Instead of successfully having bite, it plays more like obviously fake vampire teeth - and it sidelines three of our most splendidly wild animated comedy characters into delivering arms-folded, uninvested wisecracks about stuff happening to them, rather than making stuff happen. The scripts stare at our modern world with a head on a swivel, eager to poke at every single aspect (especially if it involves a modicum of progressivism, but also if it involves joked-to-death topics like Russian trolls and Trumpism) and call it dumb. 'Woke jokes' run rampant, with trite and hackneyed observations about current-day hipsters and how sensitive they are. The opening crack about how wild and funny it is that bathrooms have gender-neutral signs is only the tip of the iceberg of this strangely conservative-leaning shift in comic voice. Here, the returning cast and new showrunner Wellesley Wild (of Family Guyfame, which brings a lot of this show's venomous new tone shift into context) paint the Animaniacs as our voices of reason our figureheads of intelligence reacting to a world gone mad our Jim Halperts, not our Michael Scotts.

Download the new animaniacs