Cartoon Network’s Last Gasp
Bloomberg (archive.ph)
By Felix Gillette
2025-05-13 11:00:27GMT
Illustration: Niro Perrone for Bloomberg Businessweek
One night in August, a group of animators headed out on foot through the streets of Burbank, California, cloaked in Mission: Impossible-style black outfits. At about 10 p.m., the crew arrived at its destination, a deserted office disconcertingly close to the neighborhood police station. For decades, the building had served as the bustling studio of Cartoon Network, which, like much of the cable universe, has fallen on challenging times. Until recently, the facility was a place where young animators daydreamed of launching their creations into the world. Now it sat empty and foreboding—another reminder of the grisly cost cuts that had been sweeping through Cartoon Network’s parent company, Warner Bros.
On the sidewalk outside, the animators hurriedly set up a generator, a projector and a laptop outfitted with video-loop software, and hit play. For the next several minutes, an animated vignette played on repeat across the building’s facade: A large disembodied hand clutching a pencil rubs out “Cartoon Network” from the top of the building, then tries to erase a nearby worker, who scampers for safety. After a brief pursuit, a pack of colleagues band together and collectively shove away the menacing pencil pusher. The film ends with an unsubtle message: “Dear studios: Don’t erase animation jobs!”
Cartoon Network studios in Burbank.Photographer: AaronP/Getty Images
The group circulated the video online, adding to an expanding body of work bemoaning the state of the US animation industry, where concerns about unemployment are high, new series scarce, overseas outsourcing rampant and anxiety over artificial intelligence widespread. Among online commentators, much of the resulting ire has been directed at David Zaslav, the chief executive officer at Warner Bros. Discovery Inc., who’s emerged as a frequent target in Hollywood since orchestrating the stormy 2022 merger of WarnerMedia with Discovery Inc. Discovery was best known for low-cost reality-TV and crime shows—and not known at all for animation.
On Zaslav’s watch, sweeping cuts have roiled the combined company’s animation assets. Beyond the shuttering of the old Cartoon Network studios, Warner Bros. has backed out of theatrically distributing several almost-completed animated movies, including Fixed, a feature from revered cartoon auteur Genndy Tartakovsky (since picked up by Netflix); it pulled the plug on the Boomerang network’s standalone animation streaming service; it closed Rooster Teeth, a subsidiary in Austin that made several popular animated web series; and it removed numerous animated movies, classic Looney Tunes shows and Cartoon Network programs from the company’s streaming service, Max. Somewhere amid the changes, #RIPCartoonNetwork started trending on X while animation fans circulated the hashtag #FireDavidZaslav on YouTube. “Discovery came in, and it went downhill fast,” says Robert Alvarez, a retired animator who worked on popular Cartoon Network shows from the mid-’90s until 2023.
David Zaslav walks the red carpet at an event in New York in 2022.Photographer: Nina Westervelt/Getty Images
In August, Warner Bros. announced it was taking a $9.1 billion charge, writing down the value of its traditional TV networks, which include, along with the Discovery Channel and Cartoon Network, the Food Network, TBS and TNT. Warner Bros. doesn’t break out the individual financial performance of each channel, but Cartoon Network’s struggles have certainly contributed to the downturn. According to estimates from S&P Global Market Intelligence, the annual advertising revenue for Cartoon Network and Adult Swim, its spinoff animation brand for grown-ups, plummeted from $668.3 million in 2014 to $133.7 million last year.
The viability of the Cartoon Network brand in streaming doesn’t look much more promising. A few years ago, network executives were touting Max as the next natural step in Cartoon Network’s evolution. But since its debut five years ago, a string of programming misfires and increased competition from YouTube have meant that Max has largely failed to emerge as a go-to destination for young viewers. According to data from PreciseTV, a video advertising firm, only 13% of 10- to 12-year-old viewers have recently watched programming on Max, versus 32% for Hulu, 57% for Disney+ and 72% for Netflix. Among preschool audiences, the numbers for Max are even worse. The company recently decided that children’s programming is no longer a core part of Max’s strategy, further clouding Cartoon Network’s prospects.
