Strip Law (PILOT)

Strip Law is a new animated show on Netflix that portrays Las Vegas like it is being experienced through someone on shrooms. It is an Idiocracy-adjacent world where basically anything is allowed as long as it is entertaining. In the middle of that chaos is a full-on kangaroo court, where attorney-at-law Lincoln Gum takes on cases trying to prove to himself and everyone else that he is not just a failed version of his mom’s legacy.

Going up against his arch nemesis and former boss Steve Nichols, voiced by Keith David, Lincoln realizes he cannot win in this town by being normal. He brings in Sheila Flambe, a street magician he meets as juror number eight, to add some Vegas showmanship, plus his small staff to help him stay one step ahead in court.

On the podcast, we recap the pilot, hit the best and worst moments, debate whether this has any chance of being the next BoJack, and give our ratings. Welcome to Today’s Episode.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:15

Welcome to today's episode of the podcast where we discuss the most recent installment of a different series every show. It is Tuesday, February 24th, the day that Andrew Johnson was first impeached. He's the first president of the U.S. to ever be impeached in 1868. And he was actually one vote away from being removed from office by the Senate. But then they were like, eh, I guess we'll keep him. He was the 17th president, right? Right after Lincoln. Because I always imagine getting like Lincoln being as cherished and loved as he was by the time that he passed away. He's even in strip law. Yes, he is. That's why I'm talking about him so much. Not really. But yeah, so imagine being the one right after that where all of America is probably coming together to like root for you and you still fail miserably. Like you still get almost impeached.

SPEAKER_00 1:00

It's him and Andrew Jackson that I always get confused because I think Andrew Jackson was like the seventh president or somewhere around there.

SPEAKER_01 1:06

Historical names like that, where it's that quicker, yeah, Andrew, and then you also have like a bunch of Hamiltons out there and stuff like that. Alexander's, I mean. Um, yeah, so let's talk about Strip Lot's new cartoon comedy that dropped on the 20th on Netflix. It was made by Colin Crawford. At first I thought it said it was made by the creators of the good place, but I guess I I misunderstood that. Maybe you're talking producers.

SPEAKER_00 1:26

Dang is going to be like a Netflix show that Stephanie soon, and that's uh going to be a yeah, a different animated show. But Colin Crawford, he's done a lot of late night, which makes sense when you see the intro for this thing because it's very like SNL-esque.

SPEAKER_01 1:40

It also makes sense with the cast because the cast is a lot of comedians that have been on a lot of other cartoon shows and a lot of other podcasts.

SPEAKER_00 1:46

There's so there's so many cameos, a lot of comedy bang bang kind of circa. But uh for Colin Crawford, he worked on Stephen Colbert. Colin Crawford, yes. He worked on Stephen Colbert, lights out with David Spade. He wrote the first season of Modoc and Paradise PD, if you remember those shows. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:02

I do agree. I mean, you watched Modoc, uh, you didn't watch Paradise PD. I know. That one did not get as good reviews, if I remember correctly. This show is basically Harvey Birdman, attorney at law. The instant I started watching it, the instant they showed that it was a fictionalized version of Austin Powers, who was being uh the witness on the stand, I was just like, how is this different? Except you're not facing a bunch of uh as many uh fictional characters.

SPEAKER_00 2:27

It's just a couple. IGN said uh Netflix's strip law is the most mad adult uh anime debut since Rick and Morty. They also compared it to Harvey Birdman and Space Ghosts Coast to Coast. Kind of the old adult swim. If you're gonna be aware of it.

SPEAKER_01 2:40

You watch more adult old swim. You change those words around. Old adult swim than I did. Uh do you agree?

SPEAKER_00 2:46

Yes, because it's just as delirious. Uh the animation is really not why you watch the TV show. It's kind of simplistic in the way that's done.

SPEAKER_01 2:54

It looks like every other Netflix show that's been coming out in the last however many years. And we'll talk about those. The first episode is called Finally a Show About Lawyers. So at least it has a sense of uh uh a humor about itself.

