Summary
Dating is the name of the game in “Romantic Meat-Based Adventure”, as Judy’s own romantic woes make her worry that her father might end up dying alone.
Ever since the premiere of The Great North, the show has made no secret of patriarch Beef’s emotional unavailability. I mean, this is a man who pretended his wife had been savaged by a bear so he didn’t have to grapple with her having left him. It seems like since then, little has changed as far as his love life is concerned, and the hook of “Romantic Meat-Based Adventure” is that Judy thinks the condition might be hereditary. She’s finding it difficult to commit to kissing her new fancy man, Steven (Kelvin Yu), and it’s easy to imagine her father might be to blame.
Of course, Judy has issues of her own, as she explains to her imaginary best friend Alanis Morissette. Her first-ever kiss with a classmate by the name of Anderson Gustafsson went terribly wrong when his luscious hair got caught in her braces. That particular mishap has put her off lip-locking for the foreseeable future, but perhaps if her old man can learn to love again there’ll be a trickle-down effect?
After a family meeting in The Great North season 1, episode 4, the Tobins decide that the best course of action is to force Beef to attend a meat and meet singles mixer, a good chance to hook up with women and go home with sausages. Since they know he’ll be reluctant, they also agree to attend a chainsaw basics workshop with him as payment — a dream come true for a beardy slab of beef like… well, Beef.
The problem with the mixer is that there will be a lot of men (including Steven, much to Judy’s horror) but very few women — luckily, Beef claps eyes on one who takes his fancy almost immediately, a hysterically plain-looking woman named Dell (Brooke Dillman) who’s widowed several times over. They have a fair amount in common and things seem to be going well between them, but when Beef asks her out she refuses him outright. Dismayed, he returns home with the kids to find her waiting for him, which is when she explains that she believes herself to be cursed since all her husbands meet horrific ends. I’ve certainly heard worse rejection excuses. After a cooling-off period, she recommends he hits her up again, which I suppose is progress of a kind.
It’s certainly enough progress for Judy. The Great North season 1, episode 4 ends with her heading back to the bar to kiss Steven after a genuinely earnest conversation with her father and the legacy of loss that her mother’s sudden departure left them with. It’s a sharp tonal pivot, but “Romantic Meat-Based Adventure” handles it admirably. This is a cut above most sitcoms, animated or otherwise.
