I know I have better things to do right now: pay bills, finish my taxes, take care of some chores that have been sitting incomplete for weeks. Still I have a need to take a minute to vent about [Adult Swim]. I haven’t posted in months and yet tonight’s showing of the awful, sad, depraved The Room was just the last straw. Maybe I needed Tom Servo and Crow to guide me while watching but I just didn’t get the April Fool’s joke here.
This isn’t the network I used to watch for a solid three hours every night. This isn’t even the network that I would tune into every now and then and be presently surprised to find something new on. I’m wondering if I’ve changed as I’ve grown older or has the staff of [Adult Swim] transformed over the years? They’ve been on what I view as a juvenile, downward spiral of low budget animation and cheap live action shows for a few years now. I know that money doesn’t make a show necessarily better but can we consistently have animation that doesn’t look like it was drawn by a three year old? Can we not attempt a parodies of old Krofft shows filmed in a garage with a green screen, annoying characters and inane plots? Half of the new shows over the last few years make me wonder if I need to be on something to fully enjoy them. Why? I expect better than internet quality programming on the TV, not worse.
Anime seems to be making up a decreasing percentage of the programming. Recently there’s been lots of old Fox programming like Family Guy and King of the Hill (which I enjoy, thank you) as filler. The days between new Venture Bros., Metalocalypse and Robot Chicken are filled with Xavier: Renegade Angel, Saul of the Mole Men, Fat Guy Stuck in Internet and Squidbillies. Did I forget to mention that flip book animation called 12 Oz. Mouse? Then there’s a whole set of “edgy” and inconsistent shows like Tim & Eric and Superjail that always have to go so over the top. Looking at the overall programming lineup on adultswim.com I guess there’s more good than bad but the bad is just so awful and feels out of place.
I’ve enjoyed a few live action shows like Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place and Look Around You but even then I think they might be better served on other networks. I’m just waiting for them to premier an actual reality show. The fake reality show Delocated feels like a first step to their unstoppable degeneration. If [Adult Swim] wants to continue to diversify themselves into live action programming, shows that are trying to be more cleaver than the writers are capable of being and targeting the apparently easily amused, that’s fine, but at what point do they just devolve into being another MTV?