The character page for Duncanville.
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The Harris Family
In General
- Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other
- Big, Screwed-Up Family
- Character Development: As much as can be accomplished in a show where Status Quo Is God for the most part, but the family changed in small, lasting ways from episode to episode, like Duncan’s willingness to drive after the pilot, and Kimberly no longer fighting him for the "mangly spoon" after "Sibling Revelry".
- Dysfunction Junction
- Incest Subtext: A Running Gag of Season 1 that's conveyed in several fashions.
- Duncan’s dream of making out with Wonder Woman almost causes him to kiss Jack on the mouth.
- One of Annie's main strategies from deterring Duncan from making rash sexual decisions (such as taking advantage of a drunk female friend, or giving hundreds of dollars to strippers) is to project herself onto the women of these scenarios, the image of which seriously grosses her son out.
- Kimberly once threatened to catfish Duncan if he got in her way.
- Jing has a crush on Duncan, and spends the first few episodes wanting to marry her foster brother. This is resolved midway through the season where experiencing an Awful Wedded Life after a mock wedding despite neither of them wanting to hurt the other, makes Jing realize that they're not emotionally mature enough for that kind of relationship - if not why the idea of such is cause for
Squick. - When Jack coerces his family into starring in his Rock Opera, he assigns the roles of hippie lovers Rommy and (a very pregnant) Rainbow to Duncan and Kimberly respectively. This appalls his costars, but they manage to rein in their disgust to perform the play with a straight face come opening night, and the members of the audience who know that the two romantic leads are played by siblings are more morbidly amused by the coincidence than anything.
- It's All About Me: The most frequent challenge to the love the family has for one another is their individual shortsighted selfishness, facilitating abrupt moments of callousness that borders on cruelty.
- Parents as People
- Sanity Ball: Worryingly, it's usually held by Jing, who is understandably limited by her naiveté and being an actual child.
- Toxic Friend Influence: While she usually brings out the best in them, Jing's impressionable age can have her internalize and even emulate the bad behavior of her family members.
Duncan
Duncan Harris
Voiced by: Amy Poehler
The 15-year-old titular character of the show.
- Buffy Speak: Poehler described writing Duncan’s dialogue (i.e. how a 15-year old boy would speak) as taking “all the words you usually say and reduce it as two words.”
- Compressed Vice: His crush on Mia (and how off-kilter it can make him) comes and goes, sometimes in the very same episode. It’s so downplayed in season 2 as she begins to hang out with Duncan and the rest of their friends more, that she believes that he’s no longer romantically interested in her.
- Dumbass Teenage Son: Annie is terrified of Duncan turning into this.
- Grew a Spine: The first season ends with Duncan learning how to say no to Mia when she keeps urging him to step down as student council president, even rebuffing her attempt to use the crush he has on her against him. Rather than ruin their friendship, this development causes Mia to come to grips with what cost her the election, and the two of them end the episode on more personable, even ground.
- Hidden Depths: He has an understated artistic streak, is something of a movie buff, and struggles with anxiety that's always just beneath the surface of his strained ambivalence. He also fears that his parents will eventually divorce.
- Duncan is surprisingly good at hardware and fixing things, as shown in "Moneyballs," even becoming a man of the house for a while.
- In "The Pursuit of Daddyness," Duncan is shown to be a great homemaker when he puts his mind to it and realizes it feels good.
- Despite being terrible at sports, Duncan is pretty good at mini-golf and knows the route all over the place.
- Hypocritical Heartwarming: When Kimberly enacts her own rendition of this by calling Jack ugly, Duncan pipes in with the claim that their father is at least a "solid 6".
- I Have No Son!: Duncan is fond of his dad, but Jack's own flaws and his relatively inglorious job of being a plumber make it hard for him to win his son's respect. Due to this, Duncan sometimes fantasizes about spending time with more immediately laudable male role models like Sully, and Fridgey shows that he's had at least one dream where he's the son of Apollo Creed.
- In the Blood: His parents are gradually shown to be similarly manic dreamers whose obsessions can cause them to act just as foolishly as Duncan.
- Jobber: The Season 1 finale has Mia convince him to run against her for student body president as "the white guy (she) makes history against", confident that he can't possibly win. However, his nonchalance towards unreasonable campaign promises and Mia's own lack of charisma result in him snagging the election by a landslide.