SPEAKER_00 3:05

I really liked the the name to this episode. That was actually one of my pros for it. Right. And it's it's like the fallen rise of Reggie Dinkins, just yeah, playing on itself.

SPEAKER_01 3:13

Yeah, because we can name uh off all the lawyer shows that we've even talked about in the last few years. You got um uh Lincoln Lawyer, She-Hulk, Your Honor, Night Court, Suits LA, 61st Street. I do have a list here, so I'm not just coming up with all these Perry Mason, so help me Todd. Some of those are funny, some of them are serious. But this show it doesn't take the serious route in any regard. In fact, it's it's leaning into like Vegas on shrooms, which isn't a very creative take because you literally see them on a bunch of painkiller drugs later on in the episode in Vegas. Um, but it also feels a little lazy because they're going that route. It just feels like idiocracy again, you know, where everybody's an idiot, the judge is an idiot. The only sensible person who also has insecurity issues because his mom just died and he was fired is the main character, Lincoln Gum.

SPEAKER_00 4:03

Yeah, and it seems like also Adam Scott is just playing Ben Wyatt in parks and recreation. Even like the one note for this, or the one sense I keep seeing is uh they describe him as too boring. And wasn't that just Ben Wyatt? Like, wasn't that his main character?

SPEAKER_01 4:17

A nerd, but he also was he had that like stupidity to him in the show, especially as the seasons went on and he became closer with Leslie. It seemed like they dumbed down his character quite some. But I mean, he was the mayor at one point in that show, so he had uh, I think a more successful career at this point than Lincoln Gum has. Lincoln Gum, despite being a lawyer, just feels like he is failing at life. He constantly talks to his ghost mom and is like uh making voices for her. Well, he has yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:48

I know that I did see the commercial at them, but he has the one-on-one with Steve Nichols, voiced by Keith David, who was in every animated show known to man. You know, he was actually the voice of the fish in Mr. Robot, the fourth episode.

SPEAKER_01 5:01

It's crazy. I think my favorite thing I've heard of him as a voice actor is has been hotel. Um, despite the fact that I also like the original actor who played that role in in the YouTube uh pilot. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:11

He was also in Adventure Time as well. He's just he's got a great voice for anything.

SPEAKER_01 5:16

Yeah. So yeah, it but this feels like Kangaroo Court. We see everybody's on their phone, including the judge who's watching the TV. There's a guy who's like just won a covered spread. Uh we see juror number eight turn her phone into a water or no, to a flask, like a whiskey flask. We see people coming out like cheerleaders at a WWE fight. It just feels like idiocracy how things would be run in the future. However, I'm not exactly sure of the timeline because it feels like it's also supposed to be in the present. So it was like they wanted to make Vegas crazier than it is currently. And it also kind of wanted you to have a history of Vegas. We'll get into that in a little while. But Lincoln Gum loses the first case, and part of that is just because he's too boring to put up with this life. Which was about someone throwing up on a baby.

SPEAKER_00 5:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:59

Well, yeah, I guess so. Because they never even show who he was representing, or maybe they do in a second. I did catch that he was facing off against Nichols, who is Keith David's character. We get the backstory that he was fired by Nichols as soon as his mom, because they used to be Nichols and Gum in their firm. And then he decided once the mom passed away that he was going to get rid of her in the commercial. And then he uh uh Gum, Lincoln Gum decided to make his own firm with Glenn Blorschman, who is a Despard attorney, and then his niece, who works as both the investigator, the Veronica Mars of the group, as well as both Borschmann and Irene tend to shake down the prior clientele to make sure that they get paid. And one of the clientele people is like Bob Henderson Toyota. That's his actual name because he decided to change it when he bought a Toyota uh, you know, facility or something.

SPEAKER_00 6:48

How did you feel that that kind of B story fit in? Because it seemed like they it was almost felt like the Troiters. Completely uneed it. It did feel like the Triters, but it felt like they also could have cut like what? It probably took like four. It's introducing you to everybody.

SPEAKER_01 7:01

I understood why they were doing it. I wasn't like Irene or Glem. I didn't really care about either one of them by the end of the episode. It didn't give me the same like instant Simpsons solar opposites, like, oh, I know who you are, and I'm going to be on your side throughout this whole thing. It was just like, oh, it's another person.

