Teenager Henry Hart secretly works as a superhero Kid Danger, the assistant of Captain Man, the alias of Ray. Together they battle crime on the streets of the city of Swellview. Henry's friends Charlotte and Jasper know of his secret identity, but his little sister Piper and his parents are oblivious of this. Several misadventures happen: Jasper wants to use Henry's speed and recruit him in a dodgeball game; a female villain uses "love muffins" to make Captain Man fall in love with her so that she can enter his secret hideout; Ray's assistant Schwoz helps Charlotte by making a teleportation device for her science project; Captain Man and Kid Danger need to save astronauts from a space station; Schwoz's artificial disease accidentally infects the kids, so he has to quarantine them; Piper takes anger management therapy...
The third season of Nickelodeon's comedy show "Henry Danger" is, thankfully, better than the disappointingly forced second season, and improves the writting with better jokes, though some problems still prevail. One of the major problems is how overstretched some episodes feel. A scene comes to mind from the movie "The Big Short", where it is explained how a limited amount of actual cash in a CDO is used to feign a back up for a 20 times larger amount of fictional money. A similar "comedy-CDO" tactic is used in "Henry Danger": the writers come up with one truly great joke, but then write an entire story around it, and overstretch it to 20 minutes in a given episode with a lot of empty walk and empty improvisation, when in fact they only got a one minute sketch. Episode 3.11 is a good example: a crisis happens, and Henry has to transform into Kid Danger to help save the day, but cannot because he is stuck writting a test in school, while the teacher simply will not let him leave the classroom. Enter assistant and freelance inventor Schwoz, a surrogate D. DeVito of sorts, played by comedian Michael D. Cohen who consistently delivers the funniest moments of the show. Schwoz invents a hologram of Henry writing a test and plays it in a loop in the classroom, while the real Henry goes out to save the day. The good punchline shows up when the teacher always has the urge to talk to Henry, and even shouts right in front of his face, not realizing that she is talking to a recorded hologram. The joke is good, but the rest of the episode feels as if nothing worth mentioning is happening besides that.
Compared with Nickelodeon's other superhero show, "The Thundermans", season 3 of "Henry Danger" feels inferior. "The Thundermans" were careful to avoid a downward graph since they only made 2-3 bad episodes in the entire show, thereby crafting a rather balanced trend of quality. "Henry Danger's" graph of quality is far more eccentric, with several bad episodes (3.15 or 3.17, for instance) just in this season alone, yet that also means that when its line chart is up, its wacky jokes can even surpass "The Thundermans" in terms of hilariocity. Episodes 3.18 and 3.19 offers these kind of moments which are comedy gold. In 3.18, villain Dr. Minyak keeps Piper hostage in her house, and tells Captain Man and Kid Danger, whom he is watching on a live video call, to not move anywhere from their headquarters while Minyak's henchmen rob for the next three hours. Captain and Kid thus cannot move, since Minyak is watching them on the screen, but Schwoz, who was hiding behind the camera, has a genius idea. While Charlotte distracts Minyak pretending to be selling cookies, Schwoz makes a giant copy of the background of the headquarters, puts it on a canvass, attaches it behind Captain's and Kid's back, and puts the camera on a stick in front of them. When Minyak resumes watching the screen, he does not see anything suspicious, while in reality Captain and Kid are slowly walking and heading to beat him up in the house, with the "disguise background" behind them. Episode 3.19 has an insane, demented joke of the short Schwoz disguising himself as the little blond girl Piper and have him dance on the TV reality show "Swellview's Got Talent", featuring dance moves which are howlingly funny. When they invest some effort into it, authors Dan Schneider and Dana Olsen can come up with a few charming moments. But it works better when they are not so dishonest in overstretching things beyond its point of quality: for instance, "Space Invaders" is a two part episode, but in reality, they could have done it in only one episode. While it is amusing to see Piper feeling angry that her lobster commercial is constantly interrupted by breaking news, it is not necessary to prolong this to two episodes.
Grade:++
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