Then I pretty much forgot about it until I saw it on Pluto TV's Comedy Central Animation channel. But unlike Daria or Beavis & Butthead or most of the other series they show on there they don't do marathons or blocks of it; they just showed 1 episode at a time at weird times like 2am or 9:30am when I usually couldn't watch.
So when I finally got Paramount+ I was able to actually binge all 10 episodes of the series. And it was...OK. There were some things going for it but I don't think it ever really latched on to a working concept. It's the kind of show that needed another season or so to work out all the kinks--or not. That's what happened with shows like The Simpsons, Family Guy, American Dad, South Park, and Beavis & Butthead; they all needed a season or two to really refine everything from the animation and voices to the stories and overall concept. I think another season of this could have allowed it to be better.
What was the show about? Phantom Readers would ask--if Phantom Readers could ask anything at all. The design aesthetic for the show is that the characters were drawn to look like those old 80s pictures you might see in nail salons and stuff. Only in this case they were cops in the titular Moonbeam City who do...stuff. The central character is Dazzle Novak (Rob Lowe), who's sort of like Sterling Archer in Archer in that he's arrogant and a complete narcissist but at the end of the day he gets things done in a half-assed fashion. His boss is Pizazz Miller (Elizabeth Banks), who like cop bosses everywhere is not fond of his wild card shenanigans, but damn it, he gets the job done! There's his weird Canadian rival Rad Cunningham (Will Forte) and Chrysalis (Kate Mara), the nerdy redheaded forensic cop who was instantly my favorite.
Some of the episodes are kinda weird like when Dazzle is unhappy with an Unsolved Mysteries-type reenactment of a crime he stopped so he winds up doing some big budget feature that goes way, way overbudget. Or another one where Dazzle thinks a dolphin witnessed a crime so he has Chrysalis build a robot dolphin and winds up falling in love with the dolphin--that he later finds out is male. One of the better ones had Rad beating Dazzle for the best parking space, so Dazzle goes to his stuntman father (voiced by Adam West) to learn to do some great trick but instead his father is killed and he and Chrysalis have to find the killer and challenge him to a "stunt-off." The final episode has Rad using his sister as his imaginary girlfriend and then his family uses that to put on a wedding to grift the mob, which ends up getting everyone shot in the shoulder.
The one with Dazzle and his father was probably the best because there was actual character development and a real case to solve. There was also a B-plot where Rad is trying to escape from the parking garage after losing his ticket--I've been there. I think if they had gone on in that vein in a second season it really would have been better.
Since the design aesthetic was cheesy 80s art, maybe they should have leaned into that more and made it more of a parody of over-the-top 80s action movies/TV shows like Beverly Hills Cop or Miami Vice. There was some of that, but probably not enough.
Anyway, I doubt there's ever going to be a revival or reboot or anything to let the show have that chance to refine itself. I usually try to bring things back to writing and in this case the lesson is most stories need a second draft to really refine the concepts of the first draft. Like the animated shows I mention, they all needed some time to gel and that's usually true when you're writing a story.
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