… "Freak Show" turns up on Comedy Central and breaks from the starting gate looking a little bit like a revelation: outrageous, bizarre, effortlessly hip and unsubtle in magically edgy ways. … "Freak Show" is so politically incorrect and disrespectful -- and yet at the same time so brilliantly absurd -- that you can't help but shake your head in a combination of disbelief and awe. May these Freaks live long and freakishly.Entertainment Weekly gives it a “B-minus” and says:
… Thanks to the voice work of co-creator David Cross and pals like Will Arnett, this superhero spoof's odd humor manages to distract from the shudders...but just barely. You know what that means: College boys, launch those cult websites now. …The New York Times says:
… since there’s no pressure on this latest outlaw cartoon to be indignant and ideological in a way that pleases, say, Aaron Sorkin, and nor is there any threat that it will offend some phantom moral majority, “Freak Show” is free to be funny. Which it is. It presents the back story of its heroes far better than I can, and that history gives a hearty sample of the show’s humor: “In 1972,” begins the self-important narrator, who sounds like the voice-over gods from, say, “The Incredible Hulk” or “The Six Million Dollar Man,” “President Richard Nixon, Augusto Pinochet, Henry Kissinger and Adolf Hitler met aboard Kissinger’s yacht, the Wet Dream II.” It continues: “After a few hi-how-are-ya’s and several cocktails” — here the men are shown cavorting in a Polaroid, Nixon in fishnets and Hitler relieving himself out a porthole — “it became clear that the galley was desperately out of ice. Frank Mankiewicz, a junior parking attendant at the Pentagon who was moonlighting on the yacht, suggested forming a top-secret elite task force comprised of members of a small freak show that he had recently attended, because there was seriously little ice left. “His plan was agreed to by all, and thus Frank Mankiewicz’s Freak Show was born.” If you appreciate a good Frank Mankiewicz joke, “Freak Show” is definitely for you. I had to Google him, so I might be missing other stuff here. …10:30 p.m. Wednesday. Comedy Central.