Milo Murphy’s Law is an animated Disney Channel sitcom from 2016-2019 following the day-to-day life of the world’s unluckiest teenager Milo Murphy. Milo lives a normal life with his friends and family, with the twist of anything that can go wrong around Milo, will go wrong.
This show is a spinoff or sequel show to Phineas & Ferb by the same showrunners Dan Povenmire and Jeff “Swampy” Marsh. It is also, in some ways, a response show. In Phineas and Ferb, everything always goes right for the boys through an acknowledged in-universe force, miraculously keeping them out of trouble and doing some god-tier gaslighting to their sister Candace. Milo Murphy’s Law takes place in the same town, and come Season 2 Phineas and Ferb characters become mainstay recurring cast members.
The breadth of discussion I’ve seen on this show online is very slim, there aren’t a lot of people talking about it and the people I do see talking about it are (from my sample size of 2 or 3 videos) were people who tuned in to watch Episode 1 when it aired on Disney Channel and have been fans ever since.
But Milo Murphy’s Law isn’t a Disney Channel show you say, Milo Murphy’s Law is a Disney XD show! I want to make a point here which is a lot of the discussion on this show is from those dedicated fans who point to the show being solely on Disney XD in the US being the first cause of its lack of popularity and cancellation.
In New Zealand, there is no Disney XD. Milo Murphy’s Law received a prime time after-school slot on Disney Channel and I don’t think it did any better. My opinion is: the reason Milo Murphy’s Law was unpopular and remains relatively unknown is because it is a bad show.
As far as I know from Americans, Disney XD was/is Disney’s B-channel where shows would be moved to once they became less lucrative (or in Gravity Falls’ case, too potentially offensive to be on their main channel). Milo Murphy’s Law debuting on Disney XD as such was an outlier. I can’t know what executives were thinking but I think they might have watched the season they were delivered, shook their heads, and went “There’s no way this could be a hit. There’s no way. We’re putting it on Disney XD.”
Actually talking about the contents of the show now, Milo Murphy’s Law is a low-stakes serial as opposed to Phineas and Ferb’s tight formulaic episodic format. Milo Murphy (voiced by Weird Al) closest friends are Melissa (voiced by Sabrina Carpenter) and Zack (voiced by Mekai Curtis). Milo has a nerd sister named Sara who’s obsessed with the Dr. Who analog Dr. Zone. Milo has a crush on a neurotic classmate named Amanda who is not very interested in the chaos that follows him. Milo’s father Martin Murphy notably also has the disaster aura; men in the family pass it down to other men in the family. The family has a dog Diogee who will spontaneously appear miles away from home in dangerous situations and will be chided to go home.
Milo Murphy is actually a well-realised character. He’s completely accepting of the chaos that follows him and carries a backpack with him that provides an answer to handle any situation his passive causes. His optimism is persistent and rarely is any of the chaos an obstacle he can’t resolve.
To compensate for all the disasters that follow him, he is able to pass in a single absence note signed by a doctor to cover a month’s absences. There is a dedicated hospital room to the Murphy family for when they get into accidents. When he’s called in chemistry class to do something everyone has protective gear he warns people to put on. He was a nightmare for babysitters until the family found one who was brave enough. When getting pizza delivered he has to prepare the garage and get a fire extinguisher.
I’ve seen a common criticism along the lines of “It sucks Milo isn’t ever afraid of his passive! The episodes should be about him living with it and getting used to it!” and I disagree, the humour comes from Milo’s calm acceptance of his life. It’s a worthwhile and interesting idiosyncrasy that he just lives with it.
Another common criticism of the show is that the art style is boring and I don’t entirely agree for reasons I’ll explain later. That said, Milo’s two best friends Melissa and Zack and who we spend most of our time look profoundly boring
Melissa and Zack don’t have personalities of their own, and both look like background characters even though we spend almost all of the show with them. If we compare to Phineas and Ferb’s ensemble cast, each character is shaped and dressed in a way to signal an archetype which fills in some of the blanks for their character.
Isabella is a traditionally feminine girl, she wears all pink and black ballet slippers with high socks – she prides herself on her cuteness. Candace as a teenager is taller than the other non-adult cast members and wears a sleeveless vest and white skirt with a colourful belt – she is more interested in looking fashionable, and being taller than the other cast makes her look faintly awkward. Buford is stocky with a buzz-cut and a skull t-shirt – he’s kind of rough because he’s the bully.
