by Scott Thill

Reality television has worn out its welcome. Worse, it has further watered down what was already a diluted mediascape. Things have gotten way out of hand. Reality programming has ceaselessly replicated itself geographically -- most of America's hit shows are European retreads with much higher budgets -- and thematically. Because, like sitcoms or, alarmingly enough, so-called "news" broadcasts on Fox News, MSNBC, CNBC or CNN, the narratives of reality programming are, contrary to reality itself, fixed. There are no curve balls to be found. What ultimately counts in reality television is the voyeur, not the visuals.

The American reality TV zeitgeist may have well begun with the whiny adolescent brats of MTV's aptly named "Real World" installments, but it has definitely ended with a mind-boggling built-in adult audience infatuated with marginal figures who accomplish marginal feats on marginal shows that will end up in the dustbin of history.

In short, the kids are still all right, but the adults have lost their freakin' minds.

Nuking the Nuclear Family

So it's poetic that the best show haunting the airwaves is a block of animation programming, almost universally regarded as a children's format, on Cartoon Network. Cleverly positioned from 11PM to 2AM in a Sunday-Thursday scheduling slot (since the kids stay up late on the weekends), Adult Swim's daring, hilarious and edgy shows have thankfully injected some surreality back into television. And hopefully along the way, it might just hammer that last nail into the cartoons-are-for-kids coffin that's been ripe for burial since before Bugs Bunny starred in drag as Valkyrie Brunhilde in What's Opera, Doc?

"Overseas it's obviously not the case, because in France and Japan, everybody including adults seems to reading comics," says Bill Oakley, co-producer, along with Josh Weinstein, of Mission Hill. "There doesn't seem to be any stigma. But if a guy's riding a bus here and reading a comic book you think, 'Oh, there's something wrong with that guy. He's obviously immature.' Or whatever. There's still that prejudice. Adult Swim is one of the vanguards in leading the movement against that."

Adult Swim is everything that reality television is not: brave, intelligent and unpredictable. It is simultaneously analytical and reckless, flouting narrative convention -- in such shows as Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law, Sealab 2021, or Ren and Stimpy-creator John Kricfalusi's latest escapade, The Ripping Friends -- while it reinscribes situational comedy's blueprints in shows such as Mission Hill, The Oblongs and Home Movies. On Adult Swim you can still find the nuclear family at work, but only as long as subversion is allowed to share time on the conveyor belt.

Indeed, The Oblongs are the post-Three Mile Island nuclear family incarnate, a mutated perversion of Ozzie and Harriet featuring a quadriplegic father, a substance-abusing mother, Siamese twin offspring, a baby girl with what looks like a penis sprouting out of her head (to name just a few), all grown straight out of a neighboring toxic waste dump. Mission Hill's hipster locale contains two chief paternal characters, and they are homosexual lovers. Home Movies' parental units are variously failed in a Dan Quayle "family values" sense: a single mother who steals her pet's meds, a soccer coach who did time, a hotshot lawyer who can't get off his cell phone long enough to talk to his kid, and onward.

I got your television convention right here! "'I think that people turn to Adult Swim,' Small explains, 'not just because it's animated -- though that's a big part of it -- but because it's funny and different. The animation is a good mask that allows people to be unique. Whereas if you're doing a traditional sitcom, with the same writers and producers -- but with live-action actors -- you won't get away with half the shit that you're doing in animation.'"

Ironically enough, it is this distinct lack of supervision that informs the creativity under the Cartoon Network umbrella.

"What's cool about Cartoon Network is that they leave us alone," laughs comedian/musician Brendon Small, who plays the main character -- a budding cinema auteur at the tender age of eight -- of the same name in Home Movies. "They have crazy stuff. Our stuff is pretty tame in comparison. Our characters in Home Movies are probably the most sane; I think everyone else on Adult Swim is insane. Space Ghost, as funny as he is, is not sane. There's nothing keeping him grounded. A lot of the shows on Adult Swim are really edgy, but I think it's fun to be surrounded by shows like that."

