{"id":618043,"date":"2026-09-08T09:04:10","date_gmt":"2026-09-08T09:04:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/618043\/"},"modified":"2026-09-08T09:04:10","modified_gmt":"2026-09-08T09:04:10","slug":"dang-review-misfit-siblings-and-gen-z-humor-ground-animated-sitcom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/618043\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Dang!’ review: Misfit siblings and Gen Z humor ground animated sitcom"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\u201cDang!,\u201d an amiably chaotic new adult animated comedy premiering Tuesday on Netflix, tells the story of the Dangs, three Chinese American siblings living in New York City. Eunice (Poppy Liu<\/a>, \u201cHacks\u201d) and older brother Andrew (Andrew Law) share a walk-up apartment in Chinatown; at 26, she\u2019s still determinedly the baby, with little practical knowledge and dependent on him for the tiniest things. He\u2019s the anxious middle child. (Therapist to Andrew: \u201cI\u2019m getting the sense that you\u2019re an anxious people pleaser.\u201d Andrew: \u201cI\u2019m cool with that if you are. Oh my God, are you?\u201d) Somehow Andrew, who is gay, has a lot of casual sex, and only casual sex, despite being incredibly (and comically, obviously) awkward.<\/p>\n

Both Andrew and Eunice, who makes money from a live stream in which \u201chorny men and a few women with eating disorders pay me to step on bread,\u201d are relationship averse. When it\u2019s suggested she might like someone she\u2019s been seeing, Eunice panics, \u201cAm I catching feelings? Can it be stopped? Is there a vaccine? Damn whoever the president is.\u201d There is little romance in this comedy.<\/p>\n

Where Andrew and Eunice are aspirational slackers who spend off hours watching reality TV and taking whatever drug comes to hand, their older sister, Ruthie (Stephanie Hsu, \u201cEverything Everywhere All at Once\u201d), is a high-powered lawyer, more than comfortable defending evil corporations from the common people; she recoils at a community garden or free library, which she regards as socialism. (\u201cI don\u2019t even like fire departments.\u201d) Though she\u2019s seemingly the successful one, her life has taken an unexpected turn; she\u2019s left her husband, Warren, a weedy Briton overeager to please her, and is pregnant by a colleague, a creep she idealizes. Her fall from perfection delights her brother and sister, who chant, \u201cOne of us!\u201d She moves to New York and into the series.<\/p>\n

Co-created by Law, who wrote for \u201cHacks,\u201d \u201cThe Good Place\u201d and \u201cLate Night With Seth Meyers\u201d and has acted a little, and Matt Murray (a smorgasbord of 21st century smart comedies are on his resume), the show was originally conceived as live-action. If anything like the present product, it would have to have been a very particular kind of comedy \u2014 something like \u201c30 Rock,\u201d<\/a> whose beats were borrowed from cartoons in the first place. In any case, animation is the place it ought to be. The grotesqueness of Eunice\u2019s boss, Jane, a product-damaged monster who is all face and very little body, if not unachievable in live-action \u2014 Katherine Helmond<\/a> in \u201cBrazil\u201d<\/a> comes to mind \u2014 isn\u2019t really sustainable. You could not have a dead old man\u2019s head come loose from his body and roll across a conference table with quite the same air of insouciance, or melt a rat walking across an overheated microwave oven, if actual people and rats were involved. On the other hand, the fact that Warren is so annoying reminds us that unreal people can elicit genuine repulsion. I ground my teeth at his every appearance; for Ruthie\u2019s sake, I wanted him gone, and she isn\u2019t real, either. It\u2019s the magic of animation.<\/p>\n

The show is generally amusing, sometimes very funny and easy to watch as an evolving story of family. (A visit to the Dang parents in Episode 8 is especially productive.) One\u2019s mileage will vary depending on generation and experience. (\u201cI was born in 1999,\u201d says Eunice, who has never heard of Facebook. \u201cAnything before \u2018Skibidi Toilet\u2019 is just cave paintings to me.\u201d Of course, I had to look up \u201cSkibidi Toilet,\u201d<\/a> and I don\u2019t feel bad about admitting that.) There are sex jokes, fart jokes and pop culture jokes; there are jokes I don\u2019t even want to describe. But there is a satisfying specificity to the humor, especially as involves Asian American culture, gay life, New York City and New York City gay Asian American life, which is not overexplained. The city itself is rendered with some light-handed detail \u2014 its delis, drug stores, coffee shops (why did I especially like the paper sleeves on the to-go cups?), Central Park on \u201cFreaquinox,\u201d \u201cthe first day that everyone decides it\u2019s spring\u201d when citizens turn into sex-crazed zombies. (Eunice: \u201cLast year, I woke up next to an Uber Eats delivery robot.\u201d)<\/p>\n

As a situation comedy, its characters will spend their days and nights getting in and out of scrapes, enduring self-inflicted humiliations, experiencing minor triumphs; they are all a little stupid, and a little smart. And as a cartoon, its job is not just to tell you a story, but to give you something fresh to look at, something to set itself apart while offering easy access to its world and people. The character design, which borrows from anime, is elegant and a little odd \u2014 hands and feet are drawn tiny, which has the paradoxical effect of drawing your attention, making them more expressive.<\/p>\n

Beyond the three stars and No\u00ebl Wells (as Greta, Jane\u2019s cowed assistant), neither the producers nor the publicists nor the onscreen credits nor the usual websites have identified who played whom. But I copied down these names down from the screen: Al Roberts, Sungwon Cho, Jared Goldstein, John Michael Higgins, Adam Pally, Jaboukie Young-White and Mary Holland.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cDang!,\u201d an amiably chaotic new adult animated comedy premiering Tuesday on Netflix, tells the story of the Dangs,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":618044,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[262354,262350,3621,1049,428,93,166941,262355,2740,61,60,46125,262353,6107,262352,262351,329,282,102388],"class_list":["post-618043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-actual-people","tag-andrew-law","tag-animation","tag-comedy","tag-drug","tag-entertainment","tag-eunice","tag-first-place","tag-hand","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-jane","tag-little-body","tag-new-york-city","tag-old-sister","tag-ruthie","tag-story","tag-tv","tag-warren"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=618043"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618043\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/618044"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=618043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=618043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=618043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}