- Mr. Imagination: Has occasional, self-aggrandizing flights of fancy despite him living in a fairly bizarre world.
- My Beloved Smother: Annie is this in regard to Duncan.
- Never Learned to Read: Subverted. When Duncan threatens to blackmail the town with the various confessions they stuffed into the Witch Day effigy, the crowd around him thinks he's bluffing as they assume that he's too illiterate to do so. However, despite flunking English and having subpar grammar and often misspelling every other word, he's still capable of reading, which allows him to make good on his ultimatum.
- No Hero to His Valet: Due to his poor grades, unreliability, lack of focus, lazy attitude, and tendency to fail on the rare occasions where he even deigns to try, his family has rather low expectations when it comes to Duncan achieving anything, although his parents hope that he can muster enough effort to surprise them and get his act together.
- Pathetically Weak: He's an 80 pound weakling who can barely do a single sit-up. Tellingly, many of his fantasies involve him doing physically impressive things sans any hard work or training.
- Precision F-Strike: The usual suspect is the titular profanity of the episode Duncan's New Word.
- Raging Stiffie: Duncan's "Boner Alert".
- Redheads Are Uncool: He's a redhead and he's not that popular in school.
- Redhead In Green: He's a redhead and wears a green hoodie.
- Rubber-Hose Limbs: Duncan moves around like this, particularly when he's running (Kimberly comments how it looks funny). It's stated in the pilot to be because of a spine problem.Duncan: Doctor says my later years are gonna be a wreck.
- Sidekick: Functions as comic relief in episodes where he isn’t the main focus or doesn’t have a subplot.
- Socially Awkward Hero: He has no idea of how to act around his crush, Mia.
- Strong Family Resemblance: He looks like a younger version of his father Jack.
- Youthful Freckles: Duncan has these, as does Kimberly.
Annie
Annie Harris
Voiced by: Amy Poehler
Duncan's mother who works a parking enforcement officer who dreams of being a detective.
- Cowboy Cop: She believes in enforcing the law, protecting her precinct, and catching criminals. To wit, she’s not too concerned about helping or being remotely liked by her community. And that’s not even going into how she’ll bend the rules to get her way.
- Dude, Where's My Respect?: She's usually ignored by her coworkers and people whom she gives tickets to treat her like crap.
- Hartman Hips: She visibly has one to the point that when she tried putting on her old high school pants, all her hip fat became a muffin top.
- Heroic Comedic Sociopath: Struggles between being one of these and a good mother who genuinely cares for her family. Tellingly, Annie's desire to become a detective is less motivated by wanting to solve crimes than it is by her dreams of being a Cowboy Cop like in all the police-related pop culture she absorbed in the 80s and 90s.
- High-School Sweethearts: She and Jack have been together since their high school days.
- Shotgun Wedding: If Jing is to be believed, we learn in Duncan's New Word that she was visibly pregnant when she & Jack got married.
- Shout-Out: Her current position as meter maid hoping to become a detective is very reminiscent of and similar to the situation faced by Zootopia's Judy Hopps.
- Stacy's Mom: Wolf thinks of her as this.
- Tautological Templar: Played with. During her brief time as a tv judge during Judge Annie, her style of litigating murky civil cases resembled this trope in an Affectionate Parody approximation of Judge Judy, played almost off-the-cuff and swift for entertainment purposes. However, she's very much beholden to the written law, and in the episode's To Be Lawful or Good conflict, being lawful is what wins.
Jack
Jack Harris
Voiced by: Ty Burrell
Duncan's father who works as a plumber and tries to be a better father figure to children than his father was to him.
- Beware the Nice Ones: While becoming a parent hasn’t really mellowed him out, he’s at least less violent than he was as a teenager (who would attack any guy who so much as spoke to Annie) or young adult (who once punched out the teeth of one of his band mates for quitting on him to become a dentist).
- Breaking the Cycle of Bad Parenting: He wants to be a better parent than his dad was to him.
- High Hopes, Zero Talent: Jack wanted (and possibly stills wants) to be a rockstar. Sadly, while he can read, write, and play music, his singing is subpar, and his songwriting is more derivative of than influenced by his favorite artists.
- High-School Sweethearts: He and Annie have been together since their high school days.
