Dan Harmon's Krapopolis Digs Up Laughs in Ancient Greece

Cynicism is a brilliant and necessary new tool in the new Dan Harmon-created animated sitcom, Krapopolis. Set in an ancient Greek landscape where every vulnerable settlement is just a day’s walk from a rampaging cannibal horde, the unassuming farmers of the fledgling title city have been gathered together under the promised protection of King Tyrannis, son of the goddess Deliria.

Sadly for them (but not for viewers), Tyrannis is voiced with signature nasal wryness by Richard Ayoade, his imposing name belied by his unimpressive stature and complete lack of martial prowess. Meanwhile, Deliria, Krapopolis’ ostensible goddess protector, is a preening, self-impressed diva far more concerned with her slipping standing on Mount Olympus’ social register (and pansexual orgies with her husband Shlub, an eagle-horse-lion-scorpion-human monster) than in either her disappointing son’s grand plans for this thing called “civilization” or the mortal health of his subjects. (Indeed, once Tyrannis’ subjects collapse while building her a temple, she simply animates their broken bodies to get the job finished.)

Continuing Krapopolis’ stellar casting choices, Deliria is played by Ted Lasso's Hannah Waddingham, while Shlub is voiced by What We Do in the Shadows’ Matt Berry, and if you can think of two more fitting performers to bring to life a towering, dangerously capricious goddess and a horny, beaming sex beast, more power to you. Rounding out the cast as Tyrannis’ semi-supportive siblings are Pam Murphy as sister Stupendous, a one-eyed barbarian powerhouse, and Duncan Trussell as inventor brother Hippocampus, whose hybrid fish-human appearance, one assumes, stems from his parents’ penchant for screwing literally anything that walks, crawls, or swims. (Shlub announces his and Deliria’s arrival in the pilot, “All Hail the Goddess of Likability!,” by proudly telling Tyrannis they’d heard about his city project “from something we were eating and or having sex with.”)

For Harmon, who wrote the pilot episode in addition to his creator duties, such a setup offers Rick and Morty’s freewheeling possibilities within an intriguingly narrower framework. Sure, with gods and goddesses flitting around, turning unsuspecting humans into snakes on a whim, Krapopolis can stretch its reality beyond Tyrannis’ schemes for a world where might not only makes right but regularly eats the un-mighty for dinner. But the series’s first two episodes (follow-up “The Stuperbowl” sees Tyrannis’ plans for an alliance-fostering proto-Olympics go off the tracks) are solidly built around the king’s seemingly idealistic plans to move humanity forward.

That’s “seemingly,” since Tyrannis himself is quick to admit that his entire mission was born of a desire not to be murdered by someone much stronger than him. (The mission statement of the series is essentially Patton Oswalt’s signature “My Weakness Is Strong” bit.) Timidly confronting the hulking cannibal chief Asskill (Harmon regular Keith David, gleefully stealing scenes with his sly baritone) who’s come to sack Krapopolis after a Trojan horse ploy by Stupendous and Hippocampus goes hilariously awry, Tyrannis explains, “This will not shock you but I sort of talked my way into the job,” further confessing, “My endgame was to make a world that ran on talking — clearly for selfish reasons.”

The universality of Krapopolis’ take on human nature and society is undermined whenever the show indulges in occasional winking pop culture jokes, such as when the Stuperbowl is attended by Broseidon, Poseidon’s douchey son who’s “famous for being famous.” But for every anachronistic bit of low-hanging olives (such as two Stuperbowl spectators who happen to speak in sportscaster-ese), there are more that are invested in deft comic world-building, as when Hippocampus opines on how Tyrannis managed to convince people to follow him in the first place. “He tells powerless people they’re powerful and they like that, so they give him all their power,” the fish-man states, while at one point the unbeatably strong Stupendous assures Tyrannis that even she’s figured out that “in a million years, weak sissies like you will be running things.”

The show’s animation style is less showily “anything goes” than Rick and Morty’s, but that’s in keeping with Krapopolis’ more grounded, if still fanciful, nature. The three leads are so well cast and perfect for their roles that the work of Murphy and Trussell have to play catchup. Thankfully, the standout pilot scene where Hippocampus and Stupendous bloodily escape from Asskill’s camp while they and their pursuers tearfully apologize for every violent action (Hippocampus’ gift horse having accidentally unlocked the barbarians’ concepts of gratitude and betrayal) helps elevate their profiles in the ensemble nicely.

Meanwhile, Krapopolis finds time for rewarding beats of sheer silliness, as when Tyrannis’ would-be rousing speech keeps getting interrupted by offscreen questions. (“We may die today” “How likely?” “It’s a speech, Steve, not an interview. Can we do questions later?” “Doesn’t sound like it.”) And, after being transformed into a snake and then back again (in Deliria’s battle with a spiteful Athena), the newly-human Tyrannis has to reconfigure his snake-brain, assessing, “I have strange legs. Hot sun! Danger? Only mice.”

For a series that needs to establish its elaborate world and themes for viewers quickly, Krapopolis is remarkably economical in its first two episodes. The family dynamic is less so, although Waddingham and Ayoade show glimpses of shades to come in their mother-son sparring. When Deliria underplays her mortal children’s impending death by cannibal horde, her explanation, “You die anyway — the social stakes are higher when your social life is forever,” adds another dimension to their constant conflict. Berry, with his barrel-chested enthusiasm, makes Shlub’s hedonistic horniness a hoot, even if his relationship with his offspring is less defined as yet. (A second episode subplot where he imagines science-minded son Hippocampus is the world’s first serial killer isn’t particularly fruitful, although the wounded Shlub happily crowing, “So you really were learning and not just a creepy death-perv!,” to his exonerated son is a huge laugh.)

Fox is clearly enamored of Harmon’s new-old world, as Krapopolis has been renewed for two additional seasons in advance of the series’s premiere. And it’s not hard to see why. Apart from Harmon’s pedigree and that of Season 1 showrunner, BoJack Horseman’s Jordan Young (Rick and Morty and Community alum Alex Rubens will take over for Seasons 2 and 3), Krapopolis has clearly got outsized ambitions for a show that incorporates everything from the underpinnings of Western society to a (literally) Pan-sexual beast man. As with any promising new civilization, time will tell how solid a foundation these two episodes truly are.

Krapopolis premieres September 24 at 8:00 PM ET on Fox with two episodes. 

Dennis Perkins is a freelance entertainment writer with bylines at The A.V. Club, Paste, Ultimate Classic Rock, The Portland Press Herald, and elsewhere.