With more than a decade on the air and a feature film set to release, Bob’s Burgers has carved out a unique spot for itself in FOX’s Sunday night lineup. In many ways it’s the heir apparent to Mike Judge’s King of the Hill (which is possibly set to return to the airwaves and may be connected to Bob’s). In developing its cast and world, Bob’s Burgers has made efforts to develop its reality in ways that other long-running primetime animated series The Simpsons and Family Guy don’t always do.
Bob’s Burgers has also defined its cast by their unique quirks. Belcher patriarch Bob has grown from dry and low-key restaurateur to someone whose eccentricities are rooted in a dull childhood with food preparation as his creative outlet. When she debuted, eldest daughter Tina was an incredibly awkward and shy wallflower, but she’s since become more assertive, involved, and increasingly boy-crazy. While her long list of crushes has provided fodder for numerous episodes, the series has turned this from typical pre-teen behavior into something that’s going a little too far.
In the Season 11 episode “Y Tu Tina También,” written by Rich Rinaldi and directed by Matthew Long, Tina was forced to learn Spanish by audio cassette and found herself falling for the voice on the tapes. It’s a perfectly in-character thing for Tina considering she had previously found herself attracted to a fake ghost trapped a box in Season 5’s “Tina and the Real Ghost,” and lived vicariously through her “Erotic Friend Fiction” earlier in the show’s run. The issue is whether these increasingly outlandish stories do the character a service overall, and unfortunately it’s hard to see how that could possibly be the case.
For the Tina of earlier seasons, it wouldn’t have been implausible that she would find herself drawn to a recorded voice, particularly since the character struggled to communicate and express herself in person. The Tina of later seasons has grown past such diversions, able to set herself — and others — up with available suitors. Beyond being a step back in characterization, plots like “Y Tu Tina También” take the character to an uncomfortable place where her grasp on reality loosens. The episode “Just One of the Boyz 4 Now For Now” had Tina bounce from instant crush to instant crush with elaborate song and dance numbers, culminating with a sequence showing Tina surrounded by the scores of characters she’d found herself attracted to over the run of Bob’s Burgers (including the aforementioned Jeff).
Focusing on this aspect of her character above all else makes the character one-note, forcing the writers to come up with increasingly bizarre storylines to top the last — another example is Season 9’s “Every Which Way But Goose,” which saw Tina finding kinship with a goose after being let down by her regular crush Jimmy Pesto, Jr. “Y Tu Tina También” wasn’t the sort of episode that breaks the reality of a series, but it veered uncomfortably close to that edge. Tina being overly interested in boys is generally accepted as typical pre-teen behavior; Tina being fixated on an animal, a fake ghost or a voice on a Spanish tape is not, nor is it particularly interesting to watch.
While Bob’s Burgers has gone to extreme places — such as an out of control robot shark rampaging through the town, Linda Belcher and the kids pretending to be the family of their eccentric landlord Mr. Fischoeder to impress his ex-lover, or Bob and customer/best friend Teddy going on a road trip to deliver a giant ventriloquist dummy head — it handled those plots as naturally and realistically as possible. Bob’s Burgers has stretched Tina’s credibility as a character in recent years and would do well to focus more on aspects of her life other than boys, or at least give her a proper romantic storyline she can grow through, rather than flitting from one often strange or uncomfortable interest to the next. If Bart Simpson can have scores of girlfriends, Tina deserves a serious chance at love, too.
About The Author