- It's All About Me: His skittish and non-confrontational personality occasionally swerves into outright immaturity and self-absorption.
- One Head Taller: He's visibly taller than Annie.
- Only Shop in Town: Jack’s the most trusted plumber in town, and is the only one Oakdale can think to call on when a sewage failure creates a massive flood in ‘’Jack’s Pipe Dream’s’.
- Kitsch Collection: He has a collection of autographed guitars.
- Suspiciously Similar Song: The music he produces with Jing in “That Jing You Do” consists of grafting original lyrics to the tunes of existing children’s songs.
Kimberly
Kimberly Harris
Voiced by: Riki Lindhome
Duncan's 12-year-old sister who is a normal teenager going through normal teen-phases.
- A-Cup Angst: A season 2 episode reveals Kimberly is insecure because puberty has yet to give her any, quote, "Ba-BAM!"
- All Girls Want Bad Boys: She has a crush on Wolf.
- Annoying Younger Sibling: Kimberly bullies Duncan, though as the series progresses, this starts being downplayed.
- Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Surprisingly averted for a character like her, as each episode will either have her mentioning something gross happening to her offscreen or just downright show it.
- Boyish Short Hair: She has a short bob hair.
- Bratty Teenage Daughter: She's twelve, technically isn’t a teen yet, but she has her moments.
- Breast Expansion: Thanks to Jing's newly acquired witch powers in the episode "Witch Day 2", she enlarges Kimberly's bust to B-Cup size after the latter made a sarcastic response to Jing's afforementioned powers.
- Deadpan Snarker: Typical of the middle child role.
- Dumb Blonde: While her natural hair color hasn't been revealed yet, she invokes this in the episode "Das Banana Boot" where her hair was dyed blonde as part of her makeover.
- Fair-Weather Friend: Flippantly admits to the Wiccan spirits she’s trying to get help from in “Sibling Revelry” that she’s only pagan when she needs something, which is followed by a Bolt of Divine Retribution when she tries to press them for favors as if they owe it to her in spite of this attitude.
- Hidden Depths: She seems to be a very skilled architect as she designed the perfect room for Jing while Jack was having troubles from the start in the episode "Who's Vroomin Who".
- High Priest: She is voted High Priestess in her coven. She cast a spell to make the other coven members be choked by their own hair, and reverses it after they vote for her.
- I Just Want to Be Special: She wants to be popular and noticed.
- In the Blood: Like her mother, she has a romantic preference for "bad boy" types who are good guys deep down.
- Jerkass to One: She's very nice to everyone BUT Duncan.
- Middle Child Syndrome: This is a Running Gag for her in episode 5.
- Phoneaholic Teenager: She's always on her phone.
- Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure: Kimberly sometimes quotes famous movies and TV shows from before she was born thanks to online memes and popular social media posts, but she's disinterested in learning about their points of origin.
Jing
Jing Harris
Voiced by: Joy Osmanski
Duncan's adoptive intelligent five-year-old sister who's always giving him advice.
- Big Brother Worship: She adores Duncan, but a little too much, wanting to marry her adopted brother. According to her voice actress, Duncan seems like a god to Jing.
- Cheerful Child: She's always happy all the time.
- Daddy's Girl: She has shades of this.
- From the Mouths of Babes: Her blunt observations of episode plots aside, she’s also capable of swearing, though it doesn’t go past the level of using the word “sucks” to describe an unpleasant eventuality.
- Girlish Pigtails: She wears her hair in pigtails.
- Happily Adopted: She seems to be this so far.
- Morality Pet: For her family, as seeing how their awful actions can be bad influences on Jing usually gets them to reassess their choices.
- Not Blood Siblings: Even though she's adopted, Duncan is grossed out that she wants to marry him.
- Sweet Tooth: She has a fondness for sweet things.
Duncan's Friends
Yangzi
Yangzi
Voiced by: Yassir Lester
Duncan's friend who supports various brands on Twitter and thus gets a lot of free stuff from these brands. He is also a trendsetter.
- Badass Longcoat: He wears a dark trenchcoat.
- Black and Nerdy: He wears glasses and check things out with his phone almost all the time.
- Foil: To Mia, as he's the other smartest member of their group, but he uses his intelligence to plug himself into the hyper-corporate system she detests for the sake of freebies and profit.
- Phoneaholic Teenager: He's constantly on his phone checking out the latest trends.
