Beavis and Butt-head Still Idiotic, No Longer Essential

Beavis and Butt-head are back—but two decades later, MTV’s pair of dimwits is no longer critiquing just music videos. They have now added reality shows, movies, and viral videos to their repertoire. But do we still need them?

• Matthew Gilbert, Boston Globe: Back in the early 1990s, Beavis and Butt-head was perfect for the time. Kids were starting to become “media-savvy”—AKA, “growing cynical and ironic”—and the show “perfectly captured that punchy tone.” But nowadays, reality shows will be the first to mock their own ridiculousness, and most audience members are already laughing at them. “Plus, we still have South Park” for our necessary dose of snark. The new Beavis and Butt-head, therefore, “works just OK” and “isn’t as essential as it once was."

• Robert Lloyd, Los Angeles Times: Today’s Beavis and Butt-head are still making the same types of jokes (16 and Pregnant “would be a better show if they showed them actually getting pregnant.”), but they now “sound less like snarky kids and more like grumbling old men.”
• James Poniewozik, Time: Who cares whether Beavis and Butt-head can be as relevant as they once were? “As long as the central stories are viciously funny enough—which, at least in the one new episode I’ve seen, they are—the boys of Highland have a place on my TV.” Yes, you can find lots of other people making fun of reality shows—“but it’s still a pleasure to find someone really funny doing it.”
• Jon Caramanica, New York Times: “We find Beavis and Butt-Head where we left them — resiliently stuck to that dirty couch, watching their flickering TV, laughing with that combination of giggle and heavy pant.” As they have not changed, neither has the show been updated visually. That’s “as it should be: Teenage lethargy is perennial.” Even so, the first episode is “tepid and distant,” the jokes “slow and hands-off, less disdainful than uninterested.”

The show premieres tonight at 10pm. To see the hilarious results of its ad campaign taking over a website, click here. (More Beavis and Butthead stories.)