SPEAKER_00 7:17

I agree with you. Like, I like Steven Root. I didn't know that he's been doing voice acting for at least one episode of animated shows all the way back since 1997. Like that's been a streak that he has. And I think that he is a good actor, but like none of the characters, except for the judge, I thought that every single time that the judge has every time the judge said something. I thought he was the best character of the show by the time. Now that you say it, I agree. But the main characters themselves, I didn't feel like there was anything compelling about them. Nothing that like made me even really root for them by the year. Well, Barry Chandelier steps in there.

SPEAKER_01 7:48

He goes into the firm and he says, I've been waiting for a while. I needed to talk to you. I have a pro bono case that your mom was already working on, but then she just stopped calling me back. And every time I called the office, Irene would like yell at me or something like that. And I have my case uh being uh or my court case is tomorrow. And that's when Lincoln does a little freak out, but then he's like, I don't have anything else on my schedule. So what's the deal? And this guy is a stripper, and obviously they're in Vegas, so there's a lot of strip clubs at the brush fire club, kind of like a magic mic situation. We see a full ad for it. And in that thing, or in the club, their whole gimmick is that on Fridays or something, that the strippers eat keys, car keys. A stripper's dozen. How much is a stripper's dozen? 34. 34. Yeah. So 34 sets of car keys, which isn't good for you. And that's why Barry Chandelier is like suing or something, trying to get out of that contract. However, he's up against, once again, Nichols, who I'll remind you was the person he was just up against in the last quarter. I assume it's gonna be. But he acted, Lincoln acted when he heard that, like it was the first time he'd been facing off with Link uh with Nichols since his mom's passing. Like he acted as if it was a bigger deal than I think it was led me to believe.

SPEAKER_00 8:58

And I assume that in the preceding episodes, it will only be Steve Nichols that he's fighting again. Yeah, it seems like a fairly short cast.

SPEAKER_01 9:05

Even in the intro, you only see like five people listed. Um, so yes, he goes outside to get drunk um and spend the night like figuring out what's going on, uh, just by like calming down, and he meets Sheila Flambe, who is your number eight. So he recognizes her from the courtroom and she's doing magic on the streets, she does a trick, and then they spend a night on the town together.

SPEAKER_00 9:25

So I actually like the card trick because I forgot I watched a video a long time ago on this, but someone shot a bullet at like a card deck and it actually didn't go through the card deck. So when she did the same thing here, I was like, oh, that's actually true. It's a classic card trick, yes. Yeah, that was one of my pros for the show.

SPEAKER_01 9:41

I think the coolest part was at the end when they showed you that the bullets in it the whole time. Like that's just a planted bullet. It feels like uh again, Penn and Teller, uh very famous Vegas show themselves. Um, they should pop in there at some point and talk to Sheila. So he ends up hiring Sheila after they they get high and drunk and they go around. I think they blow up a cow. Um with like a rocket launcher, right? In that montage. And he hires Sheila because she's a bit flamboyant. She's out there and she can really like understand the Vegas crowd, get them entertained, and he understands that's what he's missing in the courtroom. Said very few lawyers ever. However, he's like, I'll hire you. And from then on out, I thought he was going to be like an earpiece. I thought he was gonna be her ratatouille, like she was going to be the one that they were trying to pass on the scenes as the lawyer. And instead, it took a very less interesting take, and he still remained the lawyer, but she was just sitting on the bench with him, which is pretty legal, and just kind of setting up his tricks like an assistant. I guess it's better pay for her, but at the same time, uh, yeah, so he jumps into the court scene, the next, which is back to representing Barry. And uh, I what'd you think of that little montage? Because it went through the trial really quickly about how he was no longer just this nerdy dude, but he was gonna have a whole presentation.

SPEAKER_00 10:59

Right, when he was he was like dressing better. It reminded me a lot of the fly, especially the part, or sorry, the mask. It reminded me of the mask when he slipped into his scene.

