I've written individual reviews for each season of "Central Park", which you can find against the final episodes of each run. Now the show is cancelled, I thought I'd put something here to consider the show overall.
Big fan of both "Bobs Burgers" and "The Great North" so I'm not sure why it took me quite so long to get around to watching "Central Park" - another series from the same creative team, this time on Apple TV.
Owen Tillerman (Leslie Odom Jnr) is the manager of Central Park and lives at Edendale Castle with his family. His wife, Paige (Kathryn Hahn) is a reporter with a small newspaper, looking for a big story. His daughter Molly (Kristen Bell) draws comic books in which she is a superhero and his son, Cole (Titus Burgess) is obsessed with the pet dog of Bitsy Brandenhem (Stanley Tucci) a local wealthy hotel owner. They're lives are upended when Bitsy decides that it's time for Central Park to go and for high rise apartments to be in its place.
As "Bobs Burgers" has run on, the show has become more and more musically minded, with music breaks being a semi-regular idea and the shows credits often being sung by the cast. Perhaps this is the next logical step, with "Central Park" employing a cast of musical theatre performers and increasing each episode's song ratio to two or three. The other key to this is Josh Gad, who plays Birdie, the shows narrator, who speaks (or sings) directly to the audience, as well as the other characters when necessary.
I'd assume the show is expensive and time consuming to produce, requiring the scheduling of an in demand cast as well as the need to write three to four original songs for each episode, some of which utilise star names like Regina Spektor or Mike Shinoda and wonder if that was a contributing factor to the cancellation. All of which happens before the animation process begins.
The series ends in an OK way, as in there's no cliffhangers - but the wider plot points, such as Bitsy's plan to buy the Park aren't really resolved. I don't like the subsequent runs as much as I did the first, but it's certainly not bad and I would advocate for a single feature length episode finishing up the series properly.
Big fan of both "Bobs Burgers" and "The Great North" so I'm not sure why it took me quite so long to get around to watching "Central Park" - another series from the same creative team, this time on Apple TV.
Owen Tillerman (Leslie Odom Jnr) is the manager of Central Park and lives at Edendale Castle with his family. His wife, Paige (Kathryn Hahn) is a reporter with a small newspaper, looking for a big story. His daughter Molly (Kristen Bell) draws comic books in which she is a superhero and his son, Cole (Titus Burgess) is obsessed with the pet dog of Bitsy Brandenhem (Stanley Tucci) a local wealthy hotel owner. They're lives are upended when Bitsy decides that it's time for Central Park to go and for high rise apartments to be in its place.
As "Bobs Burgers" has run on, the show has become more and more musically minded, with music breaks being a semi-regular idea and the shows credits often being sung by the cast. Perhaps this is the next logical step, with "Central Park" employing a cast of musical theatre performers and increasing each episode's song ratio to two or three. The other key to this is Josh Gad, who plays Birdie, the shows narrator, who speaks (or sings) directly to the audience, as well as the other characters when necessary.
I'd assume the show is expensive and time consuming to produce, requiring the scheduling of an in demand cast as well as the need to write three to four original songs for each episode, some of which utilise star names like Regina Spektor or Mike Shinoda and wonder if that was a contributing factor to the cancellation. All of which happens before the animation process begins.
The series ends in an OK way, as in there's no cliffhangers - but the wider plot points, such as Bitsy's plan to buy the Park aren't really resolved. I don't like the subsequent runs as much as I did the first, but it's certainly not bad and I would advocate for a single feature length episode finishing up the series properly.