Dang! Review: ★★☆☆☆ (2/5)
Dang! has a genuinely interesting premise about three messy siblings navigating identity, family, and modern city life, but its jokes feel repetitive and its constant pop culture references risk aging poorly fast.
Rating: ★★☆☆☆ (2/5)
Platform: Netflix
Genre: Animated Comedy
Episodes: Season 1
Creator: Andrew Law
Cast: Andrew Law, Poppy Liu, Stephanie Hsu
Dang! follows three siblings, Andrew, Eunice, and Ruthie, as they stumble through the self-inflicted chaos of their lives in New York. Andrew and Eunice have been living together in the city for a while, while their older sister Ruthie, long considered the more put-together one thanks to her financial success and marriage, has kept her distance.
That changes when Ruthie suddenly shows up, revealing she is just as much of a mess as her siblings, dealing with an unplanned pregnancy from her married, deeply chauvinistic boyfriend Peter, all while working a day job that gets more unsettling with every passing episode.
Created by and starring Andrew Law, who also serves as co-showrunner, Dang! feels like part of a growing trend of animated family comedies on Netflix, inevitably drawing comparisons to Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s excellent Long Story Short. Where that show is fully committed to the messy, semi-autobiographical complexity of a family across decades, Dang! instead spends most of its energy poking at Gen Z quirks and online culture.
Law’s writing background on shows like The Good Place and Silicon Valley shows through here, particularly in how the series explores self-absorbed characters whose digital lives enable their worst tendencies, whether that is Eunice building an OnlyFans-style following around stepping on baked goods or Andrew gossiping about employees at the company he founded.
The problem is that the show’s satire leans a little too hard on references that already feel like they come with an expiration date. Jokes about Klarna debt, therapy speak used manipulatively, or a celebrity cameo simply existing as the punchline itself all feel more like surface-level nods to internet culture than genuinely sharp commentary. A cute dream sequence cameo from Hayley Williams is fun in the moment, but moments like it start to blur together rather than build into anything memorable.
Visually, the show fares a bit better. Animated by Titmouse, Dang! has a clean, restrained visual style with soft shapes and flat cartoonish shading that, while not as visually distinct as something like Long Story Short, still looks pleasant enough. That restrained design actually works in the show’s favor during its more surreal, slapstick moments, like Eunice bouncing off several cars unscathed, since the contrast between grounded visuals and cartoonish chaos lands better than most of the show’s verbal jokes.
Where Dang! does show real promise is in its willingness to explore genuinely interesting territory, the clash between LGBTQ+ identity and religious dogma, or the discomfort around Asian fetishization in dating. Unfortunately, the show often struggles to turn these ideas into jokes with real bite, and its choice to make its characters deliberately unlikeable from the start makes it harder to stay invested when the humor itself is not landing consistently.
The clear standout of the season is voice actor Sungwon Cho as Peter, Eunice’s obviously terrible boyfriend. Cho’s deadly serious delivery of some genuinely off-putting, chauvinistic lines makes for the show’s funniest recurring bit, precisely because the contrast between his sincerity and the character’s awfulness is so well played. Eunice’s boss, a bizarre, unsettling supporting character who walks through broken glass as if nothing happened, also adds a memorably strange energy whenever she appears.
In the end, Dang! has plenty of thoughtful ideas on paper, particularly around identity and family dynamics, but the actual execution feels repetitive and rarely surprising, even when it leans into raunchier territory. Watching selfish, childish characters stumble through their own mistakes can absolutely work as comedy, but only when the jokes themselves are sharp enough to make the stumbling fun to watch. Too often here, they simply are not.
For something completely different, our roundup of 15 Best Hindi Dubbed Animated Movies to Watch Right Now is worth a look if animated content is what you’re in the mood for this week.