Jello Reviews - "The Ghost and Molly McGee" (Patreon)

Hello, all you wonderful patrons!

As I’m sure most of you are aware, I do long-form reviews of shows, movies, and games listed under the “Jello Reviews” tag here on Patreon. Ordinarily, those reviews are spoken and essentially improvised as I find I’m best at explaining myself when I do it verbally.

However! This January I was completely incapacitated for about 2.5 weeks with a chronic fatigue illness that was so strong I spent 85% of every day glued to my bed. I spent the rest of the month covering shifts over at Sound Cadence Studios for my best friend Marissa Lenti who works as a director there. They caught a bad case of pneumonia and coughed so hard that they snapped their spine and couldn’t move for a few weeks. What a fun start to the year!

Then, February rolled around and I finally had the time to get back to work on Dogs in Love 2, which I haven’t been able to touch since July of this year.

…so, of course, I immediately came down with Covid.

Yay.

I’m doing okay, all things considered. I’ve been vaccinated and had four booster shots, so overall my case has been mild. In fact, as I type this I barely feel sick apart from being kind of snotty. I’m still highly infectious though, and I have a lot of things scheduled for the week after the next one. Because of that, I’m doing my absolute best not to stream or record anything that might agitate the disease and keep me testing positive longer than I want.

But!

If you’ve been following me for a long time, you probably also know that I have a condition where I get ✧∘*~ chronic depression~✧･ﾟ  if I don’t output some kind of creative content every few days, and being sick for 75% of 2023 has been about as rough for my mental health as it has for my physical health.

In order to remedy that, I’m doing a little experiment:

Normally I do these Jello Reviews as a recording. Today, I’m going to try a written review instead. I’ll be covering a show I binged while sick: the Disney Channel cartoon The Ghost and Molly McGee. I think this’ll be a good fit for a text review, because I don’t have quite enough to say about this show to fill an hour-long recording, but I have just enough things to say that I still want to say them. So I’ll do my best and you guys let me know if this format appeals to you at all. If not? That’s perfectly fine because I prefer the auditory format myself. If you like it? Hey, maybe I’ll keep it in my back pocket for a rainy day.

The Ghost and Molly McGee is a show about a young half-Irish, half-Thai girl named Molly (Ashley Burch) who’s family moves into a new house in the midwestern town of Brighton. Unbeknownst to them, their new house has a prior resident: A ghost named Scratch (Dana Snyder) who, like all ghosts, is tasked with scaring enough people each month to fill out his Scare Quota for the ghost council.

Scratch is none-too-pleased to have Molly’s family in the house. In a bid to get her to leave, Scratch curses Molly so that wherever she goes and whatever she does, Scratch will be there, haunting her, until she leaves the house.

This backfires when Scratch learns that Molly is human sunshine personified and is delighted to have an all-hours best friend who can help her “enhappify” the town of Brighton and make the world a better place. Hijinks ensue.

I think the best way to go about reviewing this show is to start with my score and work backwards from there.

MY RATING - 6.5/10.

In one of the early episodes, Molly is looking for best friend candidates so she can have a human best friend in addition to her ghostly one. She’s judging her potential BFFs based on several factors: Creativity, Smarts, Generosity, a Deep Passion for Fuzzy Socks, Leadership, and—to quote Molly herself—most importantly, the X Factor.

She finds a best friend in Libby, who also happens to be far and away the best character on the show, almost entirely because of her X Factor. The show itself, however, lacks this critical quality. I’d describe it as “A cartoon I might enjoy watching one episode of if it happened to be on while I was eating dinner.”

The show is not bad by any means. The animation is good. The characters are colorful. The voice acting is lively. Every episode even has an original song by Rob Cantor (the Actual Cannibal Shia LeBouf guy) and all of them are pretty good. But despite all that… there just isn’t a hook.

Honestly, I was a bit disappointed when I started watching this show. I’d been meaning to get around to it ever since I saw the trailer last Summer. The animation was bouncy, the concept was good, and I’m a sucker for ghosts. I only saw a handful of clips/songs, but all of them seemed like a lot of fun! This had been on my watch list for a long time. I was surprised when I was getting bored just two or three episodes in.

I have a personal rule where any time I’m on the fence about a show and I’m debating whether or not I should continue watching it, I always give it seven episodes. Usually just one or two is enough for a person to decide whether or not a show is for you, but hey, sometimes the pilot is a dud. Other times it takes a few outings for the writers to figure out how to really use their own characters.

Seven episodes, however, is more than enough time for anything to reasonably grab you and more than enough screen time for you to have a solid opinion on why you did or didn’t vibe with something.

Throughout the early episodes of Molly McGee I found myself tapping my fingers and waiting for lucky number seven to come along so I could say that I did my due diligence and drop it. To be honest, if I didn’t have a Patreon that I reviewed things on, I probably would have.

