|
|
The hip place for late night TV these days is Cartoon Network's Adult Swim.
Unless you're one of its growing number of insomniac fans, you may not have heard of Adult Swim. But these shows are among the most innovative, and increasingly popular, new programs on television today. The block includes such off-kilter postmodern cartoons as "Aqua Teen Hunger Force," a send-up of classic action-hero shows starring a life-sized talking milkshake prone to such bizarrely ill-informed pronouncements as "plaque is a figment of the liberal media and the dental industry to scare you into buying useless appliances and pastes"; "Sealab 2021," a workplace comedy where nobody can ever leave the underwater office; "Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law," a "Perry Mason"-like spoof in which a winged superhero with a law degree defends famous cartoon figures accused of various crimes; and "Home Movies," a show about a single mom, her movie-making son, and his alcoholic soccer coach, all united in their mutually amiable incompetence.
The Adult Swim fare now consistently rates as the top block in its time slot on cable among the coveted young adult demographic. In the last year alone, the ratings for the entire three-hour block jumped by over 60 percent, from around 180,000 viewers to 431,000 viewers (as of April); a few shows in the block, like "Family Guy" (about a dysfunctional Rhode Island family), regularly draw more than a million viewers. Most of those viewers are young men. In fact, for males age 18-24, Adult Swim now demolishes the ratings of broadcast standbys like Leno and Letterman--beating Leno by 36 percent and Letterman by a whopping 87 percent.
I've seen a number of these shows (thank you Tivo -- I don't stay up as late as I used to), and they are definitely inventive.
One of the more interesting aspects of the article is how it talks about the way in which this creativity was allowed to happen:
...[T]he good stuff tends to come when nobody's looking--created by those on the fringes of the studio system, occupying marginal creative real estate with minimal supervision.
Kind of like what happens in the music world where the interesting music comes out of the minors, not the majors, huh?
Posted by Casper at July 13, 2004 11:39 AModdly enough, i was just watching Harvey Birdman the other night...zany, witty, and surreal.
Posted by: jeffro at July 13, 2004 02:09 PMSurreal is a good word. I suspect there may have been a little chemical assistance in the development phase of some of those shows....
Posted by: Casper at July 13, 2004 04:54 PM