Melissa and Zack don’t signal anything with their designs. Milo however, does; Milo wears a button-shirt and sweater vest as well as loafers to convey being well put-together, optimistic, slightly nerdy.
Melissa and Zack are designed like placeholders, and the vast majority of their lines are observational “How is this happening?!” or “wow, that’s kind of gross/weird”. They exist to fill space next to Milo.
Milo’s sister Sara mostly looks like a background character, but there’s an attempt to make her signal something by putting a four-leaf clover in her hair and giving her a print raglan tee of her favourite Dr. Zone character Time Ape in 3/4 quarter standing position. The character is too small on her shirt to be quickly recognisable and it looks odd.
The first sliver of personality we get from Melissa and Zack is firstly, Melissa is afraid of rollercoasters because Phineas and Ferb’s rollercoaster crushed a project of hers (shown in flashback), and Zack was in a lumberjack themed boy band called the Lumberzacks. This is Zack’s whole personality for the entirety of Season 1. Their observational comedy dynamic riffing doesn’t work because we already know what we’re seeing is ridiculous. They are nothing characters, this means half of the show is occupied by [nothing].
So Milo Murphy’s Law is a serial show. The main serialisation happens because of two characters I haven’t mentioned yet: Cavendish and Dakota, voiced by showrunners Jeff “Swampy” Marsh and Dan Povenmore respectively.
Cavendish and Dakota are the most intricately designed characters of the show and have the most going on. Cavendish is a slender greying British man in a dapper green suit and top hat from the 1870s, Dakota is a heavyset American with curly hair and a groovy 1970s tracksuit and glasses. They are time travellers working for a future government agency performing boring grunt work to prevent the extinction of the pistachio nut. I think you (the reader) should consider for a moment why the characters voiced by the showrunners have some of the most intricate designs of the show.
Initially, Cavendish and Dakota hang out in short segments around the main cast and talk about their work and how it sucks. Dakota specifically goes on lengthy rambles about things he likes or that annoy him. I think this is going off the success of Dr. Doofensmirtz in Phineas and Ferb frequently building -inators based on things that annoy him. The difference is Doof’s rants are short, snappy, and generally relatable, Dakota rambles in a flat affect.
The show’s voice direction is bewilderingly devoid of comedic timing. There is very little distinction in the voice performances between when something is a joke and when something is not. This distinction (when done well) is going to be subtle, but in Milo Murphy’s Law it’s not there at all. It doesn’t work. Dakota’s maybe-relatable-but-go-on-too-long rambles suffers greatly from this.
As the first season’s happenings go about, Cavendish and Dakota’s work to protect various caches of pistachios consistently goes wrong, with the pistachios being destroyed. They quickly catch onto Milo Murphy always being nearby when this happens, and find a renewed vigor in their work assuming he has to be a counterspy. If there’s a counterspy, surely their work is important!
This develops into the mid-season event episodes where Milo is dragged into the future with Cavendish and Dakota, who discover the future is ruled by evil sapient pistachio plants who have exterminated humanity. They defeat the future pistachio threat when Diogee urinates on the newly sprouted mutant pistachio tree in the yard of Milo’s school. A lot of this is kind of continuity-wank, like when Dakota smashes a bag of clocks over the head of a pistachio monster in the timestream and releases clocks into the air, to which he comments with joy that the clocks in the timestream pointed out in a previous episode’s ramble were caused by him.
I want to ask here why pistachios? Pistachios are not ecologically under threat and the decision to base so much of the plot around “What if these two had to protect the pistachio nut?” is untethered from any precedent that we as the audience might have prior knowledge of, or have a prior investment in. Cavendish is named after the most common banana cultivar, which due to their mass production is under constant and frequent threat of extinction. Why not task Cavendish and Dakota with protecting a rare banana species from going extinct?
You might not think it matters for their task to be something more realistic, but getting the audience to invest themselves in these characters protecting a singular nut species that isn’t under threat takes more writing effort and applied skill.
I think a fair comparison is would you be more immediately invested in Cavendish and Dakota if they were tasked with saving the Australian parakeet or all housecats?
The impression Cavendish and Dakota give me is that the production of Milo Murphy’s Law was Povenmire and Marsh just riffing with a blank check. The show skipped eating its vegetables to go straight to the dessert, in that the show’s base fundamentals aren’t there because they got bored putting it together or something?
