[A note on content: if you’re familiar with the series being discussed, you know that it covers some sensitive topics, but if you’re not, know that this piece will make reference to alcoholism, child abuse, sexual abuse, drug use, self-harm, and abortion, among other issues.]

I.

“I just wanted to do good so you could love me even more, Dad.” “Orel, I could never love you more. People only have a certain amount of love within them, and I’m afraid I have to divide mine up between at least a dozen people.”

In an era where American politics at every level is broken and disheartening, where our government dehumanizes the poor and the other, and where pundits quibble over the logistics of controversial ideas like “avoiding mass extinction", the explicitly political pop culture of even five to ten years ago seems dated. For example, others have written, better than I can, that The West Wing broke the brains of a generation of politicos that see politics as a game of witty repartee and out-logicking your opponents, rather than an ongoing material struggle with real human consequences. Parks and Recreation, while very funny and well-acted, presented an optimistic, can-do view of municipal government that doesn’t feel quite right here in Chicago, where our city councillors are currently all going down in a Viagra-addled haze. Veep gets a lot closer to what I’m looking for, but too many dark things are coming at us too quickly now, and its baroque insults aren’t as comforting as they used to be. All three of these aren’t even that old, but each feel out of date in their own way.

For more accurate depictions of how the political world works today, you have to move off of shows that are explicitly about politics and go to straight-out absurdist comedy, and Adult Swim had the best examples from the 2000s. The grotesque and hilarious work of Tim and Eric or PFFR ended up being a much better preparation for the power dynamics of 2019 than Aaron Sorkin’s headier stuff. One particular area of interest for me is the marriage of Christianity and conservative politics, which has always been pretty disheartening, and has now become so twisted and perverse that it’s hard to imagine any TV series or film capturing it accurately. But from 2005–2008, there was one little-watched claymation series that was twisted and perverse enough to prepare me for how politics and religion work together today: Dino Stamatopoulos' Emmy-nominated Moral Orel, now almost exactly a decade out from its cancellation, and a rare instance of comedy that has aged almost perfectly into the world of 2019.

In the middle of a lineup of stoner humor and Family Guy reruns, Moral Orel was an uniquely audacious piece of religious satire. Never breaking its 1950s-style paternal tone over 43 episodes, the show started with a simple formula: our cheerful claymation protagonist, 11-year-old Orel Puppington, would go to services at God’s Favorite Protestant Church in the tiny town of Moralton, try to live out the message of the sermon, and get it wrong to a horrifying extreme. This meant that the audience catching this after Aqua Teen Hunger Force every week found themselves watching:

11-year-old Orel becoming addicted to crack, in an attempt to be charitable to a drug dealer on his block

Orel learning how to masturbate and sneaking into women’s homes to impregnate them with a pastry bag as they slept, so as not to use sex for non-procreative ends

Orel reanimating the dead and unleashing an army of walking corpses on his town, in order to preserve God’s wonderful gift of life

Orel getting a Prince Albert piercing on his penis, to solidify his hypothetical future marriage

Orel drinking his own urine and eventually selling it as a sports drink, to avoid the sin of waste

If that all seems like a lot, well, you’re five episodes in with only 38 to go. Orel’s dad Clay, who was voiced by 30 Rock’s Scott Adsit, would eventually catch on to what was happening each week, give Orel a spanking in his study, and lecture him on some other oversight that just drove the hypocrisy home further (in the masturbation episode, Orel’s true sin, according to his father, is impregnating someone in a position other than missionary. Smoking crack is problematic because it is a “gateway to slang”). And then viewers would come back the following week to see what kind of trouble Orel will get into this time.

This was episode 3.

In late 2017, Roy Moore, former chief justice of Alabama and US Senate candidate, was credibly accused of repeatedly preying on teenage women throughout his career as a public servant. While Moore maintains his innocence, his own party basically conceded early on that all of this shit definitely happened; Republicans gave up on a “fake news” defense, but continued to give Moore full institutional support throughout his election after shrugging and saying “yeah he’s probably a pedophile”. One of the more notable defenses of Moore, though, was that we should cut him a break because Mary, the mother of Jesus, was also a teenage bride, so why should we judge other men attracted to teenage girls?

There’s plenty of hypocrisy you can call out in the party’s support of Moore, but the “Mary The Teenage Bride” bit stands out for its complete insanity. There are hypocrites and cynics, and then there are the people who missed the cynicism completely, heard that Mary was a teenage bride, and went with “oh ok, cool, we can all have teenage brides". They’re Orel Puppington-level true believers, making some truly horrible and unthinkable decisions in an earnest attempt to do right by the homily they just heard, up to and including vocal support of a pedophile in a Senate election.

Ben Garrison of Montana deserves praise for being the most credulous and, I suppose, artistically talented of the true believers.

While Orel is wide-eyed and earnest as he does these shocking things throughout the first two seasons of the show, he is still surrounded by the utterly broken adults of Moralton: his father is an alcoholic, the reverend is sexually frustrated, and the librarian is a authoritarian psychopath, as examples. Every adult in the series is consumed with misery, which cuts against Orel’s cheeriness, as well as the deliberately sunny animation and chipper music cues. Still, these other characters and their flaws were really just runner jokes when the show started; they wouldn’t take over the storyline until the later seasons.