Cartoon Network’s struggles have been playing out at a time when animation at large has arguably never been more popular. From Dog Man and Inside Out 2 to The Super Mario Bros. Movie, animated features continue to rule the box office. Bluey—a cartoon series from Australia that Cartoon Network executives once unsuccessfully sought to license—has been a huge hit for Disney+. And animated shows such as Peppa Pig and CoComelon regularly attract big audiences of youngsters on Netflix. The global anime market is projected to grow from $34.2 billion in 2024 to $60.1 billion by 2030, according to research by Jefferies Financial Group Inc. Surely, many animation fans still hope, there is room for the Cartoon Network brand to flourish once again.
Vanessa Brookman, a Warner Bros. executive in London who manages the brand abroad, says that the network has a strong, growing presence overseas and that the company is “dialing up” its investment in Adult Swim’s older-skewing shows, which jibe better with Max’s current strategy. (Both Zaslav and Sam Register, the head of Warner Bros. Animation, who now oversees Cartoon Network Studios and its diminished output of shows, declined to speak to Bloomberg Businessweek.) Brookman attributes the online uproar over the cutbacks at Cartoon Network to pent-up nostalgia for the time when it was first emerging as an engine of cutting-edge animation on par with the most esteemed anime shops in Japan. She says she’s optimistic about the network’s current direction. “It’s not maybe how the fans remember it,” the executive says. “But it’s not dead.”
Illustration: Niro Perrone for Bloomberg Businessweek
About a decade after Ted Turner started CNN, he came up with an idea for a new cable channel that would air cartoons at all hours, not just on Saturday morning or after school. In 1991 he bought Hanna-Barbera Productions, a mother lode of classic series—Scooby-Doo, Yogi Bear, The Flintstones, The Jetsons and The Smurfs, among many others. The next year, he started Cartoon Network, initially reaching some 2 million US homes.
The tricky job of figuring out which of the thousands of episodes to air each day largely fell to an omnivorous consumer of pop culture named Mike Lazzo. Around Cartoon Network’s offices in Atlanta, Lazzo was hard to miss. With his shoulder-length blond hair, puckish eyes and curious wardrobe (including fishing hats and kilts), he looked more like a new wave pop star than a corporate middle manager. As they fiddled with the network’s schedule, Lazzo and his small team studied the competition. In the early ’90s, critics were buzzing over Nickelodeon, Sumner Redstone’s channel for kids, and its two growing hits, Rugrats and The Ren & Stimpy Show. Lazzo’s crew concluded that rather than just airing endless Hanna-Barbera reruns, Cartoon Network should also make shows of its own. “We went to Ted and said, ‘Give us money for originals,’ ” Lazzo recalls. “And he just threw us out of his office.”
Mike Lazzo.Photographer: Ian White/Corbis/Getty Images
Admittedly, Lazzo’s team had zero experience in such endeavors. What they needed was a clever idea and some minimal proof of production competence. At the time, the entertainment industry was enthralled with the drama taking place in late-night comedy. In 1992, Johnny Carson retired from The Tonight Show, touching off a fierce succession battle. That summer, HBO began airing The Larry Sanders Show, a parody of a late-night show that successfully drafted off interest in the real-world power struggle. Critics adored it, and so did Lazzo.
The Cartoon Network staff aimed to do something similar. On a threadbare budget, they cobbled together a pilot for a parody of a talk show hosted by Space Ghost—a caped, intergalactic crime fighter with laser-shooting fists who’d starred in a 1960s Hanna-Barbera series. By splicing together clips of the vintage cartoon hero with TV footage of contemporary, real-world personalities, such as comedian Carrot Top and Bill Nye (“the Science Guy”), they were able to mimic the familiar patter of a Hollywood talk show. Turner, impressed by the bizarre mashup of animation and celebrity, gave a thumbs-up to Space Ghost Coast to Coast—which would go on to run for 11 critically admired seasons—and agreed to fund more series.
Space Ghost Coast to Coast.Photo: Alamy
For years, American cartoons had been mired in mediocrity. For much of the 1980s, shows based on toy lines from Transformers to G.I. Joe crowded the airwaves. The Cartoon Network team thought the merchandise-driven shows lacked the feral ingenuity of animation’s early years, when imaginative, wigged-out directors like Tex Avery and Chuck Jones ruled the rambunctious medium. It was time, they agreed, to re-embrace a creator-driven approach.
