Sheep in the Big City is a strange show. I remember loving it when I was younger and only a handful of episodes were shown on constant repeat, but now that I look at it as a whole, I can easily see its flaws. I can easily see why it was canceled. For those of you who don't know, Sheep in the Big City was a contestant in a contest Cartoon Network held a few years ago. Different animation studios would send in short episodes of their proposed show and users would vote to decide which one would be made into a series. And it's as if the creators of Sheep never intended to win. When the series begins, things quickly become formulaic.
In every episode, General Specific tries to capture Sheep for his sheep-powered ray-gun. (What does he need a ray-gun for anyway? The show never explains.) Anyway, interspersed between every three-part capture sheep plot are "commercials" that poke fun at pop culture. These actually are funny, for the most part. But the show's main sense of humor comes from taking figures-of-speech, sayings, etc. literally. These are pretty juvenile at best, when they're not being glaringly obvious (One example is a man saying "I'm not a doctor but I play one on the TV", followed by him jumping around on a TV set, shouting "I'm a doctor! I'm playing on the TV!"). And would you believe the most hilarious moment of this series comes in the pilot episode? The characters are going about their business when a cute and saccharine little girl asks them to help find her sheep. One of the characters then proceeds to grab her by the head and nonchalantly fling her over their shoulder. If this kind of outrageous, unexpected humor had been used more often, who knows how it could have improved the show.
But as it is, Sheep in the Big City has too few moments of good humor and falls prey to its own plot. It probably sounds like I hate this show, but I don't. As I mentioned earlier, I loved this when I was younger, but now that I've watched the entire series through twice, its flaws are all too obvious.
