TV: Swimming in Circles

Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim has become a derivative parody of itself

Josh Bell

That was in the mid-'90s (Space Ghost premiered in 1994), and by the time I got to college, Space Ghost had already built a sizeable cult following thanks to its random, anything-goes sense of humor and the relative novelty of seeing kids' cartoon characters act like petulant, immature assholes. College students and stoners were the primary audience for Space Ghost's whacked-out style, and it soon spawned several similar spin-offs, including one for supporting character Brak and others that used the same technique of putting beloved Hanna-Barbera characters into absurd, adult-oriented situations (Sealab 2021, Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law).

Thus began Adult Swim, Cartoon Network's late-night block of adult- and teen-targeted programming that premiered in 2001 and now airs every night of the week. Space Ghost has been retired, but the original comedy shows on Adult Swim now are almost all produced by Williams Street, the company that began by producing Space Ghost, and the programming block (or at least its original comedy portion; there are also Japanese anime imports and reruns of shows like Futurama and Family Guy) has become a clear case of too much of a good thing.

It's a good thing that, unfortunately, starts to look less and less good as it's repeated ad nauseam throughout AS' schedule and in nearly every new show they premiere. At this point, shows are often built around a single gag and are made up of random collections of asides that much of the time don't even bother to revolve around a central plot. Recent premieres have included Assy McGee, a parody of the "renegade cop" genre whose main character is ... a talking butt; Minoriteam, about a team of superheroes whose powers are based on racial stereotypes; and Metalocalypse, about a heavy metal band that takes its brutal music rather literally. Granted, episodes of AS shows are generally only 15 minutes long, but most of these concepts are barely worth that much time, and certainly don't stand up to multiple-episode seasons.

The blame for the glut of willful randomness masquerading as humor doesn't fall solely on the shoulders of Space Ghost, though. It took two massive hits—AS' Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Fox's Family Guy, resurrected in repeats on AS after its initial cancellation—to really beat the concept into the ground and prove that audiences stoned or tired enough would eat up endless variations on the same concept and, further, didn't much care if there was a concept at all. Aqua Teen, which features a milkshake, a box of French fries and a wad of meat as its lead characters, is built on oddities and shock value without any real structure, and its jokes are repetitive and lack any sort of grounding, no reference points to character or narrative to make them anything other than left-field, "hey, look at that" references and misdirections. Like Family Guy, which often confuses mentioning the existence of some pop-culture artifact with making a humorous observation about it, AS shows like Aqua Teen and its progeny don't so much make jokes as refer to things that one might turn into jokes.

The plague of sameness doesn't seem to make a difference to many AS viewers, but it's made the creative minds at Williams Street lazy, churning out copies of their once-innovative programming rather than creating something new and worthy of succeeding the genius that was Space Ghost. By amplifying the weird and vulgar and expectedly unexpected, and downplaying genuine risk-taking and narrative cohesion, Adult Swim has become more infantile and creatively stagnant than the bland, condescending Hanna-Barbera cartoons it originally began by cleverly spoofing.


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