Cartoon Network announced in 1994 that it was teaming up with its corporate siblings at Hanna-Barbera to sponsor a new “shorts” program. Forty-eight six- to seven-minute cartoons would be chosen from an open call for submissions, then aired on the network. They would turn the best ones into recurring series. Before long, the shorts initiative ushered in a wave of popular, long-running shows appealing to elementary-school kids and young adults, including Dexter’s Laboratory from Tartakovsky, about a science prodigy with a flair for mayhem; Johnny Bravo from Van Partible, about a preening airhead and his dating misadventures; and The Powerpuff Girls by Craig McCracken, about a trio of precocious, pint-size superheroes.
As Cartoon Network grew, its staff settled into offices at Turner’s broadcasting center on the site of a former country club in Atlanta. There, Lazzo’s team enjoyed life as the campus oddballs. They held an annual Velma Day in honor of the nerdy Scooby-Doo heroine. On April Fools’ Day each year they pulled pranks on their viewers, such as scheduling a round-the-clock marathon of Screwy Squirrel, a wickedly deviant cartoon from the 1940s. When they attended animation trade shows, they’d bring back costumes and parade around the office park, dressed as monsters and villains.
Over time, the mischievous spirit of Lazzo’s staff came to define the Cartoon Network brand, and legions of absurdism-loving cartoon heads happily gobbled up whatever they were serving. Before long, Cartoon Network was starting to rank as one of the 10 highest-rated channels on cable TV. And while the network never spawned a hit as massively popular as Nickelodeon’s SpongeBob SquarePants, it consistently delivered cult classics, including Tartakovsky’s Samurai Jack, Pendleton Ward’s Adventure Time, John Dilworth’s Courage the Cowardly Dog and Rebecca Sugar’s Steven Universe. Those shows hooked fans who eventually found themselves exploring the broader Cartoon Network cosmos. “Primarily children watch cartoons, but adults watch cartoons too,” Turner would later tell an interviewer from the Television Academy. “On the average evening, more adults are tuned to the Cartoon Network than are tuned to CNN.”
Illustration: Niro Perrone for Bloomberg Businessweek
In 1996, as a wave of consolidation swept through the cable industry, Turner sold his company to Time Warner, an entertainment conglomerate already well versed in the cartoon business. Warner Bros. Animation was one of Hollywood’s revered studios, home to Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. As the merger progressed, Time Warner announced it would shut down the Hanna-Barbera studios in LA—where Cartoon Network’s handful of original shows were in production—and move everyone nearby, under the same roof. The cartoonists would work alongside their corporate cousins.
Right away, the two cultures struggled to mesh. For the most part, Warner Bros. Animation was focused on lavish reboots of its famous characters for a new generation, while Cartoon Network was all about conjuring novel universes from scratch on shoestring budgets. Some skeptics inside Time Warner questioned Cartoon Network’s approach. Why not just make shows based on intellectual property that kids were already primed to devour? “I remember having huge fights in the 1990s with the ad sales people, who wanted to put toy shows on our air,” Lazzo says. “We were mostly able to keep it off the air and concentrate on original voices.”
By 2000, Cartoon Network executives were able to open their own animation studio in Burbank. To make it feel like home, managers handed out cans of spray paint to their incoming animators. Soon, a mosaic of colorful doodles was spreading across the facility’s main stairwell. The same playful vibe that enlivened the on-air brand took root, with each floor featuring a particular culinary attraction—a soda fountain machine, a candy smorgasbord, even a pancake station. Cartoon Network Studios favored a creator-centric approach: New episodes would unfold with an artist in front of a storyboard, sculpting the plot lines, writing the dialogue and fine-tuning the jokes. “A lot of control was given to the artists, because we felt that they would do right by the shows,” says Linda Simensky, a creative executive who joined Cartoon Network from Nickelodeon during the early days and who now teaches a class on the history of animation at the University of Pennsylvania.
