Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
When we talk about streaming culture, we’re usually enthusing about what’s new, but one of the best things about streaming is how it’s made old and obscure cult hits available to a new generation. Presenting Cult Corner: your weekly look into hidden gems and long-lost curiosities that you can find on streaming.
There’s a dark side of peak TV we don’t like to talk about often. Though today’s current television climate has given us some of the most compelling episodes and characters around, far too often our favorite shows overstay their welcome. Something that was awe-inspiring and revolutionary in Season One can feel exhaustingly drawn out and overplayed in Season Three. That’s why Disney XD’s dark fantasy Gravity Falls is such a delightful treasure.
Created by the brilliant Alex Hirsch, Gravity Falls follows Dipper (Jason Ritter) and Mabel (Kristen Schaal), a pair of twins who spend their summer hanging out with their weird and sketchy Grunkle Stan (Hirsch). It’s a show that had the potential to never end. Grunkle Stan runs a hoax-filled shop of cheap mysteries, but the more time Dipper and Mabel spend in Gravity Falls, the more they realize that their Gunkle’s home may genuinely be the weirdest place in the entire world. This is a town filled with surprisingly sensitive gnomes, teenager-hating ghosts, swamp monsters, disturbingly vengeful wax figurines, and so many more oddities. If Hirsch wanted, he could have easily made his series into a timeless monster-of-the-week tale, like a darker Scooby-Doo or a sweeter and less nightmare-inducing Courage the Cowardly Dog. Instead, Hirsch ties his children’s show to strict narrative and timeline, and as a result, Disney and Hirsch have given us one of the smartest and structurally purest shows on television.
Through the show’s two seasons and 40 episodes, the show sets out to tell one story — the story of Dipper and Mabel’s crazy summer. Ultimately that is a story that’s filled with countless adventures, heartbreak, self-exploration, magical journals, and some of the most shocking revelations in the history of children’s animation, but it’s still one story. At the end of the series, Dipper and Mabel pack up and go home. Their summer is done, and it’s time to leave.
Gravity Falls likely could have lasted two or three more seasons without suffering too much story-wise. Would it have been a bit of a stretch that this one summer lasted five seasons? Sure, but we’ve believed more insane things for less emotional payoff, especially when comedy and animation is concerned. And I feel safe saying the show’s rabid fanbase could have kept the series going for several years. After moving to Disney XD, the series broke viewing record after record for the new channel, and though its last episode was February 15, 2016, online communities for the show still stay busy. Even if Disney XD was no longer interested in the series, I’m sure Netflix or Hulu would be happy to scoop it up. Gravity Falls touched a nerve for rabid animation lovers that shows like Adventure Time, Steven Universe, and Invader Zim. The series had a home.
Instead, Gravity Falls ended after two seasons, both on top and at the request of its creator, and the show is so much more powerful for it. Season Two gleefully dives into the underlying mystery that was hinted at during Season One, and the series never lets up from there. Gravity Falls watches as a borderline perfect mystery series. It begins as fun, innocent, and a little thought-provoking, but by the series’ end, it’s insanely complicated and almost overwhelmingly huge, both on a universe level and from an emotional standpoint.
Gravity Fall’s last three episodes — Weirdmageddon 1, Weirdmageddon 2: Escape from Reality, and Weirdmageddon 3: Take Back the Falls — are proudly and unabashedly, well, weird. Louis CK guest stars as an angry, people-eating monster for god’s sake. If you haven’t seen the entire series, its finale will absolutely not make sense. And yet, when you look back to how the series started, there’s never an episode that feels out of place. Each episode slowly and smartly marches toward the series’ odd finale.
From beginning to end, Gravity Falls was the story of Dipper and Mabel’s summer, and the show never veers from that goal. The show’s unyielding commitment to its beautifully bizarre story is almost as impressive in this television age as the show’s never-ending string of confusing ciphers.