To be sure, it's an edge that is hard to find on network television, no matter who happens to be marrying a millionaire or chowing on a box full of worms. But historically television has not been about pushing artistic boundaries or experimenting with narrative convention. That possibility wasn't even on the radar until cable TV -- and its relatively independent spirit -- swooped down out of the sky.

"In that it has to reach the largest audience possible, broadcast television will never become a functional distributor of art forms," asserts Oakley. "However, cable television can and that's what's so great about Cartoon Network. Everything now is so narrowly targeted."

Of Selling Soap and Schlock

But as much as writers and critics enjoy slapping the networks around, they're only part of the problem. When it comes to the endless roll call of television's formulaic entertainment, the networks can arguably be accused of giving the people what they want.

"Here's the thing," says Adam Reed, co-creator, along with Matt Thompson, of Sealab 2021. "It's not the fault of television or the execs that make programming decisions for the major networks. It's the fault of the American viewing public. All the schlock and dreck that's on television? People watch it. It's a business, you know? The soap has to get sold. I think HBO has had the best comedies in the past 10 years; Larry Sanders, Mr. Show and Curb Your Enthusiasm are the funniest shows that America has produced. But HBO doesn't have to sell soap."

Good point. While many of the major networks have fortified their success over time with mergers and acquisitions, cable TV outlets like HBO and Cartoon Network are primarily concerned with their creative output. The big guns like ABC, NBC and CBS have to figure out how to cross-sell other holdings. NBC is owned by General Electric, which builds everything from military jets to engines for nuclear power plants; ABC is owned by Disney, whose family-oriented empire owns everything from their theme parks to the NHL's Mighty Ducks; and CBS is owned by Westinghouse Corporation, also in the nuclear power plant business. Meanwhile, Ted Turner's empire -- which joined up with Time Warner (and lamentably, AOL, which seems to have lost about $100 billion last year alone) -- is by far the largest in the 21st century mediascape. But it has so far given its smaller distributors, like Cartoon Network, the type of freedoms associated with independent outlets. Even when they are lambasting, of all things, television itself.

"Sometimes we comment on culture and sometimes we are just weird," explains Matt Thompson, "but our main comment is on TV, how terrible most of it is, and how heavily it has become tied into marketing products. We did a recent episode in which we promoted our own show the whole time, tied in with a fictitious chain family restaurant, called Grizzlebee's. There seems to be a focus on purchasing things to make your life better. It's all just crap. The main focus of our show is unpredictability; it's about how bored we are with almost every single thing on television. I know what Grace is going to say to Will before she does -- and as a viewer, that pisses me off and makes me not watch. How many times can you rehash plots and situations that were covered already on F Troop?"

Repurpose This!

Which brings us to Adult Swim's line-up of shows, many of which do happen to be revisions of those long since passed, but only as far as cost-effective visuals are concerned. While much of television has spent fortunes building elaborate designs and locales, much of Adult Swim's offspring have repurposed the Hanna Barbera backlog, which Turner bought years ago, as cheap backdrops for the absurdist yet audacious Harvey Birdman, Sealab 2021, Space Ghost, and The Brak Show.

Adult Swim has also made a career out of using other networks' cast-offs. Many of its shows have endured former lives on other channels before being summarily dumped: Mission Hill and The Oblongs first came to life on the WB, while Home Movies spent its formative stages on UPN. Futurama, the highly anticipated brainchild of Simpsons-creator Matt Groening, was on Fox before getting the gate shortly after a few seasons. Cartoon Network, a recycling wunderkind that knows animation genius when it sees it, quickly ponied up $10 million for the broadcast rights and blitzkrieged buses and billboards alike to set the stage for the Emmy-winner's successful reintroduction into television.

And then there's the strange case of John Kricfalusi, whose Ripping Friends -- a testosterone-soaked yet highly homoerotic tale of four superheroes with rough and hard names like Crag, Chunk, Slab and Rip -- spent so short a stint on Fox Kids' Saturday morning rotation that even hardcore Spumco fans barely noticed it was there. After the debacle at Fox, Ripping Friends -- a cartoon Kricfalusi designed to, as he told The Onion, "cure kids" -- has found company with Adult Swim's growing stable of too-hot-to-handle animated nomads. Which is another way of saying that the adult animation showcase believes -- and invests -- in segments of the population excited by fringe artistry. And, getting back to traditional television format, including so-called reality programming, animation makes all the difference when it comes to dealing with controversial subject matter.

