By Chris LaVigna
On its face, Adult Swim should not exist. It’s a programming block that started airing after midnight on a cable channel for kids. Its antecedent was Space Ghost Coast To Coast, a mixed-media talk show that starred a largely forgotten cartoon superhero, deliberately edited to be as disorienting and off-putting as possible. When the block launched properly in late September 2001, it came out swinging with Aqua Teen Hunger Force, a show which concerned sentient fast food products getting into non-adventures at eleven minutes a pop.
One aspect of Adult Swim’s programming that cemented its image, more than the shows it aired, was the way it made use of its “bumps,” those little graphic interstitials between the shows and the ads. For almost the entirety of its run, Adult Swim has employed black screens with a white Helvetica Neue Condensed Black font, often speaking directly to the viewer in the same tone your shit-talking friend employs to let you know they appreciate you, while also roasting every single one of your life choices.
And yet, in spite of its insanely niche sensibilities, Adult Swim slowly but surely grew in popularity, taking up more and more of Cartoon Network’s runtime, exposing the next wave of artists like Tim Heidecker, Eric Wareheim, Eric Andre, Wham City Comedy, Current SNL cast highlight Sarah Sherman (aka Sarah Squirm), and Adam Reed (co-creator of Sealab 2021 and creator of the hit FX series Archer) to the masses. We even have them to thank for the formation of one of the biggest hip hop acts of 2010s. They also helped spread the gospel of The Room, Tommy Wiseau’s tour-de-force of filmmaking incompetence, by airing it in its entirety as an April Fool’s Day prank (twice!). The block’s sardonic, offbeat voice has influenced an entire generation of American humor, and continues to be discovered by younger audiences.The main tastemaker of the block was Mike Lazzo, who served as the President of Adult Swim from its inception in 2001 until his retirement in December 2019.
Given Lazzo and company’s penchant for experimentation, it’s no surprise that in the early 2010s, Adult Swim began drifting from the stagnant waters of the swimming pool that was its main linear broadcast, and waded into the rapid rivers of the then-nascent world of internet video live streaming.
On September 16th 2014, Adult Swim launched the flagship live stream show, Fishcenter Live, a talk show that centered around a video feed of the fish tank in the Williams Street offices down in Atlanta, GA. The hosts would chat with callers and comment on games they played with the fish in the tank, mostly by superimposing pictures of coins and assigning names and points to fish that swam past the coins. That’s pretty much the most straightforward, simplistic description you can give for that show, and it still sounds like a joke some dude pitches to you after he’s blazed down a particularly potent blunt, but the show steadily caught on in popularity.
Soon enough, other daily shows started to appear on the programming, each with its one unique flavor: Stupid Morning Bullshit was a morning talk show that often centered around the hosts friendly banter, and bizarre stunts, like chatting with an ice sculpture artists as he crafts a sculpture of ALF in real time. Assembly Line Yeah featured hosts Anca and Jiyoung taking calls while working on various arts and crafts projects and consuming an array of Japanese snacks. Truthpoint, truly the dark horse of the streams, was an Infowars parody hosted by Derek Estevez-Olsen and legendary Twitter Personality Dril (always masked and with his voice deepened).
Development Meeting saw two actual development execs from the channel’s Los Angeles offices taking pitches from artists hoping to get their work aired on Adult Swim, and actually did manage to result in a one off special from some independent filmmakers called Skeleton Landlord. Another popular show was Last Stream On The Left, a video spinoff of the true crime podcast Last Podcast On The Left, wherein the trio of hosts took a break from telling stories of serial killers and UFOs in order to react to the most bizarre videos the internet had to offer.. Williams Street Swap Shop featured two hosts in bolo ties taking calls to swap items with callers, and speaking in such gentle tones that their discussions bordered on ASMR.
Maxime Simonet, who has since gone on to create the horror comedy web series Gilbert Garfield and currently streams on Twitch under the handle “RatCousin,” began working on the Adult Swim streams as an animator and graphics designer after the discontinuation of Thing X, Adult Swim’s prior attempt at jumping into the web-based content world. “It was a big, exciting opportunity. I got to do graphics for On Cinema At The Cinema. I’d set like, as a college goal, “I want to do something with Tim Heidecker” and there I was doing it.” Simonet told Typebar Magazine via Zoom.
This brings us to Bloodfeast, a show that centered around hosts Dave Bonawits and Max Simonet, two Fischenter hosts that then got their own show which, ostensibly centered around doing the New York Times Crosswords puzzle. “It was originally a [Matt] Harrigan idea. He wanted to do crosswords or board games, he couldn’t figure out what it was. Then somehow Dave and I ended up doing it…I think we’re both funny in similar ways.” The hosts’ natural chemistry, which took the form improvised bickering that often veered off into unhinged ramblings, made the show feel constantly on the verge of devolving into total chaos.