At the time, roughly a third of the network’s audience was adults, not kids, a dynamic that shaped its programming strategy. Where Nickelodeon intensely focused on elementary schoolers, Cartoon Network artists pursued edgier, more convoluted stories that appealed to a broader demographic, from tweens to college kids—basically, anyone who loved animation. “We used to explain it as, ‘We target a psychographic, not a demographic,’ ” Simensky says. The resulting shows, from Maxwell Atoms’ The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy to C.H. Greenblatt’s Chowder, were often comically absurd and crammed with slapstick gags, screwy punch lines and surreal atmospheres. “Disney was the kid in the class that’s sitting in front raising their hand,” Simensky says. “Nickelodeon was the kid in the middle, making jokes. And Cartoon Network was the kid all the way in the back row, shooting spitballs.”
Almost overnight, the studio turned into a powerful magnet for early-career animators, many of whom arrived fresh out of art school with their imaginations on fire. The pay wasn’t great, former Cartoon Network animators say, but the opportunities for creative advancement were unmatched. New arrivals were integrated into an apprentice system that could quickly transform a jittery twentysomething into a steady-handed showrunner. Everyone was encouraged to pitch ideas for series, and most of what got picked for the lineup came from within their youthful ranks.
Meanwhile, the round-the-clock animation network was grappling with a persistent business challenge. Most of their advertisers were reluctant to buy commercial airtime at night, when kids were asleep. And so, in 2001, Cartoon Network announced it was turning a chunk of the nighttime schedule into a new programming block, beginning at 10 p.m. two nights a week, geared toward grown-up audiences. The network called it Adult Swim.
Adult Swim showed a cackling mix of subversive originals alongside reruns of irreverent animated programs from other channels, including Matt Groening’s Futurama and Seth MacFarlane’s Family Guy, which had originally aired on Fox. From the start, it was a winning late-night recipe that, as legions of college students could soon attest, paired particularly well with dorm room bong hits. Advertisers feasted on it.
Inside a former carpet factory in Atlanta, across a highway from Turner’s original campus, Adult Swim built a second studio, dubbed Williams Street, which cranked out droll marketing promos and batches of new bizarro shows. By the 2010s, according to people familiar with the company’s financials who asked not to be named discussing nonpublic information, the two-headed network was regularly generating $1 billion or so in annual sales and roughly $500 million in profit. Looking back, former executives say the key to all the success—from Cartoon Network’s significant profits to its sizable pile of Emmy awards—was their independence. Without adequate breathing room from Warner Bros. Animation, they say, none of it would have been possible.
Illustration: Niro Perrone for Bloomberg Businessweek
David Zaslav, a dexterous, acrobatic and prodigious dropper of names, was just getting started puffing up his new media empire. It was April 26, 2022, and weeks earlier, the telecom giant AT&T Inc. had ended its rocky, short-lived foray into Hollywood by spinning off Cartoon Network’s parent company, WarnerMedia, into the merger with Discovery. Zaslav, addressing investors on a quarterly earnings call for the first time as the new CEO, praised the company’s name-brand entertainers and assets, at various points calling out Oprah Winfrey, Harry Potter, Ted Lasso, Batman, Game of Thrones, Chip and Joanna Gaines, Euphoria, The Gilded Age, 90 Day Fiancé, the Olympics, the Food Network, The Big Bang Theory, Looney Tunes and CNN—which he described as a “true reputational asset” and invoked no less than 17 times. Not once did he mention Cartoon Network or Adult Swim.
The previous years under AT&T had done much to dull Cartoon Network’s shine. Leading up to the rollout of HBO Max in 2020, AT&T vowed to build a streaming service that could compete head-to-head with Netflix, in part by loading up on original programming, including series for kids. At first, Cartoon Network employees assumed its management team would be tapped to lead the charge. Instead, they were largely marginalized. To build buzz for the new app, HBO Max executives trawled the broader market for kids shows based on conventional, unlikely-to-fail IP. Among other splurges, they acquired an expensive package of streaming rights to Sesame Street and the latest in a long line of rebooted Looney Tunes shows from Warner Bros. Animation. They also commissioned a new talk show starring Elmo.
