Which Animal Control Character Are You?

Learn More About Animal Control

Animal Control premiered on Fox in February 2023 and has quietly become one of the most durable workplace comedies on network television. The setup is deceptively simple: a squad of animal control officers in Seattle deal with raccoons in walls, aggressive geese, loose pigs, and the far stranger humans who call them in. The animals are the plot. The people are the show.

Joel McHale anchors it as Frank Shaw, a former cop who tried to expose corruption in his department and got fired for the trouble. That backstory does a lot of work. Frank is cynical, blunt, and allergic to authority, but the series is careful to establish that he earned the cynicism honestly. He is also, improbably, the best officer in the precinct, with an almost supernatural instinct for what an animal is about to do. McHale plays him with the same deadpan precision he brought to Community, and it turns out that register works even better on a guy who genuinely does not care about being liked.

Vella Lovell plays Emily Price, the precinct director and the emotional center of the show. Emily is good-natured, conflict-averse, and constantly being taken advantage of by both her staff and Commissioner Templeton Dudge, played by Gerry Dee. The running joke is that Emily keeps trying to leave for a better-paying job and keeps getting blocked, partly because nobody above her wants to lose someone so easy to lean on. It is a sharper piece of workplace satire than the show gets credit for.

Michael Rowland plays Fred Taylor, universally called Shred, a former professional snowboarder turned idealistic rookie who becomes Frank partner. The Frank and Shred dynamic is the classic cynic-and-optimist pairing, and the show resists the easy move of having Shred gradually turn bitter. Grace Palmer plays Victoria Sands and Ravi Patel plays Amit Patel, and Kyla Pratt joined as Daisy, filling out an ensemble that operates like a proper comedy bullpen.

The show shoots in Vancouver standing in for Seattle, and it uses real animals extensively, which gives the physical comedy a texture that CGI would flatten. Officers genuinely wrestle with genuinely uncooperative creatures. The unpredictability reads on screen.

Fox has renewed Animal Control repeatedly, and it returns as part of the network Saturday and Sunday lineup beginning September 27, 2026, alongside the animated block. That longevity is notable in an era when network comedies rarely get past a second season. It survives because it is genuinely funny week to week and because it never mistakes itself for prestige television. It is a hangout show with a reliable engine, in the tradition of workplace comedies like Scrubs and Abbott Elementary, where the job is real and the coworkers are the point.

If you like Fox current slate of grounded procedural-adjacent series, it makes a decent double feature with Tracker, though Animal Control is considerably less interested in being taken seriously. The stakes are almost never life and death. They are usually a very angry bird and a homeowner who has made several bad decisions.

So which officer are you when the call comes in? Take the quiz above to find out whether you are the abrasive expert, the director who cannot say no, the relentlessly upbeat rookie, the unflappable pro, or the one keeping a running commentary on all of it.