"I think that people turn to Adult Swim," Small explains, "not just because it's animated -- though that's a big part of it -- but because it's funny and different. The animation is a good mask that allows people to be unique. Whereas if you're doing a traditional sitcom, with the same writers and producers -- but with live-action actors -- you won't get away with half the shit that you're doing in animation."

Oakley agrees, arguing that even the WB didn't quaver when it came to the homosexual relationship of Gus and Wally on Mission Hill. "They didn't have any problems with Gus and Wally because it was a cartoon. Although nobody knows this, we actually had network television's first gay male kiss in the first episode. That was the first gay male kiss ever broadcast on television and nobody cares because they didn't see the show."

But through Cartoon Network, many of these shows, some which have indeed made history, will get a chance to make their popcultural presence felt for the next several years. "At least we know around the world there are a few thousand people who watch Mission Hill all the time," Weinstein adds, "and it's their favorite show. And it speaks to them. Were it not for Cartoon Network that would have never happened. That's the cool part."

The American nightmare in color. "Adult Swim is everything that reality television is not: brave, intelligent and unpredictable. It is simultaneously analytical and reckless, flouting narrative convention while it reinscribes situational comedy's blueprints. On Adult Swim you can still find the nuclear family at work, but only as long as subversion is allowed to share time on the conveyor belt."

Subversion's Next Generation

While adult animation has a very long history in cinema, its track record in American television is arguably no older than a few decades at the most. And though there are countless assertions that Bugs Bunny's drag queen escapades, Rocky and Bullwinkle's political satire or high-octane anime shows such as Robotech and Voltron were prime examples of early adult animation for television, today's TV cartoons dealing with hot-button issues such as sex, drugs, religion, consumerism, violence and politics can basically be traced back to a single show, Matt Groening's The Simpsons.

As Harry Shearer recently noted to James Lipton in an installment of Inside the Actor's Studio featuring the Simpsons' cast, the very same component of society that was indignant over Bart's foul mouth, Homer's relentless laziness or Mr. Burns and Smithers' homoerotic couplings, are now lauding the show for its penetrating insights into everything from controversial social issues to the indomitable spirit of the blue-collar family. Time heals all wounds, indeed, but it also helps open the doors for the next generation of animators and artists who wish to stretch conventional television past its tired formulas. It also allows for kids and parents to bond over a shared love of mature animation, one that is relatively unique to this period in time.

"The Simpsons is now an institution, so it defies all traditional things," says Oakley, who along with Weinstein produced episodes of the show, as well as Futurama, before moving on to Mission Hill. "The Simpsons basically attracts -- or it used to -- every kid in the universe, and some of their parents too. But if kids didn't watch it, the ratings wouldn't be very good. My suspicion is that their audience would be miniscule if only adults who didn't have children were watching. I don't really know the history of animation and cartoons in other countries, but in America it wasn't until about 1970 that there was anything animated meant for anyone besides kids. Until underground comics started in like 1967 -- or political cartoons -- there wasn't anything. In fact, The Simpsons is really the first mainstream thing that wasn't just for kids."

It is that type of built-in audience -- animation fans who grew up on Bart and Co. that are now old enough for college or their own families -- that has found a home with Adult Swim and its impressive line-up bred on a steady diet of cultural allusion and critique.

The strangest and most unique of which has to be Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law. Birdman's greatest asset, its arrhythmic storytelling that keeps viewers on their toes, promises everything but routine narrative. And its short air-time (approximately fifteen minutes) ironically allows the show more room to take comedic risks because the comfort of time is all but erased. Like a shotgun blast, the shows explode outward into postmodern reconfigurations: Fred Flinstone is re-imagined as Tony Soprano; Scooby and Shaggy are unmasked as the potheads we always knew they were; Yogi's trusty companion, Boo Boo Bear, has become a Ted Kazcynski-type radical, called the UnaBooBoo; minor Superfriend, Apache Chief, is the victim of discrimination from an ungrateful public and forms the MultiCulture Pals after getting his crotch burned by a cup of hot coffee; and more.

