Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Stop-motion animation has been around for decades, but until Ultra City Smiths, we haven’t seen the format be used with baby dolls, dressed up as all sorts of characters. How do you deal with their limited range of motion? The vacant eyes? The pudgy cheeks? The new AMC+ series, a neo-noir mystery comedy, aims to find out.
ULTRA CITY SMITHS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: A city skyline, then a police car speeds by. “No one’s dreams come true in Ultra City,” says the rough-voiced narrator (Tom Waits).
The Gist: We see various people navigate the gritty world of Ultra City. A teenage girl named Little Grace (Alia Shawkat) climbs up a fire escape while wearing a big backpack. She knocks on the door, and the people inside knock her down so hard she falls all the way back down the fire escape. When she lands they take her backpack.
Detective David Mills (Jimmi Simpson), whom everyone calls “New Kid” because he’s new to the Ultra City PD, leaves to meet his new partner, but somehow forgets his shirt. His new partner, Detective Gail Johnson (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) is about to leave for work, but tells her son to keep in contact with her while she’s out. They find out the case they’re working on is the disappearance of Carpenter K. Smith (Kurtwood Smith), the most powerful man in town, who also happens to be running for mayor against the nogoodnik incumbent, Kevin De Maximum (Tim Heidecker). Apparently, he went out for some cigarettes and never came back; that was seven hours ago.
We see more people in the city: A dude in a cowboy hat who is called Street Hustler Boy (Damon Herriman) keeps asking people, “Scratch your back?” but he gets no takers. Rodrigo Smalls (Luis Guzman), one of the city’s big time hustlers, is trying to find out the whereabouts of Little Grace and the money she’s carrying. Little Grace talks to her mother, the massive wrestler Lady Andrea The Giant (Bebe Neuwirth) about getting jumped; she thinks she can make enough during her next match to pay Rodrigo back, but she’s then told she needs to “lose hard” that night.
As the cops keep looking into Smith’s disappearance, we learn via song and dance that Mills was (and still is) way into limes, and that as a rookie “I know s-h-i-t” about Ultra City. Johnson thinks she sees her son running with a teenage gang that wears Nixon masks. Street Hustler Boy sells his pants (and the spare pants Det. Mills gives him) in order to take care of an older gentleman, then has to find somewhere to flop. A balloon floats over the park, and Little Grace suddenly sees a gun being lowered down to her on a string.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Ultra City Smiths is a little bit Sin City, a little bit Robot Chicken, and a little bit Thunderbirds Are Go.
Our Take: It’s easy to just dismiss Ultra City Smiths as a weird little show that’s populated by doll-like stop-action puppets. But the show, created by Steve Conrad (Patriot, Perpetual Grace LTD), has a scale to it that you might not realize until you’re about two episodes in. The first episode is definitely strange, definitely disjointed and definitely confusing. But by the time you get to the end of the second episode, you get where Conrad is going with this show and why he got so many top-notch stars to lend their voices to it.
The first episode introduces us to all the players, including Congressman Chris Pecker (Dax Shepard), who unironically can’t keep himself from sending dick picks to people, and his exasperated wife Donella (Kristen Bell), Sister Mary Margaret (Melissa Villaseñor), who has her secrets, and The Most Dangerous Man In The World (Julian Barratt), who just got out of prison. And we haven’t even covered Trish McSaphire (Debra Winger), who is trying to keep a reporter named Tim (Jason Mantzoukas) from publishing an explosive TMZ piece, or Smith’s son Donovan (John C. Reilly), self-proclaimed “King of the Night.”
There’s a reason why all of these people are floating around the show’s universe, and all of it is revealed in episode 2, when the seemingly overwhelmed Mills manages to make a connection between these people and Carpenter Smith. It’s at this point where all the weirdness becomes the story’s spice instead of its main ingredient.
But, yes, even in the genre of neo-noir, Ultra City Smiths is dark and weird. But it’s also funny at times, which is what Conrad intended. The stop-action animation style, using creepy-looking baby doll-style puppets for every character, takes some getting used to. But we give Conrad and his VFX people credit for being able to make these dolls who usually have vacant looks convey actual emotion, even if most of that emotion is despair. When we see the look on Lady Andrea The Giant when she “loses hard” we know she’s depressed that her career is mostly over and she can’t help her daughter.
The musical interludes don’t seem as out of place as you might think, mainly because it’s just one weird thing in a series of weird things. When Mills starts singing and dancing about being a rookie, we’ve seen so many oddities to that point that a musical number feels par for the course.
How much of these various threads Conrad will be able to follow through on is what we’re wondering about. There’s also a story about the “Police Station Baby” that was abandoned in front of police headquarters 30 years ago, whose whereabouts no one knows about. Bringing that together with the big mystery and the smaller stories of each character will be a feat to pull off.
Sex and Skin: Some doll puppets in thongs in a second episode strip club scene, but that’s about it.
Parting Shot: The narrator says that if “the new kid does his job,” everyone will be “suspects, all.” As Grace reaches for the gun, he says, “You’ll see.”
Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to Da’Vine Joy Randolph as Gail Johnson, whose responses are so deadpan they’re almost sleepy. But it’s also funny.
Most Pilot-y Line: “Ultra City, she don’t care,” is what everyone says at some point during the episode. It’s the title of the episode, after all, but it’s also a refrain that gets a bit stale by the end of the episode.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Yes, Ultra City Smiths takes an episode or so to get into, because the first one might be one of the most truly strange things we’ve seen all year. But once the plot thickens, it starts to make more sense.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