- Token Black Friend: He's African-American and is one of Duncan's friends.
Bex
Bex
Voiced by: Betsy Sodaro
Duncan's tomboy friend who is seen as one of the boys.
- Ink-Suit Actor: Betsy Sodaro bears a strong resemblance to her character.
- Known Only by Their Nickname: Bex is presumably short for Rebecca.
- Lady Looks Like a Dude: She said that she was once mistaken for a boy.
- Naked People Are Funny: In the pilot she claims that she was naked so much at the EDM festival and in Judge Annie she exposes her nude body in front of the crowd of people watching their protest, giving this hilarious response by the mayor.Mayor Jen: "Make your ruling fast judge Annie, we don't have the budget to pixelate."
- One of the Boys: She's this in Duncan’s friend group, though she lampshades this saying that she can’t truly be one of the guys on account of her bustline.
- Raised by Grandparents: She appears to be raised by her grandma.
- Shameless Fanservice Girl: In "Judge Annie", she's the only one of the teens who has no issue in her nude body being exposed by the the swimming hole being drained. While everyone else tries to lower themselves along with the water level, she doesn't care and shows off her anatomy.
- The Smurfette Principle: Before Mia joined, Bex was the only girl in the group.
Wolf
Wolf
Voiced by: Zach Cherry
Duncan's monotonous friend and the object of Kimberly’s affection. He has issues at home and acts aloof and disinterested in things.
- Ambiguously Brown: He has tan skin.
- Disappeared Dad: Wolf never knew his dad, but his mother claims he was a deadbeat with no ambition.
- Emo Teen: His dour, monotone demeanor places him here.
- Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": It is unknown what Wolf's real name is.
- Everyone Has Standards: Wolf’s frequently absentee mother has forced him to adjust to living rough, but even he won’t keep wearing the same pair of underwear for more than five days.
- Identical Stranger: Has two actually, one who may or may not be his father in the episode "Witch Day" and a blond look a like in the episode "Annie Oakie".
- Porn Stache: Sports a small, thin one.
- Raised by Wolves: He's spent so much time fending for himself in the woods, that in "Wolf Mother", we see he has the ability to communicate with animals and track a lost Jack and Kimberly by their scents.
- Stacy's Mom: Has a case of it for Annie. He even has a sketchbook featuring her in semi-erotic poses.
- Tall, Dark, and Handsome: He's tall, has long shaggy black hair, and Kimberly has a major crush on him.
- Transformation Sequence: Parodied in Wolf Mother where he reverts back to his old self.
Mia
Mia Abara
Voiced by: Rashida Jones
Duncan's crush who's very liberal and likes hanging out with him and his friends.
- A Lesson in Defeat: Spends the first act of Classless President talking at and down to her classmates while running for student body president. Losing the office to Duncan causes her to realize how callously dismissive she's been, and that while she might view high school mainstays like prom as "antiquated", she has to at minimum respect and try to understand why they're so beloved by everyone else.
- Amicable Exes: The Season 2 premiere has her old boyfriend travel to Oakdale to try and reignite their relationship. It's not an unpleasant visit, and they even make out for a bit to try and see if it does anything for them anymore, but they decide that they're Better as Friends come the end of the episode.
- Insufferable Genius: This is what initially costs her the student body presidential elections in the Season 1 finale, as her underwhelming campaign promises of implementing more standardized testing into the school budget and abolishing prom for a mandatory day of service where everyone is forced to clean the town's dirty river fall flat.
- Just Friends: After season 1, she thinks that Duncan is over the crush he had on her. He isn’t. However, in "The Dudliest Catch" she is aware of it and it seems to be reciprocated but since her life is busy they agree to just hang out one-on-one.
- Not So Above It All: Seems to become this in Season 2 as she admits that she's "basic" enough to find Duncan's teenage rebelliousness attractive in "Duncan's New Word".
- Only Sane Woman: Whenever she joins the group and often bewildered by the groups' (sometimes the whole town's) crazy antics.
- Soapbox Sadie
- Teen Genius: In "Classless President", her accomplishments from her last school include class president, secretary, co-chairperson of the student council, R.A., T.A., honor roll, reluctant cheerleader, and ambassador to the sister school in Brussels. Her potential future involves becoming class valedictorian, a lawyer, doing legal charity work, and becoming President of the United States.
