In the many-stationed world of cable television, where every niche channel is an isolated island or remote valley, new species of programs are born, new forms emerge.
When Ted Turner had the idea to recycle cartoons from the massive film and TV libraries he had acquired into a 24-hour, all-animated network, he surely could not have imagined that he was creating the soup from which would crawl Adult Swim. To wit, a programming block of funny-strange and even antisocial series that now occupies 45 hours a week of Cartoon Network real estate and consistently leads ad-supported cable stations in "delivering" -- to the advertisers -- the prized youth demos. Granting the odd fellow traveler (like MTV2's "Wonder Showzen"), it is not like anything else on TV.
But success, even of the iconoclastic kind, always establishes a code, and there is now a recognizable Adult Swim aesthetic, which is both an expression of and influence upon its time, so that new shows are created in its image.
It is, by definition, not for everyone. Of all the arts, comedy is the closest to pop music; perhaps because the new wave is always defined by the young, eager to separate itself from what came before and to own what comes next. It needs to exercise new forms of wickedness, which sometimes just means raising the bar on bad taste, but also has to do with finding new methods of attack on targets heretofore taken for granted. One generation may not recognize the humor of another; Adult Swim exacerbates the matter by making shows about hillbilly squids and a pair of disembodied buttocks working as a detective.
(That this can be so was given a real-world illustration recently, when the city of Boston was shut down after a number of small animated electronic signs, featuring one of two "Mooninite" characters from the Adult Swim series "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" and meant to promote a forthcoming film, were taken for terrorist explosive devices. A $2-million settlement was reached with Boston, and CN General Manager Jim Samples resigned in regret.)
