First teased in 2022 as a Breaking Bad animated parody, the official trailer for Brendan Fraser‘s upcoming series has now dropped, and it delivers on its promise — this is defintely a not-safe-for-work dark comedy. A mashup of familiar mob dramas and family sitcoms, the show satirizes deeper social issues like extreme environmentalism, eco-terrorism, and corporate greed. It also features an all-star ensemble led by two beloved ’90s actors.
Breaking Bad meets Yogi Bear in Breaking Bear, “a fur-flying, law-breaking, forest-saving rampage following a dysfunctional family of bears who go full criminal to stop frackers, mobsters, and a psychotic wolf pack from destroying their home.” The trailer is raunchy at the jump, showing Jer Bear (voiced by Fraser, The Whale, The Mummy) lounging on a couch while smoking and watching adult content on TV. Startled when Blair Bear (Sarah Michelle Gellar, Buffy the Vampire Slayer), his wife, and his baby brother Alistair (Josh Gad, Frozen) catch him dirty, Jer accidentally chomps on the cigar, squirting suspicious white fluid on his family.
“It’s the kind of thing that none of us could ever do live action because we would be cancelled in about 10 seconds,” Gellar said in an interview. There’s another scene where Jer mauls and kills a man, eats his intestines, and swallows his genitals whole before saying, “Gives new meaning to the word ‘junk food.'” One YouTube user perfectly summed up Breaking Bear‘s vulgarity — “Tubi Originals: ‘F*** you, it’s Free.'”
Breaking Bear stars Fraser, Gellar, Gad, Annie Murphy (Schitt’s Creek) as Jer’s sister Tawny Bear, and Elizabeth Hurley (The Royals) as the Wolf Queen, one of the main antagonists. She rallies her pack after learning that Jer broke “the sacred law of the forest” by killing a human, which is the opposite of reality. The premise of Breaking Bear is straightforward — three bears come out of hibernation to find out someone is fracking their forest, so they deal drugs to raise money and fight the enemy. “It’s so out there,” Gellar quipped.
Breaking Bear leans on mobster drama tropes like blindside hit jobs, turf wars, and civilian casualties. Just like in Breaking Bad, the Bears also cook their product out of a camper van in the middle of nowhere, but they soon hire other forest animals as they scale operations, which draws the attention of the Russian mafia, a local biker gang, and racist polar bears. And then there are the main villains — the looming Big Pharma, Big Oil, and logging companies, all pillaging the forest’s precious resources.
Breaking Bear is created by Julien Nitzberg (Mike Judge Presents: Tales from the Tour Bus), and executive produced by Blink-182’s Tom DeLonge (Poet Anderson: The Dream Walker), Stan Spry (Creepshow), Jeff Holland (Day of the Dead), and Bradford Bricken (Twelve Forever). Tubi seems hell-bent on expanding its raunchy adult animation library with standouts like The Freak Brothers and Cyanide & Happiness, so Breaking Bear is in perfect company.
Breaking Bear premieres on Tubi on Jul. 24.
