Friday Night TV Murder Pile: Fox puts down HouseBroken

Lisa Kudrow's animated pet comedy had a crazy-good voice cast, but crazy-bad ratings after 2 seasons on Fox

By William Hughes | May 10, 2024 | 11:03pm

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Friday Night TV Murder Pile: Fox puts down HouseBroken

We have zero context for this image, and that is fine Image: Fox

Another Friday night, another TV show quietly taken out back and given the Old Yeller treatment by networks hoping to get the dirty work done before their weekends start. This week, that means Fox has just announced that it’s pulling the plug on two-season animated comedy HouseBroken, part of its Animation Domination block of primetime shows. The series starred Lisa Kudrow and a whole bunch of extremely talented people as a crew of animals doing what we can only bring ourselves, after a cursory examination to describe as “Secret Life Of Pets shit, except for grown-ups.”

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The series, which debuted back in May of 2021, was created by Gabrielle Allen, Simpsons alum Jennifer Crittenden, and Clea DuVall, the latter also starring in the series. Which, again, had just a ridiculously stacked cast of voice performers on hand, with Sam Richardson, Will Forte, Sharon Horgan, Tony Hale, Jason Mantzoukas, and Nat Faxon all starring, and regular guest roles from Maria Bamford, Brian Tyree Henry, Greta Lee, Timothy Simons, and more. Truly, the most incredible voice cast we’ve ever seen attached to a show that, if you’d asked us about it two hours ago, we would have been unable to confirm that it existed.

HouseBroken last aired new episodes last August, so the writing has presumably been on the wall for the series for a minute. The show regularly brought in fewer than half a million viewers in live viewing, which, even for Fox’s animated projects—which rarely crack a million people live, even for long-running shows like The Simpsons, Bob’s Burgers, and Family Guy—is on the lower end of the list. (Compare it to Dan Harmon’s Krapopolis, which only does slightly better, but has already been renewed through season 3.)