Yahoo News ‘Praise Petey’ Review: Freeform’s Adult Animated Comedy About a Cult Is Disappointingly Tame
Freeform’s Praise Petey sounds mildly deranged on paper — which, to be clear, I mean as a good thing. The half-hour animated comedy centers on a New York fashionista (Annie Murphy), who’s surprised to discover in the premiere that she’s inherited a backwoods cult from the late father (Stephen Root) she barely knew. If nothing else, it’s a premise I don’t think I’ve ever heard before; it’s so specific and so bizarre that I have to presume someone was really excited about it at some point.
Alas, despite a top-shelf voice cast and a smattering of jokes targeted squarely at my own Millennial-women-in-media demographic (if you get the reference to that 2011 Chris Evans GQ profile, it might be aiming at you too), the overall impression left by Praise Petey is of no impression at all. Neither offensive enough to loathe nor impressive enough to love, it turns out, in the end, not special enough to really remember.
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The series’ generic quality shows early. “I’m Petey, a girl with a boys’ name, so you’re allowed to like me,” Murphy chirps in the premiere over a montage of her daily routine: coffee, therapy, yoga (which she also refers to as therapy), meditation (which she also refers to as therapy). Her fashion-magazine job consists of sorting “good clothes” from “bad ones,” seemingly at random, and trying to go unnoticed in meetings where editors argue over whether “shirt” or “pants” is in this season. The joke, I guess, is that glossy media types are a uniquely vapid bunch — which, fair enough, except that all of these observations would have felt stale 17 years ago when Meryl Streep eviscerated Anne Hathaway for presuming to be above it all in The Devil Wears Prada.
But after a series of catastrophes rob Petey of her job, her fiancé and her luxury apartment, she makes the desperate choice to move to New Utopia, located somewhere in the wilds of “West Carolina.” When she arrives, covered in mud and woefully unprepared for life beyond the high-rises of Manhattan, she’s embraced by a population already primed by her father’s prophecy that he’d be succeeded by the Great Daughter. It’s Petey who’s uncomfortable with their traditions, like human sacrifice (of character actors, specifically) and daily orgies (though Petey’s dad’s wives are quick to clarify that he used the term loosely: “We mostly just helped him with the TV remote and listened to him describe movies he’d seen on airplanes”). And it’s Petey who’s determined to modernize the organization from the inside, like a “She-EO of a super-toxic corporation.”
Coming off six seasons as a similar sweet-but-self-absorbed socialite role on Schitt’s Creek, Murphy could probably play Petey in her sleep — and the first five episodes sent to critics (of a ten-episode season) don’t exactly ask her to stretch her abilities. Still, she’s a solid anchor for an appealing cast that also includes John Cho as Bandit, Petey’s sexy cowboy friend/nemesis/love interest; Kiersey Clemons as Eliza, a no-nonsense local barkeep and Petey’s new BFF; and Christine Baranski as White St. Barts, Petey’s eternally icy mother.
If only their collective charisma were matched by equally compelling scripts. Praise Petey‘s generally upbeat, good-natured vibe keeps it from ever getting too grating, and a few of its jokes are clever enough to garner a chuckle. I appreciated the absurdity of Petey’s wooden ex-fiancé being a literal plank of wood, for instance, though the sight gag gets less funny with repetition. And some of New Utopia’s excesses are outrageous enough to suggest the stranger show that could’ve been. The sight of a “human desk” consisting of bodies twisted together for Petey’s use is appropriately, amusingly horrifying; the one of a “human Shih Tzu” curling up by Petey’s feet becomes perversely endearing after a while. Were the series sharper or more ambitious in other areas, these occasional giggles might feel like enough.
But it’s not, and so the parts of Praise Petey that work are spread through long stretches of stuff that’s just kind of there. This includes the show’s attempts to grapple with its own core premise. I don’t know what precisely Praise Petey creator Anna Drezen is trying to say about cults, or the people who belong to them. The series gestures vaguely toward the idea that all of us belong to cults in some fashion, and (more darkly) that a lot of us deep down want to be told what to do and what to believe in.
There’s a vast chasm between Petey refusing to buy a printer when Mercury’s in retrograde, though, and her dad’s followers giving over their entire lives to a man who won’t let them use real money or watch uncensored movies. Probably no viewer needs the dangers of cults explained to them in a post-NXIVM, post-Wild, Wild Country world, yet Praise Petey‘s timidity in mining that gap for either satire or commentary feels like a missed opportunity.
Instead, the cult business largely gets sanded down over time to a collection of light, mostly harmless quirks. Episode five sees Petey’s past and present collide when her ex and his new fiancee decide to hold their wedding on New Utopia’s picturesque farm. In classic sitcom fashion, Petey initially tries to tuck away everything creepy and freaky about her community, going so far as to send its biggest weirdos off to collect pinecones in some distant forest — only for all of its oddities to burst back in through the door at the least opportune time with a lesson about the importance of traditions. It’s the most cohesive chapter of the season, and easily the most heartwarming. It’s also, ironically, the one that seems least willing to embrace what should set Praise Petey apart — not the familiar sweetness of small-town comedy, but the twisted, thorny peculiarities of cult life.
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