Illustration by Valerie Thai

Bob’s Burgers keeps getting better. Loren Bouchard’s animated sitcom, now in its 15th season on FOX, is bigger-hearted and far more ambitious than when it first aired in 2011. It has the kind of confidence that can only emerge, I imagine, when a project that starts out with tepid-to-terrible reviews goes on to receive years of critical praise and multi-season renewals. A critic at the Washington Post once dismissed Bob’s Burgers as “derivatively dull,” and wrote that “somewhere, once again, Fred Flintstone weeps.” The show has since inspired a film, a cookbook, a comic book series, and perhaps inevitably, the porn parody Bob’s Boners (2014).

For the uninitiated: Bob’s Burgers is about a family running a struggling burger restaurant in a fictional New Jersey beach town. The Belchers are an eccentric bunch. There’s deadpan, pessimistic Bob (voiced by H. Jon Benjamin); his spirited wife Linda (John Roberts); Tina, their nerdy teen, obsessed with boys and horses (Dan Mintz); Gene, the flamboyant middle child (Eugene Mirman); and mischievous nine-year-old Louise (Kristen Schaal). The characters dive into all sorts of hijinks and adventures to keep their restaurant afloat— like participating in a water balloon battle to counter a neighbourhood rent hike—and always return to the status quo in the well-loved tradition of long-running, episodic adult animation.

Except Bob’s Burgers isn’t The Simpsons or South Park. Yes, the writing can be gross and edgy—the pilot includes a recurring bit about Tina’s itchy crotch—but it softens. Below the toilet humour lies a tender heart. It’s what makes Bob’s Burgers spark: its ability to balance absurdity with genuine emotion, and to explore existential questions, like what we owe the dead, with tremendous wit and pathos. “I am a terrible son and a terrible person,” Bob says in season 13, after spending a day trying to find his mother’s grave, which he hasn’t visited in two decades. (Meanwhile, Tina wonders whether it’s rude to pick a wedgie in a cemetery. Gene’s reply: “I think it’s rude not to.”) But in the episode’s emotional climax, Linda tells Bob that his mother would be proud of him. “Look what you’ve done with the restaurant, with this family,” she says, then adds, quickly: “Tina, take your hand out of your butt.”

Like the Simpsons, the Belchers are frozen in time—a fate that’s particularly brutal for 13-year-old Tina, forever trapped in puberty—even as the sitcom clearly cycles through the seasons, marked by holiday-centric episodes. Still, the characters evolve. Socially awkward Tina becomes more confident in her budding sexuality. When a classmate threatens to share her “erotic friend fiction” (secret, sexy stories she writes about her peers) with the whole school, Tina decides to read it to everyone herself. (Her motto: “I’m a smart, strong, sensual woman.”) Early Louise is almost demonic—in season one’s “Sexy Dance Fighting,” she tells Tina she should kill herself. Gleefully, no less! But over a dozen seasons later, we see a more vulnerable side to her character. In season 13’s “What About Job?” Louise spirals out about her future: “What if I grow up and I just am not really anything cool or exciting? What if I’m just a boring-life person?” It’s a gut-punch of an episode. Silly and resonant in equal parts, it marks the series’ gradual shift from a darker, more abrasive tone to something heartfelt and oddly profound. Over time, Bob’s Burgers has positioned itself in a realm that many critics take for granted: the airy, earnest, slice-of-life comedy. TV that is far removed from the stream of reboots, tense dramas, and dramedies that still command the most cultural authority.

Season 14’s standout, “The Amazing Rudy,” pivots away from the Belcher family for the first time. The story follows Louise’s classmate, a recurring character known as Regular- Sized Rudy (Brian Huskey), as he attends a “we’re-still-a-family dinner” with his divorced parents and their new partners. It casts the Belchers as minor characters—they first appear a quarter of the way through, in the background, bickering about whether to steal coins from a mall fountain, while Rudy tries on hats at a kiosk called “Better Off Head.” (Bob’s Burgers is reliably—and delightfully—heavy on wordplay.) The episode is funny and melancholic, scored to wistful piano melodies and Stevie Wonder, like a less-cynical BoJack Horseman. There’s a montage of past family dinners, each one showing Rudy’s parents sitting farther apart. There’s a tragicomic scene in a carwash, where Rudy’s father can’t tell Rudy he loves him without the whirring machines drowning him out. And there are moments that align us with Rudy, like when he watches the Belchers from a distance, drawn to their supportive, close-knit dynamic—a nod to Bob’s Burgers’ secret sauce, the key to its enduring charm.

“The Amazing Rudy” proves that after 262 episodes, Bob’s Burgers can do whatever the hell it wants. It can experiment with tone and perspective. It can arrange a Philip Glass song for Gene’s all-xylophone band in a way that brings me to tears. It can cast comedy superstars, from Paul Rudd to Patti Harrison. And it can channel the quiet, emotional ambition of children’s television, where animated shows like Adventure Time, Steven Universe, Hilda, Dead End, The Owl House, Summer Camp Island, and Infinity Train have often delivered more affecting and complex storytelling than adult animation over the last decade. (A few exceptions: BoJack Horseman, of course; Pantheon; A24’s Hazbin Hotel, and HBO’s terrific Harley Quinn.)

Among that company, Bob’s Burgers stands out for its remarkable longevity. Television has long been a cutthroat arena. The landscape has felt especially unstable since the Great Streaming Panic of 2022—courtesy of Wall Street—when services like Netflix, Disney+, and HBO Max became more selective about renewals, and less willing to nurture shows finding their groove. (Many also removed media from their libraries to cut costs, making a casualty of animated gems like Infinity Train and Summer Camp Island.) A new kind of Comfort Show has emerged: the rare series that gets regular renewals in a painfully commercialized industry. The survival of Bob’s Burgers is a small marvel; that the series continues to surprise and delight viewers, year after year, is an argument for patience. For giving writers time to experiment. For sticking with a TV world as it unfolds and evolves. For playing the long game—despite all the odds.

In the season six episode “Sliding Bobs,” Tina, Gene, and Louise imagine how different life would be if Bob didn’t have a moustache when he first met Linda. Would Bob and Linda have ended up together? Would their family still exist? When Tina panics at the thought that life is ruled by chaos and randomness, not fate, Linda tries to comfort her: “Everything is random, but that’s what makes life so wonderful. Sometimes, all the crap in the universe lines up—like that night I met your father. Everything lined up, and it came out Belcher.” We’re so lucky it did.