Meanwhile, Cartoon Network Studios—adept at low-cost original kids programming—mostly spun its wheels. Behind the scenes, AT&T began planning a reorganization that in the months ahead would consolidate Cartoon Network Studios back in with Warner Bros. Animation—essentially reinstating the uncomfortable arrangement that had proved so unpalatable decades earlier. Feeling sidelined, several team members jumped ship, including Lazzo, who retired.
In the spring of 2020, when AT&T finally rolled out HBO Max (later rechristened Max), sign-ups were sluggish. “Pricing is high, the buzz is not there,” industry analyst Michael Nathanson said a few days after the app appeared, noting that his own children were totally indifferent to it. Somehow a company with three celebrated animation studios and one of the world’s largest collections of cartoons had failed to generate much interest from young viewers. “Nobody came to me yesterday and said, ‘We should get HBO Max now, Dad.’ ”
Zaslav, now dealing with his new company’s ballooning costs and vaporized cash flow, implemented a multibillion-dollar cost-cutting plan that touched every part of Warner Bros.’ business. It particularly irked creatives, including cartoonists who felt they were even more vulnerable to the scythe-swinging than their peers in live action. When cuts hit Turner Classic Movies, for example, Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese jumped on a Zoom with Zaslav and ultimately won some concessions for the cherished classic-film channel. Who would ride to Cartoon Network’s rescue?
The animation industry’s stars weren’t famous actors or silver-tongued directors; they were fictional characters—by and large a bunch of anthropomorphic animals and bug-eyed misfits with nebulous executive function skills. Samurai Jack and Gumball couldn’t exactly roll up to the boss’ mansion and sweet-talk budget protections over cocktails and sign autographs for the nephews. Quite possibly, the cartoonists were screwed.
In 2023, Warner Bros. revealed that it would be shutting down Cartoon Network Studios’ home in Burbank and moving the remaining staffers into the “Iceberg,” the company’s glistening, Frank Gehry-designed offices a few miles away. What little remained of the network’s prized independence was over. Workers came in, painted over the treasured mural of graffiti on the stairwell walls and pried the Cartoon Network logo off the building’s facade. Van Partible, the creator of Johnny Bravo, went back for one final, dispiriting look around. “It was just really sad,” he says.
Last fall, Cartoon Network began airing Barney’s World, a sugary-sweet reformulation of PBS’s onetime live-action show, starring the soft purple dinosaur. In the decade and a half since the original series went off the air, the toymaker Mattel Inc. had snapped up the Barney IP and concocted a plan to revive it for the benefit of toddlers and shareholders. “It’s exactly the kind of thing that people at Cartoon Network would have once made fun of,” says Simensky, the former Cartoon Network executive.
But in the current media environment, the dancing dinosaur is an important draw for the network in the US and far beyond, according to Vanessa Brookman, the Warner Bros. executive in London. In some regions, such as Latin America, where cord-cutting has yet to decimate cable and broadcast audiences to the same degree as in the US, kids still spend sizable chunks of time in front of the family TV, she says. Along with Barney, the company is also developing a reboot of The Powerpuff Girls and shooting spinoffs of Adventure Time and Regular Show. This year, according to a company spokesperson, a seventh season of The Amazing World of Gumball will make its debut on Cartoon Network, as will new episodes of Total Drama Island: Reboot and We Baby Bears—both based on previous Cartoon Network shows.
Brookman disputes the widely held presumption in the animation community that Cartoon Network has largely given up on originals. In April it began airing Roye Okupe’s Iyanu, a new series about a teenage girl with magical powers. But in the current environment, Brookman says, reboots of past hits make good business sense. They’re easier to market cross-culturally to global audiences, and middle-aged parents are eager to introduce the vintage Cartoon Network characters to their own kids—the kind of multigenerational on-ramp that rivals like Disney have been so good at building over the years. “The easiest way for me to do that now is to do it with our really beloved IP,” Brookman says. Retired animator Robert Alvarez says of the future of the network: “Scooby-Doo is like a vampire. You can’t kill it.”
