Can I Graduate? MTV Unleashes Its New Animated Series

MTV’s marketing department has seen better days. Its recent campaign, in which the music channel likens itself to a sexually transmitted disease (“I feel itchy. Do I have MTV?”), is weird, not funny. Its shameless self-promotion in the recent Josie and the Pussycats was seen, based on the film’s box office, by somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 people. And the press release for “Undergrads,” MTV’s most recent cartoon program, highlights the show’s major flaw. It’s not funny.

And unfortunately this is the most surprising thing about the show. With virtually every other current sitcom set in a white suburban household, “Undergrads” should be able to capitalize on the essentially untapped comic potential its college setting provides. Its creator, a 22-year-old NYU drop-out, should be able to give the show the youthful wit and energy that won him the MTV Character Screen Test competition halfway through his freshman year of college. Yet despite its billing as “irreverent” and, even more inaccurately, “humorous,” the show could hardly be more conventional or disappointing.

Had this show been made for NBC or CBS, it would have been reasonable not to expect much. Critics have made much of the fact that, with the exception of “The Simpsons” and a few other cartoon shows on Fox, no other network has had much success, critical or commercial, with attempts at a prime time animated series. But whenever this point is made, the reviewer is undoubtedly forgetting “Daria,” the “Beavis and Butthead” spin-off that has consistently been one of the best, most underrated programs on television.

While MTV has noticeably declined during the era of “TRL” and “Undressed,” “Daria” has achieved what the network originally set out to do. “Daria” is an insightful, ironic dissection of high school culture and its victims. Its consistent quality has been one of the few positive constants in the networks programming over the past few years (you’ll forgive me if I neglect to praise “Say What? Karaoke”).

So my hopes were raised at the prospect that the network might continue the short but hallowed tradition begun by “Daria,” with “Undergrads” taking on, as its press release labels it, the “strange developmental purgatory that is the college freshman experience.” But alas; “Undergrads” comes closer to “Saved By the Bell: The College Years” than it does to “Daria” in finding humor in the maelstrom of social and academic changes that accompany the first year of college.

“Undergrads’” biggest failure is that it relies on college stereotypes so stale that most middle school students will be tempted to tune out. “Daria” can be appreciated by anyone, but perhaps the greatest reason for the show’s success is that it only becomes funnier if one is immersed in high school life and the paradoxes that are so fundamentally a part of it. But instead of digging for the deeper comic ironies inherent in dorm life, “Undergrads” is content to recycle the characters and settings used in Animal House and other familiar college films.

The press release for the show emphasizes this fatal weakness. The assorted colleges attended by “Undergrads’” four main characters comply with only the shallowest stereotypes about post-high school institutions. Gimpy, a student at Tekerson Tech, spends his time playing juvenile pranks on his RA and ordering around his overweight, bespectacled followers. Nitz, an apathetic whiner, and Cal, an airheaded hedonist, attend State U. Rocko, a “maladjusted, underachieving” jock with alcohol issues, attends (you guessed it!) a community college.

“Undergrads” does show some promise in its lesser elements. Jessie, Nitz’s hall mate and potential romantic interest, occasionally has something interesting to say about frat initiation or semi-annual streaking rituals. The show doesn’t even deal with professors or schoolwork in its first two episodes, so perhaps there is hope that it will find more substantial material later on. But based on its early installments, the show is a disappointment.