With some shows, it’s very easy to point to one particular element and say “This thing is the problem.” Maybe the pacing is bad. Maybe the dialogue just isn’t good enough. Maybe the team didn’t communicate their vision to each other. Maybe the animation needed more time. Maybe it’s RWBY and it’s all of those things. Those are the shows that give that awkward golden 7/10 experience. That “Yeah, this show's pretty good. (Pause) BUT—!” conversation-starter that makes for the most fun media to review.

Molly McGee’s first half is not a 7/10. It is, most decidedly a 6/10. Sometimes even a 5/10. And those are the hardest things to critique.

If I were to market one part of my creative skillset, I would call myself a “story consultant”. I like picking media apart and finding out what works, what doesn’t, and why. Pointing out the Good versus Bad is easy. Pointing out Good versus Flawed is fun! But how does a person dissect “Meh”? What kind of story notes would I give when there aren’t any glaring issues, but there also isn’t really anything great either? Where do you begin? I mean, you can’t just turn to the head writer you hired you and say “Kinda sucks, Joe. My main note is: Be more interesting next time!”

That ended up being the little game I played in my head while watching this show. How would I supervise this script when there’s so little that’s noteworthy enough to change? I had to dig for awhile to find what I would call this show’s “core problem”, but I think I got it: Molly and Scratch’s dynamic has no consistency and no set rules.

The show’s main theme, if you’d be generous enough to call it that, is happiness vs. misery.

Molly is a ball of endless positivity who wants to improve her new town. Scratch, on the other hand, is a ghost working for the Ghost Council. Every ghost’s job is to spread as much misery as they possibly can. This is most often achieved by scaring the living. Each ghost must hit their Scare Quota and feed the resulting misery to an evil spirit named The Chairman every month, otherwise they will be thrown into the “flow of failed phantoms”, which is basically just double-hell.

The writing setup here seems obvious, right?

Molly tries to make things better while Scratch tries to make things worse. The two butt heads over this and at the end of the episode Molly comes out on top because this is a kid’s show and being nice is better than being mean.

Additionally, anyone who has ever watched a movie before can probably pick up on the fact that Scratch is affable enough that he’ll undoubtedly come around to Molly's way of thinking sooner or later and will eventually befriend her and her family. Then the core conflict will be Scratch finding ways to avoid being sent to double-hell without sabotaging Molly’s projects because he cares about her now. And normally you'd expect a switch like that around, oh, I dunno... maybe halfway through the first season. Right?

But no. That’s not what they do.

Instead, Scratch is amenable to some of Molly’s ideas right away and he’s ingrained himself as a part of the McGee family by episode two. The two protagonists swap which one of them plays voice-of-reason character on a nearly episodic basis, and somehow Scratch ends up being in the right more often than Molly does.

This creates a weird problem.

The pitch of the show is a goofy ghost trying to make a town worse, shackled to a little ray of sunshine trying to make the town better. But even just a single-digit number of episodes in, Scratch can be completely neutralized by handing him a taco.

What’s more, the fact that he’s a ghost barely plays into anything. Molly’s entire family can see Scratch right away even though nobody else in the town can (which honestly doesn’t make a lot of sense to me as they aren’t explicitly part of the curse that binds Molly to her ghost). Scratch uses his abilities to possess one or two people and then a baseball in the two episodes, but after that it’s like they forget he’s supposed to be supernatural at all. I actually, out loud, said “So why is there a ghost in this show?” four or five times.

At first I had assumed that this weird ambiguous status-quo where Molly and Scratch can just be whatever the writer needs them to be to one another was just a choice the showrunners made because they wanted all the episodes to be interchangeable. Not every show needs to have an ongoing story and sometimes it’s best if the episodes can be watched in any order. That way they can rearrange them and eventually syndicate the show for infinite reruns. Fair enough.

But no! There actually is a fairly major status quo change about halfway through the first season.

Molly’s aforementioned best friend Libby cannot see Scratch for the first 11-odd episodes. Whoever made this creative choice, they made the wrong one. The show immediately gets much more watchable the moment the best character (Libby) is able to interact with the main duo on their own footing. I cannot understand for the life of me why they even waited as long as they did.

In fact, because Molly’s family can see Scratch right away, I assumed Libby just knew about him and didn’t mention him for the first few scenes they were hanging out together. Because why wouldn’t she be able to see him? She can see other ghosts attacking the town like Howling Harriet. Why is Scratch off-limits? If it was to make a big deal out of the reveal, that was a bad call and absolutely not worth slicing the main trio’s dynamic in half for ten whole episodes.

