Do young people remember “Sausage Party”? The movie about the hot dog that really wanted to find his place in a bun? While it may not feel that old to viewers of a certain age, the comedy about sentient food discovering the truth about what happens when they leave the grocery store is already eight years old, a lifetime in pop culture. And there are elements of it that feel even older, a product of a pre-COVID time when comedies aimed more directly at adults were more common.
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The truth is that the adult comedy genre is more prevalent on TV in the 2020s than it was before, and so it makes perfect sense that the 8-episode “Sausage Party: Foodtopia” would pop up on Prime Video, a place made much wealthier by star Seth Rogen’s producorial work on “The Boys.” The great actor/writer/producer got the culinary band back together for an original show that works in fits and starts, basically unfolding like what would happen if a script for “Sausage Party 2” was broken up into 8 relatively short chapters (20-25 minutes). While some episodes feel like they’re spinning their wheels in the same pun-heavy and food-destructive comedy arenas, there are enough funny sequences, buoyed by A-list voice work, to make it easy to digest even if you don’t remember the movie.
“Foodtopia” basically picks up after the apocalyptic end of the animated comedy, wherein human beings, with the assist of some bath salts, learned that their food had hopes, dreams, and truly intense sexual desires. The destruction of the “humies” forces many of the characters from the original film into a world they still don’t completely understand. Let’s just say the first time it rains leads to the kind of disaster movie destruction that one could imagine happens when water meets food.
Frank (Rogen), Brenda (Kristen Wiig), Barry (Michael Cera), and Sammy Bagel Jr. (Edward Norton) are the main narrative forces this season as the food quickly creates a new society to keep each other safe without human intervention getting in the way. Before you know it, there’s a currency (human teeth) and even a class system. If the film was about food learning about the lies that kept them happy, the show is about how hard it is to maintain peace and unity in a new society. In some ways, it’s more thematically ambitious than the movie, which leads to a few interesting themes about power and trust, but it also makes for a show that can feel fractured and unfocused at times, unsure of what it’s really saying, partially because it’s basically a 175-minute movie.
As for voice work, Rogen and Wiig are typically great, but the series truly belongs to Cera, who gives his talented all to a very different Barry. The runt of the hot dog package from the movie has developed a sort of bloodlust from the carnage between the film and show, forcing him to butt heads with Brenda & Frank when they discover a human (a great Will Forte) who might be able to tell them about little things like rain and capitalism if Barry doesn’t brutally murder him. Meanwhile, Norton’s Sammy struggles with grief over the death of Kareem Abdul Lavash (David Krumholtz) while Sam Richardson rocks the voice work behind a new character named Julius, who becomes the first de facto leader of utopia, and everyone learns a few lessons about the corruptive nature of power. He’s an orange, of course.
The mercifully brief episodes of “Foodtopia” work to the show’s advantage. Whereas the film struggled to keep its main idea afloat for the runtime of a feature, “Foodtopia” gets to work in 20-minute bursts of entertainment, but there’s a version of the show that does that even more effectively than this one. While some of the ideas about the weaknesses inherent in an emerging society are entertaining, the show really clicks more when those can be backdrop for generally goofy behavior like a “Burning Man” mega-concert with pun characters like Prune-o Mars and Pita Ora or even an ode to a hit action film late in the season. There’s an amazing sequence with an egg who finds herself at the bottom of the social ladder that illustrates the potential of a version of this show that allowed for more creative diversions. Over a relatively short season, the writers feel like they lose interest in the overall plotting, and it would have worked better if they could have just leaned into self-contained stories, almost like a Saturday morning cartoon for adults.
That didn’t happen, and so “Sausage Party: Foodtopia” feels like a show kind of caught between a feature sequel and its potential as a TV series. Now that Frank, Brend, and Barry have returned and brought along a few new friends, it’s certainly possible that future series could find a better balance in the writing. And there’s just enough wit and sharp humor here to make that an enticing potential meal. [C+]
“Sausage Party: Foodtopia” premieres on Prime Video July 11.