Universal Basic Guys is utterly basic

Titling your show Universal Basic Guys is quite the gamble. Sure, the animated FOX sitcom created by Adam and Craig Malamut follows a group of Jersey men who find themselves living a life of leisure once their factory jobs are given to robots and they’re offered $3,000/a month as part of a universal basic income pilot program. In that sense, the title is self-explanatory. But putting “basic” in your title almost makes negative reviews of your show write themselves. For this is, in both premise and execution, a rather pedestrian outing. It’s utterly basic, in fact.

What is most striking about this latest addition to FOX’s storied Animation Domination programming block (home of The Simpsons, Family Guy, and Bob’s Burgers) is how unconcerned it seems with engaging with its central concept. Universal basic income is but a narrative crutch (explained not in a pilot but in the show’s opening credits) that allows its core group of men to go about their days with no care in the world. Mark and Hank Hoagies (both voiced by Adam Malamut) and their neighbors spend their days, in fact, getting into an outrageous series of hijinks that run the gamut from violent encounters with exotic pets and hooking a whale while fishing to encountering the Jersey Devil and interacting with a real-life sex doll. There is no rhyme or reason for these skit-like A- and B-plots, let alone for the central conceit of the show: What would a group of regular guys do with a regular monthly stipend? Hang around and buy needlessly expensive stuff—all while getting into ripped-from-’90s-sitcom storylines that stress the differences between the sexes. (An entire episode revolves around the importance of having a guys’ day, which, yes, involves failed TikTok challenges, beers, and greasy food.)

Here is a neighborhood where it’s the women who go out and make money and remain exasperated at their slacker husbands. And yes, it even includes a slightly more emasculated figure (Fred Armisen’s effete David) as a foil for the beer-bellied, goatee-sporting lead who’s the butt of every kind of joke you can imagine. In many ways, Universal Basic Guys almost feels like a throwback to the kind of sitcom men of yore that have only gotten a slight update in this 2024 offering. These are men who forget they’re supposed to go out to fancy dates with their wives, who begrudgingly bond with their stepsons, and who are often more focused on being right than on doing the right thing.  

Add to that the fact that the whole “universal basic income” premise seems designed to excuse their 24/7 devotion to leisure time, and you’re left with a rather noxious image of contemporary Jersey working class masculinity wherein all men are idiots, buffoons, fools, and/or otherwise uninterested in bettering themselves or those around them. Moreover, this is as retrograde (not to mention conservative) an image of such a policy as FOX News could dream up. Here universal basic income is not a way to improve community or the livelihood of working-class folks but a tired sitcom premise where men are encouraged to remain careless caretakers and couch potatoes who are all too happy to cash their checks and buy themselves exotic boa constrictors and expensive golf clubs. This is welfare as a punchline.

Indeed, the Hoagies and the world Malamut has created around them (and himself) feel out of time. Its scripts are peppered with such timely references as Titanic, The Little Mermaid, and Saved By The Bell. The show even features a throwaway cameo from the most well-known billionaire in 2024…Bill Gates. All of this would be excusable if it weren’t indicative of a series that offers little in terms of invention or originality. When a character jokingly notes that the scene in the Hoagies’ garage looks “like a beer commercial from 2003,” they may as well be describing the entirety of Universal Basic Guys. Even in an episode that finds Mark’s brassy wife Tammy (Talia Genevieve) trying to fight off a sexist “gentleman’s only” country-club policy, the show cannot help but fall back into exhausting sexist tropes—all while punctuating them with some tone-deaf throwaway gag at the state of girls’ rights in the Middle East that is just as unseemly as it sounds. 

With its simple animated lines and some amusing voice work both by Malamut and Armisen, as well as Genevieve and Ally Maki (as David’s workaholic wife Andrea), there is little here to really lift this latest FOX offering. There are some welcome moments of tenderness. One, in the first episode, involves a sentient simian, another a misunderstood Jersey Devil. The show’s empathies are oddly always falling on these strange and estranged figures. But overall, its aggressively bro tone—especially as it’s often presented in quotation marks, winking at you that it knows what it’s doing even as it offers no commentary on which to hang that ironic posturing—remains strident and borderline obnoxious throughout.

Universal Basic Guys premieres September 8 on FOX