Milo Murphy's Law

There’s not a lot that gets me street cred with my kids. That’s fine. I’m a parent, and a lot of my interests are boring to them. A lot of my pop culture stuff is out of date, and they frankly don’t care that their mom is a writer. It’s not like their friends are familiar with anything I’ve written anyway, right? But one of the smaller aspects of my life that does give me a little weight with them is that I have known Michael Hirano Culross since before that meant anything to anyone but the other kids at my high school, where he worked as a substitute teacher in the mid ‘90s. We’ll get to why this is funny—and, okay, who he is—in a minute.

For now, let us start with Weird Al. (Whom a lot of my friends have met, having paid for meet-and-greets at concerts, but whom I have not.) He is the eponymous Milo Murphy, a descendant of “the real Murphy” of Murphy’s Law fame. Anything that can go wrong around Milo does. This appears to be carried on the Y chromosome, as it is also true of his father, Martin (Diedrich Bader), but not his sister, Sara (Kate Micucci). Sara and the kids’ mom, Brigette (Pamela Adlon), have learned to live with the Murphy effect. So has everyone around them.

The series starts on the first day of a new school year at Jefferson County Middle School. There’s a new kid in town, Zack Underwood (Mekai Curtis). He’s the only one who stands next to Milo. Another student, Melissa Chase (Sabrina Carpenter), explains it to him, but it’s too late. Zack is caught up in the effect, and he freaks out. As anyone would. Milo, however, has lived with the effect all his life and his way of dealing with it is to be fully prepared. For everything. He has the most well-packed backpack in the known universe. He and Melissa sail through the madness, with Zack being considerably more like the audience would be in his reactions.

There’s our basics, but the town is fleshed out with all sorts of other characters. There’s Amanda Lopez (Chrissie Fit), Bradley Nicholson (Vincent Martella), Mort Schaeffer (Greg Cipes), Chad Van Coff (Django Marsh), and Lydia Apparently No Last Name (Alyson Stoner), the other students in the kids’ classes. There’s Elliot Decker (Christian Slater), the volunteer crossing guard who considers Milo his nemesis. There’s assorted parents. There’s assorted teachers—including Mr. Drako, whom Chad is convinced is a vampire for reasons that are not completely unreasonable. And Mr. Drako is played by Michael Hirano Culross. So there’s why this show makes me cool to my kids. Does he play a teacher because he used to work as a substitute? Eh, maybe.

Actually, the voice cast on the show is pretty good. Yes, most of them are only a big deal to people who are fans of Phineas and Ferb, not entirely surprising as the show was created by Dan Povenmire and Jeff “Swampy” Marsh. If you are familiar with the earlier show, you’ll know a lot of the cast of the later one. But also, you know, you start with Weird Al, and Sabrina Carpenter is a veteran of the Disney-to-stardom pipeline. At the same time as I looked forward to having Culross as a substitute, I had a crush on Christian Slater. And other well-known performers have included Laraine Newman, Vanessa Williams, Jemaine Clement, Rhys Darby, and Mackenzie Phillips. Oh, and Mark Hamill, Ming-Na Wen, and Brett Dalton as time travel agents.

Wait, what? Yes. There’s an ongoing subplot in the first season involving a time travel agency. We are mostly interested in Dakota (Povenmire) and Cavendish (Marsh), who are for reasons constantly involved in keeping the pistachio from going extinct. (That they could just get pistachios and plant new trees in the future is never discussed and bothers me every time.) For reasons, they are constantly coming across Milo and his friends. They are compared to Savannah (Wen) and Brick (Dalton), who are actually doing complicated work, and it later turns out that Mr. Block (Hamill) considers them incompetent. Which, you know, not entirely wrong.

It’s a solid show. There’s a running gag about “you don’t know everything about me” when a character reveals some surprising trait or ability. Zack, for example, used to be a member of the Lumberzacks, a boy band with some small popularity. There’s the characters’ fondness for The Dr. Zone Files, which lets us get into things like nerd gatekeeping—and lets Sara be the one who’s really into it. She eventually gets a boyfriend, Neal from the Comic Shop (Maulik Pancholy), in an episode that’s got that wonderful “is this really a date?” energy. There’s the episode where the non-title characters speculate on how exactly Milo is so constantly prepared for everything. There’s Diogee, the Murphys’ dog, whose middle name appropriately turns out to be “Ex Machina.”

And then there’s the crossover. The show is not a spin-off; the creators call it a “spin-on.” Because we find out well into the series that it takes place in the same Danville as Phineas and Ferb. For the second season, Dr. Doofenschmirtz (Povenmire) moves into the Murphys’ house, for reasons. I’m not a huge fan of Phineas and Ferb, and part of the reason for that is that I find Dr. D really annoying. So does Sara, who’s not unreasonably upset at having him sitting around on their couch all the time. And the show really leans into how obnoxious it would be to have him in their house.

Let’s be clear; we start the show with improbability. Milo is by his very nature a fantasy character, or at least a fantastic one. (The second season, which introduces aliens because why not, gives it a sciency explanation.) Aliens and time travel are not standard parts of a slice-of-life show, and having them means that Milo lives in the same sort of plausible-impossible world as, well, Phineas and Ferb. Within the laws the show sets, Milo makes sense. Everything that can go wrong does, even if—especially if—it does in a way that does not fit with the real world. Milo has a backpack of holding, the sort where you can have three weedwhackers just in case. That makes sense. For the show’s version of sense.

There’s a lot more to discuss. There’s Scott the Undergrounder (Scott D. Peterson). There’s the Pistachions. There’s the constant songs, some sung by Weird Al and some sung by various other people. There’s the fact that an episode of the show was Peter Fonda’s final screen appearance. In one of a couple of episodes with Peter Stormare. (I told you the show had a great voice cast.) I’d seen bits of the show here and there, but I binged the entire series this week for this article, and I’m glad I did. It’s likely to become an occasional background show for me going forward, even if I’d rather spend time with the mystery of Mr. Drako than the known fact of Dr. Doofenschmirtz.