ZP style review: Milo Murphy's Law
Yeah, I'm trying this again, but the show needs a third season and we're desperate so what can you do? Milo Murphy's Law. From the same minds that brought us eight years of summer comes this delightful show about a child whom chaos and destruction follow him around like gum on a shoe. It is not, however, a show about a lawyer called Milo Murphy. I think the Fox Network has the monopoly on crime dramas, what with them making one after the other out the most ridiculous of circumstances, not to mention the near-constant NCIS repeats. No wonder streaming is taking off like Elon Musk's rockets.
For those that don't know, why are you reading this review? But for the sake of completeness, I'll summarise it anyway. This show is about a boy that is plagued with constant bad luck. Essentially, anything that can go wrong around him tends to. Amazingly enough, Dan and Swampy are not making this phenomenon up for the sake of entertainment, this actually exists, and the move to make a seemingly unknown anomaly, exaggerate it to an insane degree and call it children's television is nothing short of genius. Saves a lot of money on writing, I can tell you that much.
But a show is nothing without its main lead, and Dwampy have hit that out of the park as well. I'm not sure what bakery makes walking cinnamon rolls, but I'm pretty sure I'd like to sample some of their wares, I just won't be driving home afterward. Yes, Milo Murphy, the titular cursed child just wades through the oceans of his curse with all the boundless optimism of Dwampy's previous creation, Phineas. Such a happy-go-lucky type makes this review quite difficult considering how he has little to no negative traits. I'm serious, he's just too perfect to criticise. Where to start. He never lets the onslaught of chaos and mayhem get to him whereas a lesser being would hide themselves away for the sake of society, Milo embraces it with open arms, and because he's comfortable in his own skin, other people are perfectly happy to be in his presence, albeit several feet away and behind some sort of protective barrier, with only one or two sour sods giving him grief.
A main lead, however, is not complete without his supportive besties, and we have two good examples of this character type as well. There's Zack Underwood, the new kid in town who meets Milo on his first day and is initially put off by the weirdness but ends up embracing it with Milo come the second act of the pilot. That is not to say he doesn't express some sort of disbelief at the various shenanigans. After all, we can't have a cyclone of calamity without the straight man in the comedy group. It also helps that he serves as the musician of the group, what with him being a former boy band member, although I find it hard to believe that Milo wasn't originally pitched to fit this role considering he is voiced by a professional musician in the form of Weird Al.
The other main lead in this threesome is Melissa Chase, Milo's childhood friend and nothing more, despite the Internet's insistence, well, a slightly dark corner of it. I never really understood how, even after only the pilot has aired, that fans see a boy and a girl together for all of one episode and decide that they shall kiss, hug and make babies when they haven't even so much as winked at each other. The chemistry just isn't there. Not in a romantic connotation, anyway. They certainly have a strong, platonic friendship. I can definitely see Melissa as some sort of sister figure to Milo, but not much else. They just don't click that way. Boys and girls can be friends without the kissy-kissy goo-goo junk getting in the way.
That is not to say Melissa isn't a character in her own right. She certainly has her moments, like escaping a prison made entirely out of plant matter or stopping an evil robot from destroying a science fair. Melissa is the kind of character that girls of that age can look up to, a girl that can show the target demographic that girls are just as capable as the boys, and that they don't need a man to be worth anything, a character type that seems to be a growing trend with Disney these days, and I am all for it. Give me a ticket to the 'strong female character' train any day of the week. Just don't expect me to ship her with Milo, because it ain't happening.
