The three season run of The PJs marked an odd nexus in the career of Eddie Murphy, who has on average found more critical acclaim in the last two decades in animated mediums than he has in live-action. The cartoon trend started with Mulan and pushed directly into The PJs a year later. The writing for the show was unexpectedly sharp and made incisive critiques of life in the ghetto, and it did it all with claymation characters, a notoriously time-consuming means of animation. Unfortunately for the world and Eddie Murphy, the show didn’t hit the popularity it deserved and had to settle with a truncated third season. It was a solid season of comedic television, but with only ten episodes it feels incomplete.
The perk of being an animated sitcom is that The PJs could take extreme, oddball stories and make them work where live-action shows could never dare go. Case in point, in one third season episode, Thurgood accepts a new air conditioning unit from a cigarette company in exchange for a gigantic ad on their building. It’s the kind of scope and visual grandeur a normal sitcom doesn’t embrace since the format usually involves group shots and a few close-ups of common living spaces – with exteriors only ever used for establishment shots. And while stop-motion clay animation isn’t exactly an easier medium to work with (each episode took roughly two months to film) it makes it easier for the audience to accept outlandish things like a giant billboard or two youths driving a car around the city and hitting a bum as a running gag.
The voice cast of The PJs was quite good for what it was, but in the third season you get more of the episodes where it wasn’t actually Eddie Murphy for Thurgood, and if you’re paying attention it’s noticeable. Phil Morris and Mark Moseley, the two actors who stepped in when Murphy was away, just don’t have the same energy and the episodes feel somewhat empty as a result.
DVD Bonus Features
None.
"The PJs: Season Three" is on sale October 4, 2011 and is not rated. Animation, Comedy. Directed by Mike Dietz, Mike Johnson, Sean Burns. Written by Steve Tompkins, Eddie Murphy, Larry Wilmore. Starring Eddie Murphy, Kevin Michael Richardson, Loretta Devine.
