Review: The Rob Lowe-naissance gets animated with sex, violence and vanity in 'Moonbeam City'

Review: The Rob Lowe-naissance gets animated with sex, violence and vanity in ‘Moonbeam City’

By Robert LloydTelevision Critic

Sept. 16, 2015 2:30 PM PT

The Rob Lowe-naissance continues Wednesday night with Comedy Central’s “Moonbeam City,” the first of two fall series to star the ageless man-boy wonder. (“The Grinder,” with Lowe as a TV lawyer with pretensions to practicing law, premieres later this month on Fox.)

This one, created by “Conan” writer Scott Gairdner, is a law-enforcement cartoon with lots of sex and sex jokes and violence and violence jokes, and a vain and somewhat incompetent, or accidentally competent, hero at its center — very much like FX’s “Archer,” but with its own set of stylistic referents. Set in the far reaches of Lowe’s own career — the 1980s, or something resembling them — it is something like “Miami Vice” filtered through “St. Elmo’s Fire,” filtered through MTV, filtered through the art of Patrick Nagel.

It is a vision of 1980s retro-futuristic noir — which was kind of a thing at the time. (See Alan Rudolph’s “Trouble in Mind,” for example, or “The Warriors,” or Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner,” for that matter.)

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The palette is long on peach and pink and neon violet; the shoulders are padded, the sleeves rolled. There are fancy cocktails with crazy straws, wind chimes and crystals, dolphins in the bay, synthesizers on the soundtrack. Everything is oversized. It is rather fetching, in a nauseating way.

Indeed, much of this won’t make sense without some familiarity with the decade and its New Wave styles. Younger viewers (18 and over) are directed to viewing Duran Duran videos on YouTube and image-searching Helmut Newton.

Lowe plays Moonbeam City police detective Dazzle Novak, physically modeled (I would say) on his own younger self; Elizabeth Banks plays his chief, Pizazz Miller, who is occasionally lit as if through Venetian blinds, a stylistic tic of the times. Will Forte is Dazzle’s sad psycho rival, Rad Cunningham. (“His name should be Dan Druff,” says Dazzle, “because I wish he’d stay out of my hair.”) Kate Mara is the relatively normal Chrysalis Tate, “a junior tech underling in the tech department,” who becomes his partner.

I rather liked it, though for its form possibly more than for its content. (Note: Subsequent episodes improve on the pilot.)

Occasionally it aspires toward satire. “It’s mostly poor people,” Dazzle says dismissively of the crime wave taking over the city.

In the three days that all the police are all at CopCon — where Dazzle runs a panel on his “Keep What You Confiscate” way to riches and performs with his glam rockabilly band, and there are demonstrations of the Diarrhealizer and the Interrobot — the ghetto grows green. (“Without constant police brutality,” says one former hoodlum, “it’s like a weight has been lifted”). Dazzle, philosophical: “You can’t stop the march of progress, in her knee-high jackboots, cheapening the price of human life a little more every day.”

More often it runs along these lines, typical of cartoons (and there are many) whose stock in trade is the undercutting of overheated heroic/villainous norms.

Dazzle, turning down a bribe: “I’m afraid I’m not ruled by greed. Sorry … no dice.”

Villain: “Oh, there’s dice, all right. The biggest dice you’ve ever seen, with your name on them.”

“My name is on big dice?”

“Yes.”

“My full name?”

Confused pause. “Your name’s on the dice.”

“But there’s still dots on the dice.”

“There’s nothing to do with dice, it’s a figure of speech.”

“I don’t understand how that’s a threat.”

“Because you — I’m threatening you.”

“If you’re going to threaten me, you’re going to need to be much. More. Articulate.”

Say goodnight, Gracie.