Jason Ritter

Listen to Dipper Pines for a minute and you will hear it: a voice that breaks a little on the important words. Ritter plays him tight and worried across the two series of Gravity Falls (2012), a twelve-year-old with a journal full of theories about a town where the adults have stopped noticing what is wrong. Kristen Schaal's Mabel gets the laugh a beat before the joke; Ritter gets the pause before the sentence. We expected a cartoon voice and got something closer to a performance, and the crack is what did it: the moment in every episode when Dipper's certainty gives out and you can hear how badly he wants to be right. It is the best thing we have seen him do, and he did it without his face.

He has been working since a television debut at ten, in The Dreamer of Oz (1990), and he had a father whose comedy the casting rooms of the early 2000s kept expecting him to reproduce. He did not. His breakthrough was Kevin Girardi in Joan of Arcadia (2003), and from there he settled into the kind of television part that asks a man to be liked without being dull: Mark Cyr in Parenthood (2010), Sean Walker in The Event (2010), then the leads in Kevin (Probably) Saves the World (2017) and Raising Dion (2019), a voice in Frozen II (2019) and, since 2024, Julian Markston in Matlock.

The type is the nice guy, and Ritter knows it. "One of the things that really bothers me," he told an interviewer, "is this idea that people who try to be nice and good people aren't as complicated as assholes." The independent films are where he tests the point: three with the writer-director Marianna Palka, including Bitch (2017); 7 Minutes (2015), in which his character's morals shift while you watch; a man in the grip of depression in About Alex (2014); and, in The Tale (2018), a part in a film about abuse that critics praised. We have not reviewed those and will not judge them from here. What they tell us is that the crack in Dipper's voice was not an accident of the recording booth.

The risk with a career built on decent men is that nobody notices them, and network television is built on men nobody notices. Ritter is good at seeming harmless; the parts that matter are the ones that let him be harmless and something else at once. Matlock casts him as a man too concerned with what other people think of him, which, by his own account, is not much of a stretch. We would rather he did his worrying somewhere with fewer commercial breaks.