It takes us like six episodes until we actually see his house and his family, something that really should be the show’s home base if it’s trying to be a sitcom.
Melissa and Zach are quick sketches that are there because the show needs Milo to have characters to bounce off, with no further consideration for their dynamic or personalities. Milo’s mother looks more like Melissa than she looks like Sara. Dr. Zone eventually becomes a major part of the show’s event episodes which then makes Sara briefly relevant, as Dr. Zone is her sole interest and personality point. Cavendish and Dakota meanwhile, the showrunner stand-ins are the most intricately designed with developed personalities, interests, and goals.
I almost didn’t finish the show because it was very boring but slugged it out with my partner in part because I wanted to write this review and felt like it would be incomplete if I didn’t even get to the controversial Season 2.
Season 1’s finale is another event episode, formally crossing over with Phineas and Ferb to defeat a renewed pistachio menace, this time being a problem in the present instead of the distant future. Zack and Melissa are sad next to the entire Phineas and Ferb cast because the P&F cast are able to perform roles in snappy dynamics and have comedic timing, which the MML cast do not. The episode ends with Dr. Doofensmirtz’ tower collapsing and him then requiring a place to live until his place is fixed, which winds up being the Murphy house, making him a common recurring character in Season 2.
A frequent fan criticism of this show is frustration that Season 2 has Doofensmirtz as a recurring character, and I agree, it sucks. Doof outside of an episodic format loses much of the scaffolding which makes his character work – no character is intrinsically funny in any situation. Why is the mad scientist just living as a shitty roommate in the house of this middle class American family?
I suspect that Doof’s inclusion might have been a Disney mandate to draw in viewers from Phineas and Ferb by bringing a fan favourite character back, but he doesn’t work here.
The weirdest thing is about six? seven? episodes into Season 2 something about the show changes. The writing becomes significantly snappier and funnier, the voice direction tightens up.
Cavendish and Dakota are fired and abruptly hired back by a different, uncomfortably pleasant boss with the new mission to pick up alien trash. Fundamentally their new job serves the same purpose as their previous job – they’re doing something that should be cool and glamorous (time travel vs covering up the existence of aliens), but they have the bullshit grunt work (protecting a common plant from extinction vs picking up alien trash). This time though there’s no continuity wank or time travel rules they need to consider. Dialogue between Cavendish and Dakota stops being rambles about things that annoy the writers and becomes about their relationship to each other.
The animation from this point also becomes more dynamic – the characters will sit in different ways, they touch each other more, they interact with the environment more.
This is why I don’t think the art style is a huge problem, it’s just the characters themselves are under-designed and for the first 30 out of 40 episodes their movement is static, barely interacting with the environment or each other unless called for by the script. Once they start interacting with each other and moving more suddenly it’s completely workable.
The show begins emphasizing Milo’s connection to his family further and his house becomes a proper home base location. The arc thread through this season is Cavendish becomes compelled to prove the existence of aliens to the public and vanishes. Doof and Perry go through a break-up after Doof learns Perry is on the clock when hanging out with him, and Milo being spied on by aliens. Not like underwater or flower aliens, just aliens, easy archetype, they build off that from there. Dakoka and Doof have a rebound relationship with each other after their respective breaksups
The show’s finale involves Milo being transported to the aliens’ home planet with the rest of the cast in tow to solve a bad luck energy building on their planet. The solution is everyone splits the bad luck energy between each other rather than having one person managing it all herself. Easy. It works. Then the show ends.
Milo Murphy’s Law gets its act together two thirds of the way through the show by throwing much of its original priorities out and finding almost an entirely new direction, and the best thing I can say about it is it managed to reach being mid. At its best, highest point, the show is only not bad. It is still more boring than the worst Phineas and Ferb episodes.
My thoughts are that the concept of “A boy who has everything go wrong around him, and is good at managing this” with the way it was realised is just not a strong enough concept to carry a show. The time travel elements are there I think because the showrunners thought in the writers room it would be fun to do some continuity wank. You’re telling me Milo Murphy doesn’t cause a butterfly effect or two from his disaster aura? The show feels like it was initially conceptualised as the polar opposite of Phineas and Ferb (takes place during the school year as opposed to summer, everything goes wrong for the main character) and they just threw whatever in from there.
