The Quarantine Stream: ‘The Venture Bros.’ Built One Of The Richest, Funniest And Most Detailed Fictional Universes In TV History
By Jacob Hall/Sept. 11, 2020 8:30 am EST
If you’re new to The Venture Bros., if you want to see what the fuss is all about, you may need to power through the early episodes. That first season (and especially the pilot) represent the show at its crudest, both aesthetically and comedically. While sometimes very funny, the initial stretch is very much “What if Jonny Quest, but full of dick jokes?”, a premise that cannot sustain an entire television series. Not all of it has aged well.
If you look at the entire cast – the heroes, their villains, their friends, their allies, and everyone in-between – from the start of the series and compare them to where they end up in season 7, it’s shocking. The Venture brothers themselves grew up before our eyes. And they dragged everyone else, sometimes kicking and screaming, along with them.
That “everyone else” is vital to The Venture Bros., because the title may refer to Hank and Dean Venture, intrepid teenage adventurers, but the show was about their entire universe. Inspired by classic pulp stories, ’60s adventure cartoons, superhero comics, ’80s action movies, and literally every single thing that Publick and Hammer ever loved, the world of the series proved as complex, and as fun to explore, as anything from Marvel and DC. What begins as a pastiche of pop culture transforms into something wholly unique in tone and intent.
Just look at the characters assembled in the image at the top of this article. I know all of their names. I know their backstories. I know their relationships with one another. I know who they have worked for, who they have worked with, who they hate, who they love, and what they want. I also know they are a tiny, tiny fraction of the characters who matter to both the show and to me. To make a list of individuals, organizations, teams, and companies that carry dramatic or comedic weight in the Venture Bros. universe, I’d need a Wiki to do it justice. And the show makes this world-building look easy. And yes, it does it all alongside very good dick jokes.
Canceling a show this good is unthinkable. Canceling a show with so many unresolved threads and storylines is a crime. While we hold out hope for a hero to step in and save the series, we can revisit the whole thing on Hulu and just remember that we were blessed with this masterpiece for seven seasons and 17 glorious years. That’s remarkable.