Speaking of Milo's love interest, one character that I feel I should mention is Amanda, Milo's crush. In stark contrast to Isabella Garcia-Shapiro, who started 'Phineas and Ferb' lusting after Phineas' junk and pretty much stayed there for four seasons and eight years, Amanda's relationship with Milo steadily develops as the show goes on. What's this? Love at first sight admonished for character development and growth? Such a thing is unheard of! Yes, Amanda starts out keeping her distance and Milo at arm's length, to actively wanting to spend time with the runaway bakery product on legs, to literally shaking a bitch up because she had the audacity to look at him suggestively, and yet half the fandom expects Milo to end up with the childhood friend simply because 'it's the done thing' and that 'she has seniority'. Shut up with all your pretentious arguments! Let this relationship blossom and leave the two in peace. Trust me, you're less likely to end up in the hospital that way.
But enough about the characters, let's talk about the plots and storylines. Yes, this show has those. Contrary to 'Phineas and Ferb' which could get formulaic and repetitive fairly quickly, Milo actually has story arcs. The first season revolves around time travelling nut monsters born out of the bumbling idiocy of the B-plot characters, Cavendish and Dakota, Dwampy's latest submission to the 'totally-not-gay-couple' magazine, a place formerly held by Buford and Baljeet. They mix up a chemical from the future with a pistachio plant. That plant mutates into a humanoid plant monster that looks like a Doctor Who villain reject, that beast multiplies and they screw up the future. Well done you. They go back to the present (wow, that was a weird sentence) and try to restore the timeline, but they couldn't even do that right. After all, we have to have a final showdown for the finale. One plant monster makes it to the 1950s and spends the next six decades plotting revenge, culminating in the show's only crossover so far with the parent show and they wipe them out with discontinued soda. I couldn't make this up if I tried.
If you thought that was ridiculously farfetched, the second season is even worse, if you can believe it. This arc revolves around octopus monsters that spy on, stalk, and abduct Milo for his ability to deal with Murphy's Law, the explanation for which is so absurd that I'll just say it is because of leaking raspberry jam. I mentioned the show's only crossover, but Dwampy missed a prime opportunity by not including Meap in this arc. Where the hell was he? You introduce an outer space cop in the parent show that hunts down evil aliens, but when these Japanese hentai cast-offs kidnap this vulnerable child from his home and drag him half-way across the universe, he's nowhere to be found. If anyone on Earth tried this, they'd be cuffed and jailed faster than you can say 'Jimmy Saville'.
Who do we get instead to rescue Milo from this horrible fate, and the existential threat of alien probing? Doofenshmirtz, that bumbling evil pharmacist from the parent show, except he's not evil anymore and he's living with the Murphys for reasons. His inclusion into this show stems from the fact that we needed someone to invent time travel and apparently Phineas and Ferb were busy that week, or just didn't feel like doing it again because they already invented a time machine in the first season of their show and they don't like doing repeats. He gets an arc in season 2 where he tries and fails to do good while Perry cleans up after him. That sounds kinda familiar. We've already had eight years of Doof trying and failing to be evil, why did you feel the need to interrupt Milo's show to focus on Doof's redemption arc? We already got that in 'Last Day of Summer'. All this does in the long run is hamper the show's ability to stand on its own when you force the viewer to put on nostalgia goggles. Couldn't you have made a separate show about do-gooder Doof? He's a fan favourite. People would love to see that.
For all the faults of the show, it plays out like a typical Dwampy affair, and they hold the same appeal as the Yakuza games for two reasons. One, both are hilariously dumb, yet so earnest you can't help but get invested, and the second reason is that both have a killer soundtrack you want to blare out over the car radio on the morning commute to work, but are also afraid that the other motorists will notice, look in your direction for a fraction of a second and think you're a weirdo. It seems that Dwampy have mastered the art of taking wacky plots, engaging characters and the music into a cohesive whole that flows like poetry. In fact, they've inspired me to write this little sonnet:
Roses are red
Violets are blue
Give Milo a third season
Or I'll come after you.
Author's note: I wrote this in admittedly quite a hurry because I wanted to submit this for the 21/11/2020 effort to get #RenewMML trending on Twitter, but since I don't have an account, and never will, I'll need someone who does to tweet a link to this publication. Anyway, here's my ZP style review of MML. Enjoy.