As Max himself notes, the show quickly (d)evolved to something far more abstract. “I don’t know how it happened at first, it’s not just bits…When we got a larger studio space and cameras, I was just into letting the interns do what they wanted.” One example being the later episodes’ penchant for “living tableaus,” the interns would strike odd poses, and feed into the improvised story of the day’s episode.
The show would often veer off into countless spinoff segments like Tender Touches, a gloriously insipid soap opera that began as an audio drama but was then mutated into animated spin off that aired on the linear channel. The show starred Simonet and Bonawits playing fictionalized versions of themselves and cast a few regular chatters/callers in recurring roles, an interactive aspect that carried over through both versions of the show, and delighted fans.
Not only were the streams a platform for new talent to perform and grow, they also proved to be a space for Adult Swim’s veteran creatives to stretch out, try new things, and interact directly with fans both new and old – Matt Harrigan, who got his start working on Space Ghost Coast To Coast, was one of the hosts of Fishcenter Live and was one of the streams’ most ardent advocates.
Dave Willis, the co-creator of Aqua Teen Hunger Force and numerous other [as] shows, would don a motion capture suit and host a sports commentary show in character as a 3D avatar of Carl from ATHF in the maddeningly titled Pregame Prognostifications From The Pigskin Wyzzyrd. Jason DeMarco and Gill Austin, two of the chief producers behind Cartoon Network’s equally iconic anime block Toonami, hosted Toonami Pre-Flight, a show in which they discussed anime, answered fan questions, teased upcoming shows, and looked back on the classic speeches and storylines they’d crafted for the show’s robotic host TOM.
Adult Swim was not only talking directly to the audience, they were in conversation with them, and giving these chatters a look behind the scenes of the goings on at Williams Street. Hell, they even live streamed the office holiday parties. The barriers between the artists and workers behind the shows and the audience that consumed them never felt thinner.
In addition to their daily and weekly programming, the Adult Swim Streams also served as the digital venue for some specials that pushed the boundaries of the format. Wham City Comedy, a video and performance art collective born out of Baltimore in the 2010s, had found success with their short films airing on the channel, such as Unedited Footage Of A Bear and This House Has People In It.
In 2017, Wham City and [as] teamed up to produce The Cry Of Mann, an eight-part soap opera performed live, which heavily featured call-ins from viewers who could talk to the characters and influence their actions. The miniseries was a hit for the streams, boasting some of their highest view counts – estimates range from seven to thirteen thousand concurrent views per episode, with an overall peak of 25 thousand by the end – and overwhelming their phone lines (I should know, I called close to a hundred times almost every night and managed to get on once).
This led to the 2018 followup, the Call Of Warr, which upped the interactive nature of the story and culminated in one of the main characters doing a live read of a screenplay collectively written by the viewers. It’s safe to say that the streams were vital space for the WCC collective to grow and thrive, and I don’t think it’s at all a coincidence that the group disbanded not long after the dissolution of the streams.
With almost every on the show airing live and featuring call-ins and chat responses as component of the show, it’s no surprise that the streams developed a small but loyal crew of regular chatters – people with usernames like starshinekitten, The_New_Flesh, WonderCHOEzen, FriskyKillface, JazzAmbassador, RAINBOW-UNICORN-POOP – who logged on every day to watch their favorite shows and interact with their hosts. I myself went by the handle “Agent_Jeffries”, and often looked forward to catching up with my fellow chatters as much as I looked forward to watching the shows themselves. Most people responded to anything I said by quoting Fire Walk With Me, but it was a small price to pay for a quality chat name.
While the term “community” gets thrown around alot on the internet in an attempt to describe any digital crowd of seemingly like-minded peoples, the folks who flocked to the Adult Swim Streams did manage to feel like true makeshift community, with chatters frequently supporting each other in their creative endeavors, and on occasion organizing IRL meetups. Many chatters still stay in touch today across various social media platforms, and do their best to support former Adult Swim streams hosts in their more recent ventures.
But live streaming on the internet was not a completely new thing when Adult Swim got involved, live chat communities even moreso, so what exactly made these streams feel so unique? I personally posit that the Adult Swim streams, being the newest appendage of an already established alt-comedy brand, one that both honored its past legacy while embracing the next generation with full-throated passion, created a bridge between two generations of artists and entertainers, an organic pipeline of mentorship that seems to be rapidly disappearing in an increasingly unstable but no less insatiable media landscape.
What would be little more than a calculated step into a growing market for most media groups was a full on dive into the deep end (pun entirely intended, who am I kidding) for Williams Street, and it showed. Simonet certainly felt that Adult Swim’s chief tastemaker supported what he and the digital team were doing at the time: “There were times where Lazzo would be in other meetings talking us up, and I think it annoyed people on the linear side.” He recalls with a laugh.
When 2020 collapsed onto all of us, the streams became even more vital, and shows marched on in their compromised-but-still-fun remote forms. It wasn’t until late in that year, where we are more reliant on these shows for a sense of connection than ever before, that corporate overlords cut everything off.