I will now go into various other points and criticisms of the show I can’t fit elsewhere:
Continuing on from Phineas and Ferb, all or most episodes of the show have a song somewhere in it. None of the songs in MML are very good, but according to Dan Povenmire’s TikTok he had to make most of these on his own in a very short time period (2 weeks?) so we have to forgive it somewhat.
That said, the actors for Milo, Melissa, and Zack are all musically talented people. Milo is Weird Al and Melissa is Sabrina Carpenter. Zack’s voice actor Mekai Curtis is musically talented too, playing the piano and drums, as well as producing and arranging. Despite this, Weird Al only sings the theme song, Sabrina Carpenter never sings, and Mekai Curtis is given a lead vocal role while Milo and Melissa play instruments. Why was this decision made? In Phineas and Ferb all the main cast sing with the show’s band. This is not the case for Milo Murphy’s Law, except Dakota singing a ditty “we’re going to the zoo and we’re going to see some animals” which is not funny and gets repeated like four times throughout the series.
Sometimes the show has boomer humour or boomer takes and you remember that the showrunners are older middle aged men. Melissa’s personality as the show goes on sometimes gets into very 90s ‘girl power’ territory, the show’s theme park is a fat joke where everything is pork lard themed and the mascot is a fat kid, Doof and Dakota have a sincere 90s rap number which I think the showrunners thought was genuinely cool. The show gets cranky at reality TV.
The most notable example of this boomer humour, is there’s an episode where we see someone pitching an all-woman reboot of an 80s film franchise to executives, who accept it immediately, the implication being this is a stupid concept. A recurring actor character is gravely upset he can’t be in this film, when in previous entries he’s played a lead role.
Milo and friends give him a makeover so he can audition for a role while pretending to be a woman. The show’s musical number includes lines such as “you’ve got a face that can stop traffic”, emphasizing his broad shoulders and that he needs to shave every day. We see the actor taking down a robber with apparently surprising, apparently un-feminine strength, we see him shove cis women out of the way so he can reapply his makeup in the bathroom mirror. We watch Milo say “My dad says you can’t put lipstick on a pig!”. We watch the actor buying candles to place in his house for some reason? Why’s that funny? Women be shopping? There’s a Buffalo Bill joke somewhere in the episode with a minor character named Bison Billy.
This misogynist/transmisogynist episode was released in 2019, deep into Trump 1.0 and many years after the flurry of widely condemned bathroom bills in 2015-2016. There’s no excuse, man in a dress jokes were widely known to reinforce negative ideas about transgender women by this point. This sucks. Why does Ghostbusters 2016 warrant an episode where the issue is the male actor is losing work?
I think people don’t like to badmouth this show because people are fond of Phineas and Ferb and they may have some vague parasocial relationship to the showrunners who made their favourite thing when they were a kid (this is completely fine and normal, no sarcasm, people aren’t stupid for this).
There’s a video Why Milo Murphy’s Law Failed To Find An Audience or something where the creator talks about sitting down to watch the Milo Murphy’s Law premiere and talking about it the next day with their school friends, but by like episode 6 everyone else had stopped watching – this wasn’t the show ‘failing to find an audience’ this is the show just not being very good. The Phineas and Ferb characters being there is annoying, but the show references P&F in unfunny ways basically every episode before they’re formally added.
There’s another video with someone talking about the transphobia episode where they spend like 20 minutes trying to give Dan Povenmire and Swampy Marsh the benefit of the doubt on the episode, my man you don’t need to, it’s likely they just don’t care enough about trans people to not do a man in a dress joke.
This show is bad in a way that’s not immediately apparent without analysis. It doesn’t have a single pinpointable of failure, nor is it a trainwreck with obviously shit animation or bad taste humour. It’s just boring. It’s meh. It’s a nothing. It didn’t eat its vegetables and went straight for the dessert. The base concept isn’t strong enough to carry a show and the writers were too busy riffing on things that were probably funny in the moment but not funny when translated to animation on-screen. There is a reason it was put on Disney XD first off and there’s a reason it hasn’t gotten much of a fanbase outside of the people who watched it when it first aired.
Your takeaway from this should be that people telling you Milo Murphy’s Law is ‘peak’ are wrong and people begging you to watch it should not be listened to because it is very boring. Phineas and Ferb is great just watch more of that.