President Curtis is the Rick and Morty spinoff that absolutely nobody was asking for.
I don’t remember watching an episode of Rick and Morty, seeing President Curtis show up, and thinking “You know what? This guy needs his own show.” He’s a perfectly fine supporting character, and some of his appearances throughout the series have actually been pretty funny. But there’s a big difference between being entertaining for ten minutes in somebody else’s show and being interesting enough to carry an entire series.
After watching the first four episodes of President Curtis, I’m not convinced he can do the latter.
For anyone unfamiliar with the character, President Andre Curtis is the President of the United States in the Rick and Morty universe, voiced by the always excellent Keith David. The spinoff follows Curtis and his staff as they deal with the kind of ridiculous problems you’d expect to exist in a world where aliens, monsters, alternate dimensions, and mad scientists are just normal parts of everyday life. His team includes White House Chief of Staff Roe Banks and Secret Service agent Francis O’Doyle, who accompany him through everything from secret government conspiracies to paranormal threats. Rather than focusing on Rick and Morty bouncing around the multiverse, the show essentially asks what the American government is doing while all this insane shit is happening in the background. It’s not a terrible premise, but it also feels like an answer to a question nobody was really asking.
President Curtis isn’t bad, but it isn’t particularly good either.
I could have gone the rest of my life without a show centered around the president from Rick and Morty, and after four episodes I still don’t see anything here that justifies spinning him off into his own series. There’s nothing offensively terrible about it. The animation is fine, Keith David is obviously great, and I chuckled at a handful of jokes. The Gun Baby thing in particular was kind of funny.
The problem is that kind of funny is about as enthusiastic as I can get.
Nothing I’ve watched so far has stuck with me. There hasn’t been a joke that made me stop the episode because I was laughing too hard, nor has there been anything I could see myself quoting or referencing later. I’ve watched plenty of comedy shows where one stupid line or scene lodged itself permanently in my brain, sometimes against my will. President Curtis hasn’t given me one of those moments yet.
Within a year I’ll probably forget that I even wrote this review. That’s how unmemorable the show is.
I will give the writers some credit for at least trying to evolve Curtis beyond what he originally was. When President Curtis first started appearing in Rick and Morty, he was very obviously an animated stand-in for Barack Obama. The voice, mannerisms, attitude, and general presentation weren’t exactly subtle. Over time, though, the character has gradually developed more of his own personality and become less attached to whichever real president happened to be sitting in the White House.
Nowadays, Curtis feels more like a parody of politicians in general.
There are still pieces of Obama in there, but you can also see elements from other political figures. Curtis has picked up some of Donald Trump’s narcissism over the years, particularly his obsession with being respected and proving that he’s the most important person in the room. He’s insecure, petty, competitive, arrogant, and constantly frustrated whenever somebody else steals his spotlight. These traits have made his later Rick and Morty appearances more entertaining because he no longer feels like the writers are simply making Obama jokes several years after Obama left office.
That evolution is probably why somebody thought a spinoff could work.
I just don’t think there’s enough character there to sustain one.
Curtis works well when Rick is around because the two of them play off each other. Rick doesn’t respect Curtis or his authority, Curtis absolutely cannot stand that Rick doesn’t respect him, and the resulting dick-measuring contests are usually funny. Their personalities naturally clash, and putting one of the most powerful political figures in the world up against a guy who sees presidents as minor bureaucratic inconveniences creates a good comedy dynamic.
Remove Rick from the equation and Curtis loses one of the main things that made him entertaining.
Now the writers have to build an entire comedy around Curtis and his staff, and so far I don’t think they’ve figured out what makes this show unique beyond Rick and Morty, except it takes place in the White House. There are monsters, secret government programs, absurd political crises, and sci-fi bullshit, but all of those things already existed in the original series. The perspective has changed, yet the comedy really hasn’t.
It feels like somebody took a recurring side character and stretched his scenes into 22 minutes.
This isn’t necessarily a problem unique to President Curtis. Spinoffs built around supporting characters are always risky because supporting characters are generally designed to be consumed in smaller amounts. Sometimes you get Frasier, where the writers discover that there’s much more potential in the character than anyone realized. Other times you get something that makes you understand exactly why the character was supporting the protagonist instead of being one.
