Sausage Party’s sequel makes a strong case that Seth Rogen needs more boundaries

Sausage Party: Foodtopia is an unlikely creative flex for writer-producer partners Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. Creative freedom in Hollywood is almost always relative. But the ability to get paid for something like this sequel miniseries — for dedicating 160 minutes to the ongoing adventures of sexually overactive, sometimes murderous animated food — that has to sit pretty high on the power spectrum.

That’s something delightful about Rogen and Goldberg’s long-running success together: Approaching 20 years after their breakout Superbad, it truly feels like they’re still following their own weird muse. That muse led them to bring Superbad to the big screen after starting the writing process when they were literal teenagers, younger than the actual characters in the movie. It gave us the stoner action-comedy epic Pineapple Express. And it resulted in the gloriously weird, celeb-packed apocalypse in This Is The End, their joint directorial debut. “Seth and Evan really wanted this” is the only possible reason a movie like 2016’s Sausage Party exists: It’s hard to imagine any outside forces insisting that someone spend millions to computer-animate a raunchy parody of objects-come-to-life Pixar movies, which then pivots into a critique of both organized religion and smug atheism.

On the other hand, Sausage Party’s $100-million-plus success likely played a role in the existence of its supersized sequel. Prime Video’s eight-episode Sausage Party: Foodtopia miniseries continues the saga of sentient hot dog Frank (Seth Rogen), his bun girlfriend Brenda (Kristen Wiig), his smaller fellow hot dog Barry (Michael Cera), his neurotic pal Sammy Bagel Jr. (Edward Norton, still doing a Woody Allen impression), and various other former residents of the grocery store these foodstuffs escaped in Sausage Party.

Leaving behind their shelf life, and their fate of inevitable consumption by “humies” (humans), the food has brought about the apocalypse — for humies, anyway. For food, the end of the human world is a chance to rebuild a new society from scratch, and avoid the mistakes of the big, stupid species that preceded them.

That’s heady stuff for a profane cartoon where food celebrates every victory with a massive pansexual orgy. Even beyond the sex stuff, and the many gags where food or humans are horrifically mutilated for laughs, Foodtopia is a lot. The episodes are only 20 minutes long, but they still add up to nearly three hours, twice as long as the film this series is sequelizing. In other words, the shock laughter — and there is some! — has plenty of time to die down as the gag wears thin.

Maybe, though, the dying-down process has been happening for a while. Rogen and Goldberg are prolific producers, and not just of Rogen vehicles: Their Point Grey Pictures has made Apatow-style comedies like Blockers and Good Boys, comics adaptations like The Boys and Preacher, and some oddities like the recent Jenna Ortega/Martin Freeman thriller Miller’s Girl. As with any production company, Point Grey’s output is mixed; if anything, their track record is probably better than average. But Foodtopia feels like, if not a breaking point, a sign that maybe the specific Rogen/Goldberg brand of secretly thoughtful raunchiness has been pushed to its limit.

Rogen and Goldberg aren’t credited writers on Foodtopia, and the creator/showrunner credit goes to Ariel Shaffir and Kyle Hunter, two of their co-screenwriters on the original film (as well as the Rogen holiday film The Night Before). Still, Rogen voicing the lead role clearly signals that he’s tacitly approved the project — and why wouldn’t he? It’s an expansion of a weird gamble that paid off.

As such, dedicated fans of the first movie will probably enjoy the series. Students of the Rogen/Goldberg oeuvre may especially appreciate how the show takes one of Superbad’s memorable side bits — Jonah Hill’s complaint about being banned from anatomy-shaped food as a kid (“You know how many foods are shaped like dicks? The best kinds”) — to its logical conclusion.

Yet there’s also something dispiriting about Foodtopia. The endless f-bombs, the jokey food gore, the anal-obsession gags — they’re simultaneously not quite as juvenile as they sound (produced with Rogen’s trademark self-awareness), and not nearly as clever as the show seems to think, given how the self-aware humor makes all the characters feel like flimsy constructs, delivering transparent messages.