The show's cast of recurring characters is equally subversive. Birdman's primary opponent, Myron Reducto, is Sigmund Freud with a shrink gun, miniaturizing everything in sight the minute his manhood wavers. Spyro, another opposing counsel, is a literal drama queen who phrases his opening arguments in meter or stage plays (his version of Shaggy and Scooby's pot bust is titled, "As You Smok't It"). Even Harvey's sidekicks -- a falcon named Avenger, a sadistic Birdman clone named Peanut, and a lunatic boss named Phil Ken Sebben -- are imbued with hilarity. Avenger has to remind Harvey how to use his own PDA, the homicidal Peanut can't go one episode without trying to kill everything in sight, and Sebben is consistently in want of some, ahem, male attention. "That's right, baby, it's over," he coos into a terrorized but heartbroken Birdman's ear, after rescuing him from the UnaBooBoo in an almost scene-by-scene retelling of Jagged Edge's finale.

Giving the people what they want?. "'Here's the thing,' says Sealab's Reed. 'It's not the fault of television or the execs that make programming decisions for the major networks. It's the fault of the American viewing public. All the schlock and dreck that's on television? People watch it. It's a business, you know? The soap has to get sold.'"

The surrealists wouldn't know what to do with Harvey Birdman. Its ingenious brand of adult animation owes as much to absurdists like Ionesco and Duchamp as it does to Bugs Bunny and Bullwinkle. Same goes with the other shows in Adult Swim's lineup. Aqua Teen Hunger Force's superheroes consist of a box of fries, a milkshake and a meatwad. Kricfalusi's hypermasculine Ripping Friends are out to save the world for the "manly", but spend most of their time fondling each others' firm buttocks. Sealab's revisionist stab at Hanna Barbera's underground science complex imagines the workplace as a trap from which no one can escape, something to ponder in the Downsized Age.

But taking risks and flipping TV the bird is just the byproduct of a programming imperative that, more than anything else, just wants to screw with everything all of the time. For a living.

"I think it's about 50/50 on subversion vs. goofing off," says Reed. "It's a pretty great job. We have a really fun staff, this big rambling loft in an old cotton mill, and a very communal atmosphere. Very laid back. But we do try to make some sort of social commentary now and then. Race usually comes up, and I think we try to nudge people a little bit. We're nowhere near as good at it as say, All in the Family, but we do try to slip a message in now and then. And I'm sure there are people in a cabin somewhere with a satellite dish who are pissed off about our interracial dating, and that as soon as the spring thaw comes and they can get down out of the holler, they'll come shoot out our porch light. But, you know, screw 'em."

28 February 03

"Make You Uncomfortable" For years, Nicolas Cage has taken roles that would make other actors empty their lunches into their limos. He proclaims his independence in Morphizm's In Their Own Words. . . . MORE	A World Without Bodies We're heading for a future without flesh. And though suicide bombers use it for leverage on the evening news, it'll never be more than electronic to us. Morphizm's newest columnist Nathan Means keeps it hyperreal . . . MORE	"It's Amazing I've Survived" Bill Plympton's latest self-drawn exercise in physiological agency and madness takes the animator back to high school in search of hormones and VW-humping mascots. Our interview elaborates . . . . MORE
"Sea of Trivia" If you're looking to fit in during an endless War on Terror, the last thing you do is make a film about a guy who wants to kill the president. But if you're Assassination of Richard Nixon director Niels Mueller, you make the movie you want to make, and hope Sean Penn is in it . . . MORE	Body and Soul Long before he was the auteur behind A Man Escaped and Lancelot of the Lake, French director Robert Bresson spent a year suffocating beneath Nazi occupation. How he got labeled an optimist is another story . . . MORE	You Break It, You Pay For It Americans are notoriously tight with their money, but they see no problem in shelling out billions for a war they don't want. That's because no matter how shattered Iraq is, the American occupation will never go broke . . . MORE