Disenchantment

There’s a drunk princess, an elf sidekick, and a cat demon in a fantasy kingdom called Dreamland. This is Matt Groening’s Disenchantment, which Netflix dropped all twenty episodes of at once. It’s what he made after The Simpsons spent thirty years becoming increasingly pointless, and after Futurama had its brief moment of genuine brilliance.

It’s strange that I still care what Groening makes. The Simpsons proved he could create something brilliant, genuinely smart and absurd at the same time. Then it proved he could let that thing decline for decades without being able to kill it or fix it. Just shuffle forward, less a show and more momentum. Futurama was different—brief, clever, willing to be genuinely weird. It didn’t last long, which was maybe the point. At least it quit while it had something to say.

So here’s Disenchantment. Princess with a drinking problem, misfits, a world designed to be slightly wrong. It’s not a bad premise. It suggests Groening’s interested in doing something other than celebrity cameos and nostalgia. Whether that’s actually true, whether he’s still capable of making something that isn’t just going through the motions, I don’t know. But you don’t keep paying attention to someone’s work for this long if you don’t believe they might surprise you again.