Some moments in the series seem to exist entirely because they might have theoretically earned an NC-17 if they’d been in the movie version. But was Sausage Party really so constricted? Foodtopia gives the impression that Rogen and company are in it for the envelope-pushing, rather than the character-based comedy and genre-blending that’s characteristic of their best work. Lately (and this is visible on The Boys, too), their freedom has started to feel like a crutch.

Foodtopia itself sometimes flirts with admitting that: Frank and Brenda start out wanting a society free of the restrictions that have ruled their lives for so long, but they eventually realize that maybe their initial vision isn’t compatible with the messiness of reality. (Though the alternatives they explore don’t seem particularly workable either.) The show occasionally feels like a metaphor for its own aimless quasi-provocations.

I say this as a fan of Rogen’s going back to Freaks and Geeks. Though Rogen obviously loves that show, he has also mentioned that Freaks and its unofficial follow-up, Undeclared (where he also served as a writer) sometimes felt limited by network standards. (Meaning that among other things, teenagers couldn’t swear that much, and stoner-coded characters couldn’t actually visibly smoke a lot of pot.) He’s been more vocal about how his terrible experience making a PG-13 Green Hornet movie convinced him to avoid projects that require him to tone down his personal sensibility, which tends to skew R-rated and raunchy.

But some of those limitations could make for fresher movies and shows. This isn’t a one-to-one comparison, but take a look at another recent Point Grey cartoon — 2023’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem. It’s obviously aimed at a younger audience, so it’s the rare Rogen-related project with a PG rating. It’s also better than Foodtopia on almost every level. The jokes feel more spontaneous. The inventive animation style contributes to the movie’s tone, rather than feeling like a vehicle for efficiently conveying “funny” sex and violence. There’s humor derived from the filmmaking — timing, editing, movement — rather than from characters swearing. The characters feel more distinctive — a major feat, considering some past incarnations of the Ninja Turtles. Shepherding a kid-friendlier project must have been a challenge, but Rogen’s team met it head-on.

By contrast, even though Sausage Party is a relatively new, original property, Foodtopia already has the exhaustion of a rehash. Was it so important to marinate in the movie’s precise volume of sex, violence, and puns? Some of the show is amusing; some of it is even mildly thought-provoking in its evocation of current events. But it feels like a lot of effort expended over a cartoon that ultimately isn’t as satisfying as the millionth Ninja Turtles reboot.

For that matter, if Rogen’s go-to example of a movie hampered by content restrictions and studio meddling is The Green Hornet, he should count himself lucky, because The Green Hornet is largely pretty good! A studio-compromised Michel Gondry movie is a lot more visually exciting than some lesser artists’ personal statements, and plenty of subsequent vehicles over which Rogen had more control aren’t nearly as good. Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared both make an even stronger case that working within some kind of confines — network standards, mandated time slots, set episode counts — doesn’t have to limit quality.

There’s always a fine line between advocating for some kind of constraints on a creator, and turning into the worst kind of studio executive, fantasizing about forcing a filmmaker to kill all of the voice and originality in their work for the sake of fantasy-league box-office success. (Or worse, forcing them to play the IP game for the sake of crowd-pleasing safety.)

There’s also the danger of sounding like the know-nothings who insisted for years that singular talents like Wes Anderson or M. Night Shyamalan should exclusively direct other people’s screenplays, to avoid the visual signatures and thematic concerns that others have mistaken for pitfalls. Nobody should want to limit successful creators from doing what made them successful, or from sounding like themselves. Generally speaking, Rogen and Goldberg’s adherence to their foul-mouthed, transgressive, boundary-kicking vision is admirable. It’s just that with Foodtopia, that vision has started to look more like a fixation.

All eight episodes of Sausage Party: Foodtopia are streaming on Prime Video now.