Streaming on: Prime Video
Episodes viewed: 8 of 8
When the film Sausage Party was first announced way back in 2010, some journalists expressed scepticism that it was even real. Surely no studio would fund an R-rated feature film about animated talking food with graphic scenes of murder, violence and sex? But no. Sausage Party was very real, and if you don’t remember it from nearly a decade ago, it’s easy to feel like it was some sort of fever dream.
Like that original film, this eight-episode TV sequel — which sees much of the voice cast return, including Seth Rogen, Kristen Wiig, Michael Cera, David Krumholtz, and Edward Norton — is the sort of creation that does beggar belief. How did this even get made? That’s not even a quality assessment. It is just slightly mind-boggling that it exists. You will ponder this from Episode 1, when — in the aftermath of the food-human war, which leaves food now the dominant species on Earth — our edible pals celebrate with a mass orgy in a car park, much like they did at the end of the film. And it is graphic: a can of chicken noodle soup sucking off a banana; a potato-based human centipede; a pickle entering the holes of a slice of Swiss cheese; a can of tuna licking out an orange; etc, ad infinitum. As Wiig’s hot-dog bun Brenda Bunson says proudly, watching on: “They’re like our children. And now our children are fucking each other.”
This could not be any more Not-For-Everyone if it tried. But that’s okay.
It continues in this vein throughout all eight episodes. Most notably, there is a sex scene in Episode 6 so explicit and so ridiculous — Team America’s puppet-shagging looks positively tame by comparison — that Amazon requested a content warning, one the creators are “proud to announce”. There is evident juvenile back-of-the-classroom glee at how naughty this all is, and how much they are able to get away with, and that in itself is quite funny. That, obviously, also means it will very much put a lot of people off. This could not be any more Not-For-Everyone if it tried. But that’s okay.
Outside of the straightforwardly outrageous stuff, the comedy here is somewhat mixed; Rogen and his writing partner Evan Goldberg seem to have taken a step back from the writing side (though they remain as producers), and the series as a whole doesn’t have quite the same comedic punch as the original film. There is still solid pun work on show here — shout out to Megan Thee Scallion and Tina Turnip — and there are some enjoyable film parodies, including a Fast Five car-chase riff and a pitch-perfect nod to Call Me By Your Name’s end-credits. But just as many of the jokes feel a little unleavened.
Like the original film, it also looks kind of ugly — which, you suspect, is partly the joke: a mickey-take of Disney and DreamWorks films with the aesthetic of notorious cheap-and-Christian animated series VeggieTales. That visual comedy made sense in the original film; spread across over four hours of television, it becomes a bit exhausting. It’s not pretty, and not only because of the scenes when a hot-dog sausage jumps up the arse of a human.
Still, like the original film, this is a show that has some unexpectedly big ideas on its mind. The food culture here acts as kind of a proto-society, slowly learning concepts like private property, currency, political systems, and law enforcement (which gives Michael Cera’s hot-dog sausage Frank a “sense of irrational power that I know will not be a problem going forward”). It all leads to a possible culinary civil war, and the prospect of food-fascism. This is satire at its most crude and dumb — it has Academy Award-nominated actor Edward Norton, as Sammy Bagel Jr, delivering lines like “Meshuggana cunt!” — but it is not entirely a stoned 3am conversation writ large. (It is quite a lot of that, too.)