The Oblongs - Season 1

The Oblongs is premiering three times in one night, in hopes of getting an audience. Isn't that funny? It could be about as big a laugh as you'll get.

The family's biggest handicap is that it isn't funny, even though Will Ferrell and Jean Smart supply the parents' voices.

The Oblongs" on the WB packs a one-two punch: sick and funny. Sick, sick, sick. And yet, I'm obliged to say, demented, twisted and wickedly funny.

Although some of the animated figures are intriguing, their weak dialogue won't keep you hooked.

Everything here reeks of "Simpsons" mimicry, even the basic rhythm with which the jokes unfold. To stand out and break out, a show like this needs to offer a genuinely original voice.

When you strip away the too-deliberate attempts to be politically incorrect, there's not much left here but figurative (and literal) dwarf-tossing and lame rich folk-poor folk jokes. Ugh.

I applaud the show's robustly anticorporate satire, but I admit to discomfort at the sight of Dad spanking a kid with his head.

The Oblongs is funny, sometimes very funny.

This is wicked, daring satire.

"The Oblongs" wants to offer salient social commentary on the haves and the have nots, but it's so busy stereotyping the two groups, it says nothing at all.

Though "The Oblongs" is supposed to be "edgy," a word that has come to mean tasteless more often than not, the half-hour's social satire is buried under a pile of toxic jokes and an obsession with all things disgusting and vile.

The jokes are mostly sophomoric, the kind you'd expect FM disc jockeys to consider clever.