SPEAKER_01 11:08

Jim Carrey was started off as or or what's that Eddie Murphy movie where he takes the the thing that balloons him or actually slims him down. Are you talking about the nutty professor? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:17

Yeah, no, I I was thinking that when uh Lincoln was going through his scene, kind of representing Barry when he was doing that like movie scene, there's uh a scene very similar to the mask in it. So that's kind of what I connected it to.

SPEAKER_01 11:30

My favorite one-liner was when they had the doctor, which we've seen a thousand times, who's like being asked a question, and he just asked, should people eat car keys? And then he broke down and he was like, No, and then they on cross, he breaks again because they're like nutritionists, how can you say such a thing? And he's like, I'm only a simple brain surgeon. Yeah, that that actually got me to laugh. Uh, I also liked that they kept on using the pun of like he'll gum up the works. And it's like, so that's the only reason they made his name, they made his name Lincoln so that they could continually show little pictures of Lincoln throughout the episode, and they made his name gum so that they could use it as a punt.

SPEAKER_00 12:07

And they even so stupid. And they showed they showed Marcia Gum and like the old ad that she was like a gum sticker or whatever.

SPEAKER_01 12:14

This is made for short attention spans. It is a stupid show.

SPEAKER_00 12:18

So you think that's one of those shows that people are supposed to be looking at their phones for, like the famous story of how Stranger Things had to keep repeating their things because people were going to keep looking at it.

SPEAKER_01 12:26

Yeah, it feels like that. It feels like it could also just be a one-off type of Love, Death, and Robots, where they just come out with a bunch of simple comedies for like every state. This just felt like so, like let's pull out of a rabbit out of a hat, we'll pull out Vegas, we'll pay pull out Lawyer, and we'll pull out Adam Scott, and suddenly we have like one episode show here, one episode show. I would have I would have liked that. Um mad libs. Yeah, it's like a mad libs of of a TV show. But where where am I going with this? So Keith David's character, Nichols, he is unprepared for how prepared uh this guy seems now. And so he ends up losing the case, but before that, we keep on seeing him like sh schmoozing it up with a bunch of these uh strip club managers who are literally eating, they're doing that Nyo Taimori, the the thing where they take like a woman and they're still awake and they're just like eating off their body sushi and spaghetti and meatballs, yeah. Yeah, but instead of yeah, I was pointing out so it was a spaghetti this time. And one thing that the show likes to point out too is that it's made not by AI. So it it put that right in the right in the title card. And so um, I guess if that's you want to give it props for that.

SPEAKER_00 13:38

Uh it's also it's a love letter to uh to Las Vegas. That's at least what variety says.

SPEAKER_01 13:44

So well at its best, it wants to be somewhere between like Bojack-ish, the new Bojack on Netflix. Uh they're never gonna get that. It doesn't have the heart, it doesn't have the heart in it, I think. Right. It's a less outlandish version of Gary and his demons. Uh you got Haunted Hotel out there, it feels a little bit like that. Mulligan, um, it's just one of many of these shows. And it doesn't have the heart you were talking about that long short story had. Last year, they didn't recreate Bojack, but they did do something new, and it worked because you were dealing with multiple timelines and the characters, it was a very character-driven story where every single one of them expand, expand, expand, expand. I don't see that happening with Lincoln. It just does not seem like that he has that many layers. And as I said before, it's it's not the solar opposites or Simpsons characters where you can instantly be like, oh, that's going to be around forever. So overall, because I know I miss some background jokes that on rewatches will be okay. And because it's an okay show to just have on in the background, I'll give it a 5.5 out of 10. But like, yeah, I I I think I have some cons, especially when you talk about the love letter for it being to Las Vegas, right? So, in order to understand some of these jokes, like when they were at a performance, it seemed like it was a mixture of the Excalibur tournament for kings where they ride around on horses and then like have people shouting. Yeah, the jousting with evil canivals, uh, because it was called the Knieval something or other, Caesar's Palace jump that he did in 1967. I don't think a lot of people are gonna understand that reference, given that like most of them if it were were not alive at that point. And maybe they know evil canival just from Bart Simpson, but like I don't think a lot of people would understand it.

