Moral Orel: Season 1

Hulu is just full of the Adult Swim catalog, and while I've got it I figured I'd go back and check out a bunch of their mid-2000s stuff. I was a huge fan of both Sealab 2021 and also the early seasons of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, after all - but I was also, like, sixteen when those aired. Here's the first season of Moral Orel, a show that ran for three seasons from 2005 to 2008 and focused on a devout eleven-year-old kid whose literal interpretations of the Bible and his Sunday sermons lead to all kinds of hijinks. When Orel learns that God despises wasting, for instance, he begins to drink his own urine. When he learns that God frowns upon the suicidal for refusing his greatest gift - life - Orel decides to reanimate a bunch of bodies at his local graveyard, inflicting a zombie plague upon his town. And when Orel learns that masturbation is a sin because his seed should only be used to impregnate a woman, he reasons that he can still masturbate as long as he, you know, uses his seed to impregnate a bunch of women who are sleeping in their homes.

Episodes end with Orel getting admonished and beaten by his father, who tells him why what he's done is wrong, despite his best intentions - but more often than not, his father teaches Orel an even more irresponsible lesson. When the town is overrun by zombies, the issue isn't the zombies; it's that the zombies are naked! And when Orel impregnates a bunch of women, the issue wasn't that he did so, but that he used artificial insemination to do so instead of the missionary position.

It's pretty absurd and plenty irreverent, which is par for the Adult Swim course obviously, but it's notably more coherent and meaningful than most of the network's other shows. There is some dark, loaded, angry stuff in this backlash against mid-2000s Bible Belt culture, and even though the material already feels a little dated and extreme (thankfully), I'm retroactively impressed by the ceaseless lampoon job.

My understanding is that the first season of Moral Orel is the only one to follow this format, which is probably a good thing; Season 2 will apparently focus more on the pious town as a whole in all its corrupt and hypocritical glory, and then Season 3 is just supposed to be some of the darkest shit on television as Orel undergoes a substantial crisis of faith. To what extent this is played for real or for laughs remains to be seen, but I'm interested enough to keep going here. Episodes are only 11 minutes long, after all.