This was a good listen because the sound effects and music usage was incredibly well done. Seth Adam Sher should be proud of his work.
However, the story is incredibly cheesy. Each of the characters could be role called in a spice girls song, as the tomboy, the dumb muscle, the foreign friend, the tease, the southern gentlemen, the British guy, the double agent, the mad scientist, the bratty one, and so on. The effort to make the characters unique or give them depth undermines itself by the comedy or comes out of the left-field based upon what we know already.
The comedy is not witty, but it can be humorous until the joke becomes recurring and subsequently beat to death. There are several plot points which happen during the seasonal time jumps and have flimsy, if not stupid, explanations. Particularly, Corny not liking Joe dating Esmelada and Lily and Freudenburg breaking up. The developments are clearly for the humor it generates by putting characters in conflict, but contradicts what we know about the characters from the attempts at pathos. Later seasons the writer, Jeffrey Bridges, retcons several things to attempt to tie some threads together. The final season became very self-indulgent with prequel plots that had no dramatic tension, or worse, one of the prequels destroyed any respect I had for the character.
The best part of the show may be the fake commercials for Umket, but as the show goes on, they lose their punch and start to drag on. Crossing over into the main plot was a good idea, but towards the end, I started skipping them.
Honestly, given the 1930's serial tone, I could be forgiving of those issues. The real problem, just like in my Kingery review, is the changing of people behind the production. Several recastings that happen as the show goes on. Rene Christine Jones is phenomenal, but she sadly stands alone as the only decent recasting. The rest feel like they're trying to imitate the previous actor and the performances suffer for it.
The reason this became a one-star instead of a three-star review, is that Seth Adam Sher stops directing after episode 47. He was professional enough to stay on as the announcer through the rest of the series and thankfully wasn't recast, but it's very unusual. Especially as the final episode feels like a planned event, I'm not sure of why he stopped.
Given the rotating production team on the Kingery, and the several recastings there as well, there seems to be a pattern with Pendant.