SPEAKER_00 15:33

And I know you're talking about locale references, but just as we're on the subject, also Austin Powers in the beginning of the episode. I don't understand why that was even in the the show at all. That either worked or it didn't. I feel like there's there's a base of fans out there who laughed at that. It reminded me of the Pentaver when it shoehorned in the Mike Myers show that when it shoehorned in Shrek. Yeah, the Mike Myers show was not very good. But at least that had the excuse of having Mike Myers, the Austin Powers thing.

SPEAKER_01 16:01

I thought it was the beginning of something. I thought we were seeing like a robot chicken thing where it was going to be one celebrity after another, like a or you know, fictionalized celebrity after another. And that would have been kind of like that, yeah. Because it would have just been a Harvey Birdman even more. But, you know, it it also was a little fudgy on the rules. Like at one end, they it seemed like drugs were legal, like you could just buy them off the street, not not by some shady dude, but actually by a vending machine. And that might have just been a hyperbole, I don't know. But it and then later on they explain how you still can't shoot a gun in court. So some rules are acceptable, some not. We may be in the middle of that idiocracy sphere. The the ending joke where they were starting to pick apart the own episode and they were like on the news report saying, How did we pick a jury in one day? You know, that type of thing. I enjoyed that because again, it's just a 20-minute show that's making fun of itself. You know, it's a Peter Griffin joke almost.

SPEAKER_00 16:54

Yeah, well, I it feels like it's trying to also be very meta. I just didn't think that meshed well. So I would probably give it a four out of ten. I know that Yahoo said that it was a ridiculous cousin to Nightcourt and Ally McBeal. The show, Nightcourt being one of the, oh no, I did mention Nightcourt and a bunch of the legal shows that we talked about. Yeah. And the show is just all over the map when it comes to reviews. You can find places like the AV Club, which gave it a C, but then you also have places like Variety that enjoyed it, has a 6.2 on IMDB, 71% on Raw and Tomatoes. I don't think that it's going to be renewed for season two.

SPEAKER_01 17:30

When I said made for short attention spans, I also mean it's like short form content. Even in the commercials, it kept on pulling back layer after layer, being like, no, that's the fake out, that's a fake out, that's a fake out. It was like get your eyeballs on this. And that feels very much like improv comedy is today, or even what you'd hear on the podcast. So I think they probably bring that to it. So if you enjoy hearing these people make jokes anyways, there's no reason why you wouldn't want to see them do it in front of an animation thing. But if you're putting that against like hard, hardcore, like really well thought out animation uh dialogue and stuff like that, it doesn't come anywhere close to where it needs to be to be a like a really, really disappointment.

SPEAKER_00 18:08

I know, I know we've already said it, but it just feels lazy in the end. And I thought that the only like good animation was really that intro scene. Um, the intro that will probably be for every episode where it was just showing the outside and the blue lights. I liked how that looked, but I just can't find a reason to recommend this, I think, to anyone.

SPEAKER_01 18:25

Yeah, I don't disagree with you, but there were parts that I laughed at. So I even though it's lazy, it doesn't mean that I couldn't have found some jokes that were pretty funny in there. Um but also I can't imagine trying to eat 34 keys unless you're David Blaine. David Blaine could manage that, I think, right? Didn't he spit up a frog one time or something? He had a whole like aquarium, and I think that they used to do that in old magician type things. I wonder if they're just gonna continue teaching Sheila uh flambe tricks throughout the whole thing. That would be cool too. I am curious how they're gonna may be able to manage what, eight episodes, ten episodes? Ten episodes. Ten episodes. It was, yeah, it was. I might jump jump to like the tenth episode to see how it is.

SPEAKER_00 19:00

And this animated studio that worked on it was Titmouse. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:05

They've worked on like it's starting to feel like Tit Mouse is just kind of like phoning it in, though, because this feels like it could have been the same animation that I've seen in a hundred different shows. Okay. Thanks for listening. We'll see you on the next episode. Hope you enjoyed this one.

unknown 19:16

Bye.

SPEAKER_01 19:17

Bye,