Review: “The Great North” Season 4: The Best “Animation Domination” Of 2024

Another season of Animation Domination has come to a close and I believe the best show of the season has easily been The Great North. This is mainly due to the main stays like Simpsons, Bob’s Burgers and Family Guy having relatively middling seasons while Fox’s other new offerings have been borderline unwatchable.

Season 4 feels pretty monumental since this is usually when shows such as Simpsons and Bob’s Burgers learned how to easily balance their main characters and side characters. With Season 4 of “The Great North” however, we get some pretty big changes to the show with the introduction of Aunt Dirt Tobin (voiced by Jane Lynch) who was previously living in an underground bunker for 60 years. When she is discovered in her debut episode, we as the viewers are almost left with the impression that at the end of the episode, she would go back to living in the bunker and rarely interact with the Tobins. However, instead, she ends up joining the main cast, getting involved with the plots in almost every episode. It may seem weird to have a brand new never mentioned character come out of a vault and join the main cast but her integration was incredibly well done, as she brings the chaotic neutral energy the cast was lacking which has allowed the lawful Tobins to get into more extreme situations. We even get to see her adjust to life in the modern day as a lesbian with Ham Tobin which was one of my favorite subplots of the season.

Speaking of relationships we also get a pretty serious plot progression with Beef Tobin finally getting out into the dating world after a near-death experience results in getting a vision from his “private parts”, which is voiced by Jack McBreyer. This gave a really good episode where Beef learns the relatable experience of learning to have emotional love as well as physical. After this episode, Beef begins developing a closer relationship with Carrissa, who is the mother of the local elementary school bully Debbie, with the season finale ending Beef and Carrissa going on a full-on date.

Judging by my previous description of Beef’s vision, it is pretty clear that by taking over Family Guy’s 9 PM timeslot the show was trying to be more raunchy. At first, there wasn’t much of a tonal shift, but I do feel it is less tame then the more recent seasons of Bob’s Burgers have been.

Overall this was another top-notch season, the only issue being Wolf Tobin, whose ignorance brought out the worst in him this season, such as enabling his incredibly toxic friend, harassing a sandwich shop owner, and becoming very petty when his wife becomes mayor over him. He still has some funny moments such as trying to get over the feelings of anxiety with his mother-in-law, but I am hopeful that next season Wolf will be far less annoying via his naivety.

The MVP of this season was easily Judy, despite not having as one-on-ones with Alanis Morissette, most likely due to her touring schedule. Judy still had the best plots of the season, such as going on a drug trip in Juneau after being given a “gummy”, trying to date three cruise line passengers at once, and helping Honey Bee track down information on a gravestone only saying wife on it, which resulted in one of the funniest moments of the show.

Out of all the animated offerings on Fox, this show is probably the one that I’m looking forward to the most now. I’m anticipating season 5 in 2025, which hopefully result in a syndication deal.

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