Bob's Burgers

The best way to describe Bob's Burgers is to say that the characters are characters first, and then cartoon characters second. Bob is a socially anxious, balding man who runs a business with his family, and despite being great at his job is not successful. His wife Linda is very supportive, but will abandon the business the moment she needs to do something for her children. Tina, the oldest child, is a good description of a teenage girl, who is very creative, but not actually that smart - she's not dumb, but the writers don't fall into the trap of portraying her as either very intelligent or very stupid. She has a wild fantasy Life but seems to have inherited her social awkwardness from her father. In her case it's a little more extreme because when she's stressed she makes a repetitive huh sound. Gene, the middle child, is the one who I think is honestly portrayed a little unrealistically. He says most of the one-liners in the show. There are storylines that treat him like a real boy, he's a person who really believes he's talented but doesn't have the ambition or discipline to stick with anything, and he's also very attached to his mom and there's a great episode about how oblivious he is to the amount of attention he requires from her. Then there's Louise who also people have also criticized for being very cartoonish, but I think it's a realistic portrayal of a girl who is very self-determined and who does not yet have the imagination to think about the consequences of her actions. Of course the whole show has a lot of cartoonish elements and some things are very funny but what I like about it is that at the heart of it is about real people or maybe not real people but believable people. I also think it's great that H John Benjamin's two major roles are so different and yet so connected. Sterling Archer is this immensely competent secret agent, but who has self-destructive habits and rarely tries to genuinely love anyone. Bob Belcher, on the other hand, is only really competent in one area of his life, but he does genuinely love the members of his family. I think the interesting part about that juxtaposition is that if the characters of Sterling Archer and Bob Belcher were real, they probably would fantasize about being someone like the other.