Then, just when I think I’ve got the show figured out, it does that first season of a Modern Cartoon thing where after faffing about for 18 episodes it decides to have an ongoing plot all of a sudden and get kind of good. Star Butterfly did this. Owl House did this. Gravity Falls did this. I don’t know who at Disney hates the idea of the plot progressing before the end of season one, but I wish they were dead.

Suddenly, the Ghost Council is dangerously aware that Brighton, the horrible town that Scratch had haunted into city-wide depression, is now a happy little burg where everyone loves one another. And it’s all thanks to Molly! And only NOW does the focus become Scratch's double life, here, two episodes from the end.

This strikes me as cheating, or at the every least lazy. The show starts out with this premise, drops it immediately, and then picks the idea back up right at the tail end of the show. Stick to the concept, guys! Blugh.

The show isn’t all mid, of course. I did give it a 6.5/10, not a 5.

As I’ve mentioned multiple times, Libby is the absolute stand out character for me. First of all she’s voiced by Lara Jill Miller who plays Kari in the english dub of Digimon and Haru in Beastars. Miller has one of my favorite voices in the entire VA industry and I think she’s just a delight to listen to. Libby is also the character that the audience is most likely to sympathize with in any given episode. She’s quiet, grounded, funny, and comically unlucky, which is a nice contrast to how bombastic every other main character is. She’s also a conspiracy-theorist/beatnik type, which I think is a lot of fun.

The show also gets points for having good representation. Molly’s family is mixed Thai-American and they’re constantly throwing Thai cuisine into the show as well as an episode centered around Sart Duan Sib, a festival where participants cook food for the spirits of their departed ancestors. Scratch tries to take all the food for himself on the grounds that he is a spirit, which is a funny bit. Scratch likes eating food, by the way. Hope you don't get tired of that being half of his character because if so I have bad news for you.

Additionally they have not one but two episodes focused around Libby being Jewish. There’s a Bat Mitzvah episode and a Hanukkah episode, both of which are some of the better episodes in my opinion. I’ll be honest, 90% of my education in regards to Judaism came from the Rugrats Hanukkah episodes that I watched when I was like five, so it’s always nice to see more holidays besides Christmas getting dedicated episodes.

That said, the obligatory Christmas episode is perhaps the only one that comes up with a creative use of the show’s titular ghost. The town needs a donation from a local rich asshole, so Molly tasks Scratch with giving the guy a three-ghosts treatment, Ebenezer Scrooge style.

There’s also a small story arc near the end of the season where Molly’s family is evicted from their home. They end up living out of their car for several weeks. Molly spends more and more time at school and joins every club she can just so she doesn’t have to go home. She doesn't want to admit to Libby that she has no home to go back to. I actually think this is the single most interesting thing the show does. The idea that homelessness can happen to anyone out of nowhere is handled with an amount of grace the show doesn’t usually demonstrate in its writing. Molly always tries to put a positive spin on everything, but even she starts to crack in that situation. Plus, the reason they’re homeless is because they had to spend all their mortgage fees to pay off their father’s hospital bills, which is… depressingly realistic.

Other than that stuff, though, I would say that the show is mostly unmemorable and a lot of it blurs together. Even now only a week after binging this thing I'd struggle to remember more than a few isolated episodes.

Some of this stems from the fact that the episodes are 11 minutes long, which is just… absolutely insane to me at this point. It’s like shooting your own show in the foot before you even leave the starting line. Showrunners, I'm begging you, do 22-minute episodes. You need a whiz-bang writing team to make an entire show’s worth of satisfying plots that can be wrapped up in only eleven minutes, and unless you’ve got the guys writing Bluey on your staff I don’t know if you’re going to pull that off.

Of course, this show is not written by the guys on Bluey’s staff. It’s helmed by Bill Motz and Bob Roth, two guys who have been writing for Disney Channel forever. Unfortunately, the things they have the most writing credits on seem to be universally mid-tier: Brandy and Mr. Whiskers, Xiaolin Showdown, the Monsters vs. Aliens TV show (why?), and half a dozen other early 2000s direct-to-DVD disney films including the Tarzan and Jane one which is comically awful.

I did a little research into the casting for Molly McGee and it turns out that the showrunners actually wanted to base the character’s ethnicity on the actor they ended up casting as their lead. Because Ashley Burch is mixed-Thai, they decided to write Molly's family that way instead of the usual method which is writing a character and casting an actor to match their vision.

On one hand, this is really cool of them and I’m glad for the representation.

On the other, that level of flexibility really speaks to the fact that this show absolutely did not have a solid pitch or a concrete idea beyond “There is a ghost and there is a girl” when they came up with it. It also explains why the McGee family feels so weak to me as a group of characters.

