'Sit Down, Shut Up' Brings The Sharp Snark

A new animated series by "Arrested Development" nucleus Mitchell Hurwitz premiered Sunday night on Fox, sandwiched between new episodes of "The Simpsons" and "Family Guy." An ambitious show with a star-studded cast, "Sit Down, Shut Up" is certainly a sitcom for modern times. No sacred cows here, folks.

Featuring a jaw-dropping cast of voices that includes Jason Bateman, Will Forte, Kenan Thompson, Will Arnett, Cheri Oteri, Kristen Wiig and the Fonz himself, Henry Winkler, "Sit Down" revolves around the daily happenings among a wildly out-of-touch faculty at a Florida high school. Science teacher Miracle Grohe (Kristin Chenoweth) believes her cherry-picked hodgepodge of creationism and Palin-esque spiritual rhetoric is the key to salvation. Things never seem to go right for poor, ill-named Willard Deutschebog (Winkler), whose catchphrase is a doozy: “If I believed in reincarnation, I’d kill myself tonight.” Wonder bread (and even worsely named) PE instructor Larry Littlejunk (Bateman) wishes he was anything but, and English teacher Ennis Hofftard (Arnett) is, awesomely, the near-perfect personality twin to Arnett's character Gob on "Arrested Development". Will Forte plays a cheerfully oblivious The cast is rounded out with a similarly dysfunctional batch of administrators and support staff. The students? They're about as central to the show as the chalkboard.

Fans of "Saturday Night Live" and "Arrested Development" will find a home for their comic tastes here, although there's some definite room for improvement as well - such as the overall timing, as well as character development. But it's only the first episode, and there's an eagerly ambitious comic thread that runs throughout the show. Its unique production technique (animated characters against a real-life backdrop) definitely warrants a look for ingenuity's sake alone. The protagonists are entirely too self-absorbed and clueless to be believable as real people, but that's precisely the charm of it. If Will Arnett were half the asshole he's so good at playing, he'd have his own recurring role on "The Hills" by now. But the guy's married to Amy freakin' Poehler, so there's no way he's that bad of a guy.

Co-creator Mitch Hurwitz, who's best known as executive producer for "Arrested Development" got with co-executive-producers Eric and Kim Tannenbaum ("Two and a Half Men") as well as Josh Weinstein ("The Simpsons")—to find a way to bring the series more into the perspective spectrum of Fox’s other animated series. Like "Family Guy" and "The Simpsons," she show's real comic gravity is that it takes aim at the freakshow culture war we call America, with an appetite for toe-stepping and double-takes. All the same, "Sit Down" does manage to avoid the nastie, fratty side of Seth McFarlane’s humor, opting instead for a unique visual style, a mix of animated characters and live-action photographic backgrounds and a cast with more star power than an old episode of "Freaks & Geeks".

If you haven't seen it yet, don't fret. You've only missed the first episode. Check it out here. And keep an eye out for our interview with Hurwitz and Will Forte later this week!