So who saw The Goode Family on Wednesday night?

I was excited about this show as soon as I heard about it earlier this month, being a big fan of King of the Hill. King of the Hill pokes fun at a suburban Texan middle-class family (as a representative of the unsophisticated Christian conservative mainstream), but, with roughly equal time, it treats the Hills as protagonists in the midst of countless American cultural extremes.  While the show mocks Hank's narrow cultural comfort zone (e.g. he's constantly freaked out by anything his son Bobby does that seems effeminate or homosexual), it skewers pretty much everyone and everything else in American culture, too (from carbon offsets to church-sponsored "Hell Houses" and right-wing bunker builders.  The show makes the Hills fallible--very fallible--but ultimately gets around to showing us that everyone else is, too, and in a way, that makes it easier for us to all get along.

Enter The Goode Family, which sends up a family of environmentalist, vegan, non-flag-pin-wearing, hybrid-driving, bumper-sticker-toting, African-child-adopting, er, liberals.  The wife, Helen Goode, wears a meat-is-murder T-shirt and tries way too hard to discuss sex with her daughter.  Gerald Goode, her husband, a pencil-necked community college administrator, appears to be the reincarnation of the hippie high-school teacher from Beavis and Butt-Head.

What's funny about the show isn't so much that the people are extremely environment-conscious (much like King of the Hill doesn't merely laugh at the Hills). The humor is driven by the difficulty of living with a liberal's conscience.  The daughter wants to go to an "abstinence dance" as a way to avoid the pressures of adolescent sexuality, and Gerald and Helen are divided on whether to support her.  (The ensuing dance scene, by the way, is a hilarious sendup of contemporary Christian megachurch "hipness.")  And Helen's preening liberal friends constantly outdo her in green living and motherhood.

As much as I loved the idea of the The Goode Family--and still do, actually--it wasn't terribly funny, and I have the feeling that much of this has to do with the fact that only one episode has aired.  Once the characters develop and the writers begin to flesh out more of the basic idea of the show, it'll probably start to take off.

That said, I liked Nowhere Man on UPN back in the nineties, and that sure didn't keep it on TV.

So my point is this: I like Mike Judge's shows, loved his cultural critique in King of the Hill, and expect to love it in upcoming episodes of The Goode Family, too.  What about you all?  Is it too close to home?

If you haven't heard of Brandon Darby, the activist-turned-FBI-informant whose undercover participation in the 2008 RNC "Welcoming Committee" activities ultimately sent two fellow activists, David McKay and Bradley Crowder, to jail, be sure to check out the most recent episode of the public radio show This American Life (#381, "Turncoat").

Between hearing this and watching Band of Brothers on TV the other night (namely the scene where the Easy Company learns the hard way about Nazi concentration camps, namely by encountering one), my mind can't stop swimming around in that place where one's anger at the brokenness of our world leads to decisive action, sometimes violent.  Sometimes truth seems as plain as day.  I remember wondering if my anger at the Bush administration's abuse of power would ultimately ever lead to my joining a liberal militia of some kind--if the strength of my convictions would ever outweigh my existing commitments and belief in the political system.

I'll post on this more in the future, but I can't help but wonder if I'm the only one whose mind has piddled around in that topic.