Kimberly's Friends
Claire
Claire
Voiced by: Natalie Palamides
Kimberly's friend.
- Character Development: Her misadventure during “Party Like a Rocket Star” caused her to gain enough confidence to finally get her own phone despite her parents actively discouraging her from using one.
- Disney Death: Went through anaphylactic shock after consuming a peanut which she is extremely allergic to. Luckily Kimberly managed to inject her with her Epi Pen just in time.Duncan: (dissappointedly) "But I almost died."Spokesperson: "I appreciate that, but she did die."Claire: "I saw God."
- Hidden Disdain Reveal: The moment Kimberly leaves her side, she muses that she’s never been left unsupervised before, showing that she associates her best friend with all the other authority figures that police and try to control her thoughts and behavior.
- Ink-Suit Actor: She resembles her voice actress Natalie Palamides quite a lot.
- Remember the New Guy?: She was presented as if she and Kimberly have been hanging out all this time, despite no mention of her in the past.
Allison
Allison
Voiced by:
A member of Kimberly's coven
Samantha
Samantha
Voiced by:
Another member of Kimberly's coven
- Agony of the Feet: Kimberly casted a spell on her which made her foot grotesquely swolen.
Others
Mr. Mitch
Mr. Mitch
Voiced by: Wiz Khalifa
Duncan's teacher at Oakdale High School.
- Cool Teacher: He's this for Duncan and his friends, as the rest of the students. He even rides a hoverboard around school.
- No Celebrities Were Harmed: He has a resemblance to Snoop Dogg.
- The Stoner: He gets high on the weekends.
- Too Important to Walk: Gets around on either a self-balancing scooter or a bicycle.
- What the Hell, Hero?: Duncan publicly cussing out Jack provokes the usually cooly aloof Mitch into explaining to his student how Calling the Old Man Out can be satisfying, doing so against a fundamentally good man is hurtful and uncalled for.
Mayor Jen
Mayor Jen
Voiced by: Kathy Najimy
The mayor of Oakdale.
- Big Bad: The closest the show has one as every episode she appears in she antagonizes the Harris family.
- Corrupt Politician:
- She once asked a foreign government to dig up dirt on someone, possible a political rival.
- Blackmails and bullies the Harris family after Annie refuses to remove the clamp from her car. She then attempts and successfully bribes Annie to remove it in exchange for winning the Oakie Awards.
- Karma Houdini: Usually gets away with all the bad stuff she does, most jarringly in "Annie Oakie" as Annie refused to rat her out at the end of the episode.
Hal
Hal
Voiced by:
A hardware/plumbing store owner where Jack gets his plumbing supplies from.
Helen Diggins
Hellen Diggins
Voiced by: Kathy Najimy
Annie's friend and neighbor who is occasionally seen drinking wine and martini. She is also shown to be attracted to Duncan.
- The Alcoholic: In most of her appearances she can be seen with a glass of wine or martini in her hands.
- Dirty Old Woman: She has an attraction towards Duncan to the point that Annie warns him not to be alone with her.
- Does Not Like Men: If this dialogue is anything to go byBoy: (while getting hosed down by Helen) "What's your damage lady?!"Helen: "All men are my damage!"
- Noodle Incident: Annie claims that she fell asleep once with a cigarette in her mouth which caused a house fire.
- Single-Target Sexuality: Despite showing a dislike towards men, she clearly has the hots for Duncan.
Bradley
Bradley
Voiced by: Natalie Palamides
Jing's friend whose mother is a therapist.
- Free-Range Children: His parents give him nearly unlimited personal space. It helps that he's one of the most mature characters in the show.
- Incredibly Lame Fun: His post-pyromania persona is rather stuffy to the point of dull, and Jing’s play dates with him can’t last more than a few hours before he drags whatever they’re doing into the realm of tedium.
- Wise Beyond Their Years: Due to his playroom being next to his therapist mother's office he picked up a few of her methods.
- Troubling Unchild Like Behaviour: Was revealed to be a pyromaniac in the episode "Sibling Revelry".
Marcus
Marcus
Voiced by:
Another one of Kimberley's love interests.
- Ambiguously Brown
- Interspecies Romance: Has one with a female cockatoo that resembles Kimberly, he even proposed to it.
