conatonc on Gravity Falls

[froodle]

If you guys haven't checked out this show yet, you should. I'm working on a more extensive write-up about it for Popmatters, but I wanted to put the word out tonight. Disney Channel is marathoning pretty much the entire series so far tomorrow night (Friday) starting at 6pm Eastern, and you should watch/DVR it.

It's essentially a kids' show, but the jokes cut across all ages and the show is steeped in the supernatural. You can tell that creator Alex Hirsch has spent lots of time watching The X-Files, Twin Peaks, Eerie, Indiana, etc. Within the space of 10 episodes, the show has managed to set up the premise (12-year old twins Dipper and Mabel are sent to the remote Oregon town of Gravity Falls to live with their Great Uncle Stan for the summer), dig really deeply into the two main characters, develop a whole town's worth of weird supporting characters, and done some incredibly layered callback jokes.

The time travel episode from last week features a guy from the future having to travel around in the background of the earlier episodes of the show having to pick up the random junk that Dipper and Mabel inadvertently left lying around as they were traveling through time. And if you go back and watch the first couple episodes of the show, you can actually see the future guy in the background. That's some dedication to a joke that will only make sense when watching the episodes again.

Incidentally, this is the first show that Evelyn (she's 6 now) finds both hilarious and terrifying in equal measure. It's great.