TVSquad

One of the great things about blogging instead of writing for a magazine or newspaper is that I have absolutely no obligation to be unbiased. In fact, I can be as subjective and biased as I want. If I love a show, you can bet a bucket of monkey meat I'm going to tell you how much I love it, and I won't mince words.

If you do a search for my name and "Adult Swim" on this blog, you know I'm an admirer of that particular block of shows, partly because they provide content that's perfectly suited to my own sense of humor, but mostly because it gives new and weird ideas the chance to find an audience. I'm also not one of those who thinks the block should only consist of animated programming; if this is the only place on the TV landscape that'll let a show try to find an audience without worrying about whether it fits with current trends, I say more power to it.

Not too long ago I came up with a kind of "fantasy schedule" for Adult Swim, but this list is different. This is seven ideas (mostly Web comics) I think could be developed into some great Adult Swim programming. They've already done it with Maakies, so I'm hoping a few of these wishes aren't too hopeless.

And here we go:

Achewood: This online and syndicated comic strip, drawn and written by Chris Onstad, is one of the smartest and funniest things I've stumbled across in the last several years, and it has only improved with time. The animals who populate the A.A. Milne-meets-Rod Serling world of Achewood have an emotion and depth to them that's not seen much anymore in comics, online or otherwise. The characters also have their own blogs, and the fact that Onstad can switch voices from a depressed cat, to an erudite bear, to a naive young otter and still make those voices genuine proves, I believe, that Achewood would fit right in on Adult Swim.

White Ninja: Just because some humor is odd or weird, that doesn't mean it can't also be smart. What White Ninja lacks in design it more than makes up for with the kind of "how the hell did they come up with that?" comedic sense that makes Aqua Teen so popular with some and so confusing to others.

Perry Bible Fellowship: Besides the fact that it's incredibly twisted and funny, I love Nicholas Gurewitch's Perry Bible Fellowship because it relies on drawings more than writing for its humor. Compare that to something like This Modern World, a comic that is so text-heavy I keep wondering why creator Tom Tomorrow doesn't just write a pamphlet every week rather than waste his time drawing. If there's one problem with a lot of modern cartoons, it's that they put way too much focus on writing and not enough on making characters that actually look and move in funny and interesting ways. PBF, if done right, could bring back the "visual" to this visual medium.

Bob the Angry Flower: There was a short on MTV's Liquid Television called "Crazy Daisy Ed," but it has no relation to Bob the Angry Flower, an online comic by Canadian transplant Stephen Notley. Bob is, essentially, a comic strip about an anthropomorphic flower. Beyond that, the plot is whatever Notley can come up with that week, usually something with sci-fi or fantasy elements. Notley approaches his strip in a very "Adult Swim" fashion: he can do whatever he wants with the characters and still bring them back next week, something comics and animation allow that most live-action cannot.

Golden Age: This Web series ran on Comedy Central's broadband site for a short time, and offered a twisted take on old-time television and theatrical cartoons and commercials. The series was created by Augenblick Studios, the same studio that created the animated segments for Wonder Showzen, one of my favorite shows of the last couple years, and one I wish Adult Swim could have picked up when MTV2 decided not to renew it.

Kasper Hauser: I have no idea what a show from this San Francisco sketch comedy troupe would be like, I just know it would be really funny. Kasper Hauser reminds me a little of Firesign Theater in that they're more interested in creating smart and funny comedy as opposed to appealing to a mass audience by only going for gags everyone can understand. Perhaps they'd be better suited to Comedy Central (and they've actually been on Comedy Central before), but they're funny and different, and that's enough for me to include them on this list.

Lynchland: If you miss Sifl and Olly as much as I do, Lynchland, the video podcast of Liam Lynch (co-creator of Sifl and Olly and voice of Olly) is about as close as you'll get to seeing the kind of humor and great musical numbers from that sorely-missed MTV series. Lynchland includes animation, unseen Sifl and Olly shorts, music videos, and all kinds of insanity that is not, as Lynch pointed out in one podcast, the result of recreational drugs, but rather the result of someone with a really weird sense of humor, plain and simple.