girls with swords

Disenchantment’s One Weird Trick: The Loser Is a Girl

Matt Groening and Netflix team up for a new animated series that showcases a very different kind of female anti-heroine: a princess named Bean.
The main characters in Disenchantment.
Courtesy of Netflix.

Midway through the first season of Disenchantment, Princess Tiabeanie (Abbi Jacobson) tries to get a job. Predictably, things go spectacularly awry: she can’t herd sheep or man a lighthouse; she mistakes the pet store for a butcher shop. She can’t even show up for the ceremonial duties assigned to her, such as sitting in a wooden throne and looking more bored than Bart Simpson while her father, King Zøg (John DiMaggio), receives the well-wishes of peasants.

Tiabeanie, called Bean, is not good at anything; she’s not even particularly fun to be around. Lacking both friends and romantic relationships, she spends most of her time drinking with her personal demon, Luci (Eric Andre), and a refugee elf, Elfo (Nat Faxon). In a somewhat pathetic, somewhat humorous set piece in the fourth episode, Bean takes advantage of her father’s absence by throwing a party, then wanders the dance floor looking for a boy to dance with. Unfortunately, her house is a castle, and they all know she’s an off-limits princess. Bean can’t catch a break until a raiding party of Vikings barges in. They might be intent on sacking Dreamland, but at least they’re willing to kiss her.

Disenchantment, as a whole, disappoints. This derivative animated comedy is too much like creator Matt Groening’s previous shows The Simpsons and especially Futurama, in both style and substance. The series aims to do for fantasy what Futurama did for science fiction—but from the drop, Disenchantment doesn’t seem to know enough about fantasy tropes to perform the sort of genre-excavation on display in its predecessor. The debuting comedy’s idea of a fantasy world looks more like the sterile castles of Disney princesses than the Hobbit holes of the Shire; its elves resemble the Keebler variety, not Galadriel. (And the series also has its genres confused: for some reason, Bean’s stepmother, Oona, is a dead ringer for Morticia Addams.) Rather than form its own point of view, Disenchantment busily recycles the comedy of established classics like Monty Python and the Holy Grail—old material, made worse by an indifferent visual style and lazy color palette.

What Disenchantment does have going for it is unlikely protagonist Bean, a female take on Fry from Futurama—a couch potato everywoman, a slacker, an idle audience surrogate. Her rejection of arranged marriage in the first two episodes is less ideological protest than simple rebellion: Bean wants to dictate the terms of her own life, but she has no idea what she wants. At one point, a character derisively describes her as a “triple threat”—“failure/quitter/loser.” She’s voiced by Broad City co-creator and co-star Jacobson—but even that show’s perpetually stoned Abbi and Ilana shine brighter than old Bean. It’s oddly refreshing: here is a female character who doesn’t have to be witty, pretty, or brave. She just exists, poorly, and gets a whole show for her troubles.

Stories that focus on teenage misfit girls tend to emphasize how exceptional their protagonists are; Disney princesses especially are rife with secret histories and hidden beauty, and the landscape of fantasy has spawned dozens of scrappy, extraordinary girl heroines, like Tamora Pierce’s Alanna of Trebond and Buffy Summers, slayer of vampires. Bean, though, has more in common with tomboyish wanderer Lindsay Weir in Freaks and Geeks, a monument to disaffected youth.

But just as Disenchantment feels under-researched as a fantasy parody, it also seems disinterested in the storytelling tradition Bean belongs to, even though so much of fantasy is written by and about women—from modern-day novels to the folklore and old wives’ tales that became our inherited fairy tales. With the exception of the show’s fantastic fifth episode, which reimagines the Hansel and Gretel story in a way that leads Bean to save a witch—with a double-headed rainbow axe fashioned from a lollipop!—most of Disenchantment floats free from the very thing it ought to be mining for depth and context. Shows like Rick and Morty, BoJack Horseman, and Steven Universe have raised the bar for how complex and emotional animated stories can be, but Disenchantment doesn’t have enough in the tank to compete.

And even though it’s a show that centers around a female character, Disenchantment doesn’t really let Bean play lead. She’s the princess, but it’s Luci and Elfo that get the punch lines—or King Zøg, voiced by the same actor who voiced Futurama’s Bender. (DiMaggio’s fellow alums Billy West, Maurice LaMarche, David Herman, and Tress MacNeille are all in the voice cast as well, which serves to crowd out Bean’s centrality to the plot even further.)

Significantly, too, the only women in Bean’s life are her stepmother and her maid, Bunty (Lucy Montgomery); she barely converses with either of them. And in a repulsive development, the diminutive, grating Elfo develops a crush on Bean, which becomes the basis for an ongoing subplot of misunderstanding and disconnection. At one point, the show jokes that Bean has put Elfo in the “friend zone”—come on!—and then positions the two in a deeply unsatisfying will-they, won’t-they. Bean is left in the dark for this romantic buildup, as Elfo decides whether he should share his attraction to her—which is to say that the protagonist of this show is sidelined so that an idiot male’s feelings can take up all the narrative space.

Bean is an interesting character, and at times, Jacobson inflects her with so much heart that she’s genuinely tragic. But Disenchantment also seems bored by her, even though the novelty of her existence is its raison d’être. It’s disappointing—one might even say disenchanting. Then again, the season also improves as it advances—which leads this former teenage misfit girl to hope that at some point, Groening’s crew will take it upon themselves to imagine Bean more fully. It would be wonderful to encounter a show that truly speaks to the misfit girls, instead of just talking about them.