The Time Warner and AT&T merger was at the time, the latest of big-tech-meets-entertainment mergers that had hit Warner Bros., and as often happens, the consolidation and downsizing set in. Bean counters with no appreciation for art or cultural conversation looked down their spreadsheets, saw the Adult Swim streams as a tiny little skin tag on the fatty appendage that was their CN/Adult Swim ledgers, and sliced it off accordingly.
The last episode of Fishcenter, the show that started it all, aired on November 25th 2020, and concluded with a wide shot of a parking lot where all of the streams cast and crew gathered for an impromptu potluck. Even Mike Lazzo himself, not a year into his retirement, came by to mourn the premature death of his baby, and to celebrate the hard work and passion of the legion of employees who made it the weird and wonderful thing that it was.
When asked about whether or not the Streams would’ve persisted had the layoffs not happened, Max is unsure. “Maybe, I don’t know if [current president of Adult Swim] Michael Ouweleen would’ve been interested enough in it, compared to Lazzo. I don’t know if Lazzo’s pet project would’ve gone anywhere, and I don’t know what to do to make that happen, I am not Mr. Beast.”
Max continues “The most successful things on Adult Swim right now… one of them is Smiling Friends, and that’s partly because that group of guys had like, a decade to build a fanbase and were [there] in the beginning of YouTube animators…it takes a long time. I think we were late to the game.”
With respect to Max’s opinion, which I’m admittedly inclined to defer to, given his insider knowledge of the situation, I have to gently disagree. I still believe that the Adult Swim streams would have grown their fanbase and their general profile in the digital media landscape, if they’d just been given adequate time to keep going.
It’s not as if Adult Swim itself had become an instant hit on cable. It needed time to grow, to slowly but surely find its audience and build up its reputation as a space for the weirdos who couldn’t gel with mainstream pop culture, to give them something they could laugh at and feel a little less alone. Who’s to say their streaming counterpart couldn’t have been the same thing for an entire generation of viewers who will never have a cable subscription?
As of this writing, Adult Swim as a whole is a hollowed out vessel, the media equivalent of the Demeter floating along choppy waters with nothing but a dead crew and a parasitic interloper stowed aboard. Sure, there’s still some new shows and even an occasional splurge of shorts showcased on the channel, but the voice has become weakened, quieter, humbled by the realities of how truly expendable it is in a tech-media landscape where the powers that be have no remote interest in driving the culture, merely profiting off of it. New programming has slowed to a trickle, and the streams themselves only exist as a collection of marathon channels for various classic [as] shows.
Some of the shows still exist in independent forms now; Last Stream On The Left is going strong on the LPN YouTube channel, and The Perfect Women, a stream show where a group of L.A. comediennes rated and roasted chatters’ social media accounts, came back as an AM/internet radio show on June 13th of this year.
Perhaps the most heartening example of the stream’s influence on its audience is the existence of CableTwo, a livestream network that airs a variety of programming on Twitch. Co-founded by former Adult Swim streams chatter arbyparty and friends during those dark, isolated early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, the collective seeks to “…explore the possibilities of live video as a medium. This channel focuses on experimenting with form, offering a variety of live programming that is designed to entertain viewers in new and exciting ways.” I struggle to think of a better example of an artistic entity’s creative influence, than direct evidence of it turning members of its audience into fellow artists.
American media in general is in a strange, zombified state. 2024 will undoubtedly go down in the books (or rather, the myriad feature-length YouTube video essays) as the film and TV industry either broke completely, or mutated into a new beast entirely. Revenue streams from ads and subscription fees are drying up. Media conglomerates continue to merge and downsize. Audiences want something fresh, but still seem to be hesitant to stray from their comfort zones. It remains to be seen what Adult Swim’s future looks like within that. Will its voice still be talking to us in the years to come, or will it go silent? One can only hope that beyond this current valley, a new peak awaits, and the voice of the weird and the absurd will come back screaming and laughing louder than ever before.
And if the future doesn’t involve a revitalized Adult Swim, and the block ultimately goes the way of the Berlin Wall, torn down along with the rest of linear television, then let’s hope that the next generation of outsiders steps in to fill the void, sooner rather than later. In a world that seems dead set on stripping away any instance of art for art’s sake and replacing it with Shrimp Jesus, fake funeral live streams, and endless IP sludge, we need creatives who are willing to experiment, to screw around, to skillfully waste time the way the Space Ghost Coast To Coast team did when they aired an episode that was literally just eleven minutes of S.G. quietly humming to himself as he obsessively followed an ant.
It doesn’t need to be anything grand or slick in design. It doesn’t require a hefty initial investment from some venture capital group that pulls the plug when that sweet, sweet exponential growth fails to materialize. If the Adult Swim streams taught us anything, it’s that all you need is a camera, a mic, and an idea. Maybe a cool fish tank too, if one’s available.