So far, Curtis is looking like the second kind.
The show also has Keith David, which means I’m already waiting for the inevitable They Live reference.
Please don’t.
I love They Live. It’s a fun movie, Keith David was great in it, and his ridiculously long fight with Roddy Piper over putting on a pair of sunglasses is one of the most memorable fight scenes ever filmed. But holy shit, can we retire the “put on the damn glasses” joke already? People have been making that reference for decades.
Having Keith David show up somewhere doesn’t automatically make another They Live reference funny.
The only time I can remember that gag genuinely making me laugh was when South Park recreated the fight with Timmy and Jimmy during the “Cripple Fight” episode. That worked because they didn’t just have somebody say the line and point at the audience while waiting for applause. They recreated the entire absurdly long fight with two disabled children beating the shit out of each other, which was exactly the kind of stupid joke South Park could pull off.
If President Curtis eventually has someone tell Curtis to “put on the damn glasses,” I’m dropping the fucking show.
Maybe they’ll surprise me.
That’s really where I am with this series after four episodes. I’m not angry that it exists, and I don’t think watching it has been a complete waste of time. There are occasional funny moments, the voice acting is good, and the concept of seeing the Rick and Morty universe from the government’s perspective has some potential. If the writers find a stronger identity for the show as the season progresses, I could see myself warming up to it.
But right now, there’s just nothing compelling me to keep watching beyond curiosity.
That’s not a great position for a brand-new series to be in.
Comedy especially needs something that makes you want another episode. Maybe it’s characters you enjoy spending time with, maybe it’s quotable jokes, or maybe the stories themselves are interesting enough that you want to see what happens next. President Curtis hasn’t really given me any of those things yet. I watched four episodes because I wanted to review it, and if I weren’t writing this article I’m not entirely sure I would have made it that far.
I also have a hard time seeing this thing lasting very long.
My guess is one season. Maybe it gets two simply because it’s attached to Rick and Morty and Dan Harmon, which gives it a much better chance than some random Adult Swim series starting from scratch. But unless the remaining episodes are substantially better than the first four, I can’t imagine a huge audience demanding more President Curtis.
I also can’t shake the feeling that if Justin Roiland were still involved with Rick and Morty, this show probably never would have happened. Obviously I can’t prove that, and maybe I’m completely wrong. It just feels like one of those franchise expansion ideas that becomes more appealing once the original creators and production structure start changing and somebody begins looking around for recognizable characters that can be spun into additional shows.
Of all the characters in the Rick and Morty universe, though, was President Curtis really the best option?
I don’t know. Maybe by episode ten I’ll be eating my words and demanding five more seasons of this shit. I’ve been wrong about shows before, and four episodes isn’t enough for me to completely write something off.
For now, though, President Curtis is exactly what I expected it to be: a completely unnecessary spinoff that isn’t bad enough to hate, but isn’t good enough to recommend either.
It exists.
That’s about the strongest opinion I can muster.
AJ’s rating: 4/10
More from Angry_Jerk
Don't miss any new posts. Join AJnet Magazine's mailing list and receive updates straight to your inbox once a week!
The first order of business decreed by President Curtis is to extra-judicially, shadow-ban and isolate AJ,
going so far outside the Law
that not even AJ knows he has been shadow-banned, cancelled, removed, and isolated. Anybody trying to tell AJ what is really going on with the search results,
or trying to claim AJ writes articles on the Internet like Maddox The Best Page in the Universe,
or tries advertising AJ in Google search results,
will also be labeled a whistleblower,
and punished in secret, hidden, national-security death-camps disguised as psychiatric hospitals like the postcards in Sophie’s Choice,
while AJ is free to wander the earth cluelessly, (just like the Maddox article that this guy is still alive so it proves that there is no conspiracy).
1776 Grievance 12?
(People constantly die in medical hospitals with no questions asked, like the star of Lilo and Stitch, or that headline news bald eagle that nested with Shadow.
So nobody will pay attention to scores of millions of people dying in national-security death-camps if national-security death-camps are just called hospitals.)
Keith David would never do me dirty like that.