“The Looney Tunes Show” is what happens when you take the whackiest cartoon characters of the 50s and stick them in a sitcom format. Parts of it are undeniably funny but it also feels like the wrong way to present the Looney Tunes. We don’t want to see these outrageous characters trapped by the same constraints as the characters in shows such as “Seinfeld”.

Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck are housemates in suburbia. Each episode, they deal with different problems involving the other Looney Tunes such as Lola Bunny, Porky Pig and Speedy Gonzalez. We also get some weird musical numbers featuring different Looney Tunes.

The Looney Tunes are still funny here but as if they’re now forced to act like characters in a more traditional sitcom. They have fairly mundane conversations about typical everyday issues too. In the old shorts, these characters would get repeatedly shot in the face or drop anvils on each other. The slapstick here feels so downplayed that you question why we need to be watching animated talking animals when they act like pretty much like the cast of “Seinfeld”. The animation is okay for the most part but the C.G.I. sequences featuring Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner are pretty lousy looking.

Parts of “The Looney Tunes Show” are really funny. Sometimes the blurring of the mundane and the ridiculous provides some real chuckles but I just needed more absurd antics. Some entire episodes featured little to no slapstick and almost nothing that couldn’t have been done with real people. The best cartoons from the old “Looney Tunes” shorts to “SpongeBob SquarePants” to “South Park” do things that justify the use of animation. “The Looney Tunes” show has created an awkward format for itself that feels paradoxical. It’s certainly not awful and I enjoyed parts of it but I know this can be done better. A few years later, we got “Looney Tunes Cartoons”, which returned the more conventional “Looney Tunes” format of outrageous antics and it was so much better than this.