster when we don't understand what they learn from us or don't take that responsibility seriously. In a lot of ways it's about how America sucks and is a false promise to those seeking liberation. The show ends on the promise that happy, loving families CAN happen and that Orel will one day grow up having learned from the mistakes of his parents. It's a shame the show was cut short by the network but it tells a satisfying arc for what it is. The best pitch I can give you is that on the whole it's a serious and seriously clever portrait of a seriously conservative American family and by extension town. I found it to be incredibly refreshing although it's getting on twenty years old now and if any of you haven't seen it I think you should check it out. On the other hand if you have seen it let's talk about it.
The second episode of the television show is about the 11 year old protagonist masturbating into a pastry bag and using it to inject his sperm into sleeping women because the Reverend told him God doesn't want him to waste his sperm. Oh, did I just write that sentence out of the blue? I didn't mean to. It would be a stretch of a second episode if the first episode weren't about the 11 year old protagonist raising zombies from the dead because the Reverend did a sermon about how God doesn't want us to waste the gift of life. Spitting in God's face, that's what it is, and Orel happens to have a necronomicon. Well, everybody deserves a chance to get their footing. Did I mention this is serious business? My favourite thing about these first two episodes is that they're revived not so much like zombies near the end of the second season in an episode where Orel hosts a stop-motion feature of his own creation in the backyard. Therefore giving them plausible deniability. They're also referenced as things that actually happened in an episode from the third season.
They're not actually bad episodes. The claymation style and writing make them a palatable start and they have value for being as far as they are removed from the darker tone the series later adopts. Mostly I think they're worth writing about because if you watch them and find them tasteless you're not getting the whole picture. The show doesn't really reveal its maturity until the end of the first season and then only in atmosphere. Because when Orel's parents fight in the season finale it isn't played for laughs and is instead used as an opportunity to bring into perspective for the first time just how dysfunctional the family is. Which is something you should know, as a spectator, watching any episode of the show. But it's not clear to Orel and it's not clear to the show's lighthearted tone for the first nine episodes. That is lighthearted insofar as you want to read a black comedy as lighthearted; it's still laughing at christianity and it's still laughing at sexual abuse. So they are topics in the radar, but they are not treated with weight at first. It's lighthearted in tone and the brilliance of that is how it seems to be acknowledging as much with the tonal shift in the third season. Because everything the first season points at to laugh is eventually turned around and explored meaningfully later on, which is something I'd like to stress when recommending this show. Although it bears mentioning that it does not literally explore the consequences of what happens in the first season, and a lot of the more outlandish scenarios that would have led to disaster are acknowledged but not acknowledged therefore TV magick.
The show is about how the things we teach our children affect them and shape their worldview, and how that can lead to disaster when we don't understand what they learn from us or don't take that responsibility seriously. In a lot of ways it's about how America sucks and is a false promise to those seeking liberation. The show ends on the promise that happy, loving families CAN happen and that Orel will one day grow up having learned from the mistakes of his parents. It's a shame the show was cut short by the network but it tells a satisfying arc for what it is. The best pitch I can give you is that on the whole it's a serious and seriously clever portrait of a seriously conservative American family and by extension town. I found it to be incredibly refreshing although it's getting on twenty years old now and if any of you haven't seen it I think you should check it out. On the other hand if you have seen it let's talk about it.
