Okay, look. I've been watching Adult Swim for years. And for the most part, you guys have done pretty well for yourselves. Mad respect for happening on ATHF, picking up Family Guy and Futurama, and more recently Robot Chicken.
That being said, it makes me want to weep when I contemplate two of your more recent additions that are UTTERLY DEVOID OF HUMOR. I speak of _Tom Goes To The Mayor_ and _Super Milk Chan)_.
Tom Goes To The Mayor is utterly devoid of any redeeming characteristics whatsoever. Bob Odenkirk's comedy was heavy-handed and mediocre when he was a stand-up comedian, and he shows no signs of having progressed with this show. I would criticize the animation, but there doesn't seem to be any animation; just a series of badly-done black-and-white photographs posed in random ways. The characters are so uncharismatic as to actually dodge humor altogether and go straight into making me cringe. The plotline of every episode is the same: Tom gets idea, Tom visits mayor, Mayor is an idiot, Tom gets boned. I challenge you to find even a single exception to that generalization. After the first season, I fully expected this bomb to get cancelled and the material to be burned, then the fumes to be captured as an environmental hazard too dangerous to be let loose. And then this monstrosity, this morbid 'gift' (in the same way that what your cat leaves in its litterbox is a 'gift') to Adult Swim actually develops a fan base (most of whom I strongly expect tend to wear helmets even when not riding bicycles, if you catch my drift)? It utterly defies logic, and serves as object proof that humanity has become an evolutionary dead-end.
Super Milk Chan suffers from similarly impaired humor, but there's even less originality. Hey, how about another Japanese culture reference that none of the American viewers will get? Or maybe we could see Milk Chan trick the landlord out of paying her rent again, by pretending to be someone else? We haven't done THAT a million times already! Oh, wait, yes we have. And in the same way, most of the time. While many shows can be said to be bereft of sincere originality, Super Milk Chan is utterly formulaic in nature, to the point of being boring. I can predict how each episode is going to go before I even view it. The jokes are utterly unfunny, the offbeat cultural references are usually so obscure and banal that they evoke nothing more than a 'huh?', and the animation is weak enough to make me mildly ill. I mean, honestly...if you substituted another word in for 'dumbass' and rescripted slightly, this would fit just fine on Cartoon Network's normal line-up. Grow up.
So consider this a plea from a longtime Adult Swim fan. I realize that not every series you pick up can be a gem; the laws of probability dictate that in a stack of unwrapped Snickers bars, you'll eventually find a dog turd. The key is in recognizing it for what it is and not stuffing it indiscriminately into your mouth. In the name of all that is funny and viewable, cancel these two series. Put them out of our misery.
I miss Goz. SL you've broken my heart, I fear I may never move on!
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