For the record, the Taiwanese mother, Sharon (played by Sumalee Montano, awesome name btw), is the best of the auxiliary family members. She works odd-jobs on “Gig Pig”, a brand-safe version of Task Rabbit, which I think is a really neat occupation I’ve never seen a TV show do before.

The dad and the brother…? Eh, they're not quite as interesting.

I still cannot tell if I like the father’s vocal performance or not. I genuinely don’t know how I feel about it. He’s played by Jordan Klepper, a correspondent for The Daily Show who doesn’t have any other voice credits to his name and, personally, I think it shows. He has the energy of someone doing a performance in a way that MIGHT work if the camera was on him and I could see his facial expressions and body language, but I don’t think he understands how to impart that kind of energy into a believable performance with just his voice.

The brother character, played by Michaela Deetz (Amethyst in Steven Universe) is a character I would describe as undercooked. He’s a troublemaker who’s almost-entirely-off-screen mischief goes as far as black market arms dealing, but they never take advantage of this or do anything fun with it. He only gets 1.5 episodes of focus and I thought both of them felt kind of flat.

A lot of the dialogue and vocal performances feel flat to me, actually. Not extremely flat. Just like... a little flat. Like when you’re at a McDonalds and the soda in the fountain isn’t quite as good as it would be if you got it from a can because they’re watering it down to save money.

This even affects the main duo. Ashley Burch and Dana Synder are both VO veterans at this point and have tons of performances I really like, but even they aren’t quite nailing it sometimes. This is more noticeable with Scratch, who has several lines that are mumbled to the point I actively couldn’t understand what he was saying, even after rewinding the video five times to listen back to it. To me, this is a sign of slightly weak voice direction, but what do I know? (NOTE: A lot, I’ve been a director for over ten years.)

The animation team deserves a lot of credit. They're doing their absolute best to squeeze every bit of life from each line of dialogue. It's the best work I've ever seen on rig animation! But, at the end of the day if the dialogue isn’t snappy on its own, there just isn’t much they can do to improve it. It’s probably more obvious to me than an average viewer since I binge-watched the show, but they use some variant of the following joke six or seven times across the show’s run:

MOLLY: (Says something comically bright and cheerful)
SCRATCH: Ugh. Molly. If I weren’t already dead, you’d be killing me.

That’s a fine joke, once. It’s not quite as fun the third time you hear it, and one time I noticed that they used it twice in the same episode. Guys, come on.

There’s also a character I haven’t mentioned yet who shows up whenever they need a second ghost character to do things. His name is Geoff. Geoff thinks he’s Scratch’s best friend and comes across as a sort of Diet Patrick Star. He always introduces himself by noting that his name is spelled “G-E-O-F-F, not J-E-F-F.” Whoever came up with this bit thought it was REALLY funny, because they do it fifty or sixty times across the whole series.

Geoff is the most nothing character in the cast. I want to call him “unpleasantly functional”. Let me try to explain what I mean by that.

Have you ever been watching a movie that’s following a played-out set of tropes or a generic plotline and a character walks onscreen and you know EXACTLY what their deal is before they even open their mouth? Like, maybe you’re watching a Bratz show or some other production aimed at younger girls. The characters are at school and suddenly a rich-looking blonde girl with mean eyeliner comes up to them and you’re like: “Oh. This is the bully character. She’s going to be a problem. And then maybe at the end she’ll get humiliated and the good guys will save the day and win the Air Bud trophy or whatever.” And then all of that happens in exactly that way in exactly that order?

Don’t get me wrong. Tropes aren’t a bad thing inherently. They’re shorthand. But sometimes when I’m presented with a character like that, like Geoff, and the writer just does nothing with them beyond executing the exact function that their archetype is meant to fill, I just get tired. So tired. Not to sound like that one tumblr post of the guy imagining the taste of potato chips, but if I can imagine the plot of your entire cartoon after seeing five seconds of it… why are you wasting my time making me watch it? Why didn’t you write something better?

That’s Geoff. It's also a surprising amount of the first season of The Owl House, which is a show I mostly really like and want to review once I get my voice back.

Anyways, I’d like to end on a more positive note and commend this show’s original songs. Like I said at the top of this review there’s one for every single episode (sometimes with reprises) and they’re surprisingly diverse in genre and tone. I can absolutely see Rob Cantor getting these dime-a-dozen, C-minus tier scripts and going “Well. I’ve got an idea of how to make this funnier!” and writing lyrics with better gags then the rest of the episode has combined. I really respect the guy for that. This one is probably my favorite.

A blurb for the second season of Molly McGee says that a new family of ghost-hunters moves in across the street. That sounds like a really fun change to the status quo! If they play with that and maybe make Andrea a main character and give her something fun to do with Libby/Molly, I think the show could really improve.

...Not that I'll know, because I definitely won't be watching the second season. LMAO.