Crossing Swords (Hulu) S01: B-

Tom Root and John Harvatine created this animated adult feature for Hulu. They have worked on Robot Chicken, The Simpsons and other mature audiences animated series. I am a fan of this genre so as soon as I heard of this series I added it to my playlist.

In medieval age Patrick (played by Nicholas Hoult) is an ordinary peasant that dreams of becoming a knight and fight for King Merriman (played by Luke Evans), as luck would have it he is accept it as knight trainee and with a series of unfortunate events he would become one of the greatest knights of the kingdom. Well they are not that many great knights before him to be fair.

I struggle to enjoy the series, I was even about to cancel it, but after a couple of episodes I decided to just go with the flow and try to enjoy ir or not. Like other animated series trying to make sense of the story or the episodic adventures is useless, the power that drives them is how nonsense they are. It has a lot of gore scenes and nudity. Most of it gratuitous and I do complain about it. The time where we would find amusing nudity on animated features seems so mid 90's, the same goes for violence and strong language. So instead of making me laugh about it they bored me I wasn't impressed by it and was waiting for that wow factor that would make a difference between Crossing Swords and Big Mouth or Disenchantment. And they almost failed that mission.

Almost, but that doesn't mean they hit the mark. It has a good cast apart from the mentioned above we also have Seth Green, Yvette Nicole Brown, Jameela Jamil, Brecking Meyer, Natasha Lyonne and Alfred Molina. But still that is not enough to make this series really shine. Don't ask me about the animation I have no complains series like South Park proved that you don't need state of the art Pixar quality level of animation to make an outstanding product. But still it was kinda weird to not see hands on this characters.

Not everything is bad some episodes are worth watching and they did make me laugh. It has a nice big story arc to make this ten episodes a little bit more interesting, but the best jokes come from single episode adventures. How Patrick destroys democracy or how the king deals with environmentalist and animal rights defenders when it comes to the kraken. The sweet 16 party and probably the true origins from it.

Crossing Swords might gain some cult fans over time, but those might not arrive before Hulu decides to axe the series. I don't see a bright future for Patrick and co. I did in the end finally understood the comedy style, but at the same time felt that it was a little too late for that. Maybe if its cheap to make Hulu might decide to give it another chance, but I'm not really counting on it.

On a side note, Hulu was one of the streaming services that I thought wasn't going to survive this hunger games: streaming service challenge. But now I see it as a strong candidate to survive. That is if Disney doesn't boicot their own service in favor of the challenging Disney+. If they try to keep as a family friendly service Disney+ and give more liberty of content to Hulu, they have a better chance to go face to face against Netflix or Amazon, probably becoming part of the big three services. Unless of course Disney gets jealous and axes Hulu or decreases its budget to favor their star service.