In the meantime, Warner Bros. Discovery continues to rent out pieces of its historic inventory as it keeps paying down debt. Along the way, most of Cartoon Network’s past shows have been pulled from Max, either shelved to save money on upkeep costs such as residual payments to writers and actors or licensed out to other streaming services, primarily Walt Disney Co.’s Hulu.
The paucity reflects a recent turn in strategy. In December, when Warner Bros. announced it would no longer pay for exclusive new episodes of Sesame Street on Max, it conceded that the intended audience—kids—wasn’t there. “Based on consumer usage and feedback, we’ve had to prioritize our focus on stories for adults and families,” a Max spokesman said at the time. Meanwhile, much of the kids material commissioned for Max’s launch in the AT&T years has already been removed from the app, such as the short-lived Elmo talk show, which has mercifully vanished. “They went with safe crap, which obviously failed,” Alvarez says. (A recent perusal of the Cartoon Network tile on the Max app revealed a total of 11 series to choose from out of the hundreds of shows that have aired on the cable channel over the years.)
If there remains a source of hope for Cartoon Network’s more disillusioned fans and alumni, it exists some 2,000 miles away in Atlanta, where the Adult Swim team still resides. On a Tuesday morning in February, Michael Ouweleen, president of Cartoon Network and head of Adult Swim, strolled through the hallways at the Williams Street studio. If you squinted, it almost felt like the heady days of Peak Cartoon. Ouweleen went past a gaggle of young art-school grads in training and a room with a guy animating a scene of a tree falling on a screaming character. He walked into a windowless room where, amid a smattering of tripods, cameras and papier-mâché, workers were preparing an elaborate April Fools’ stunt for the amusement of the network’s fans. (Several weeks later, on April 1, Adult Swim would broadcast a half-hour special of its hit show Rick and Morty reimagined as live-action theater sketches.)
Ouweleen, who helped to start Adult Swim more than two decades ago and has worked in almost every aspect of animation series creation, from programming to marketing, says its mission essentially remains the same: Find talented artists with a unique point of view and help them realize their vision. He points out that it still maintains a shorts program to act as a pipeline for new talent. Under the current iteration, artists can get between $6,000 and $8,000 to develop brief videos—roughly 50 of which are presented on Adult Swim’s YouTube channel every year.
With cable TV audiences continuing to skew older, Warner Bros. keeps handing over large chunks of Cartoon Network’s daily airtime to Adult Swim, which at the moment seems poised to have a brighter future than the mother ship. It currently has two series in production at Williams Street and five other new or recurring series that will air new episodes in 2025. In late May, its biggest hit, Rick and Morty, will come back for its eighth season, albeit without co-creator Justin Roiland, who was forced out after being accused of domestic violence (the charges were later dropped) and inappropriate workplace behavior (which he has denied). Ouweleen says there’s been no pressure from above to shift into reboot mode. “We’ve never been questioned on why we do all originals right now. Everyone’s fine with it,” he says.
For now, the network’s fate remains tied to the troubled fortunes of Warner Bros., which has lost more than 60% of its market value since Zaslav took over. Earlier this year, the company completed a reorganization that essentially carves out the legacy basic cable networks, including Cartoon Network and Adult Swim, from the rest of the company’s assets. On the morning of May 8, Warner Bros. revealed it had added another 5.3 million streaming customers in the first three months of the year, and that adjusted profit from the streaming unit had grown to $339 million. Afterward, a CNBC reporter speculated on the air that Warner Bros. will “almost definitely” spin off its new cable networks division, which sent Warner Bros.’s share price soaring by as much as 8.6%—a strong sign that the market is eager for Zaslav to jettison the aging channels.
Having paid down the company’s debt significantly over the past three years, Zaslav is better positioned than ever to ramp up the company’s investment in original animation—if he wants to. To date, he’s remained mum on his plans for Cartoon Network and Adult Swim. While the future of animated kids shows for TV looks iffy at Warner Bros., the company is still pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into feature-length animated movies for kids, which mostly continue to perform well at the box office. Warner Bros. Pictures Animation has several big animated movies slated for theatrical distribution in the years ahead, from a reboot of The Cat in the Hat to a musical comedy titled Bad Fairies.
Ouweleen isn’t worried about the future of animation at Warner Bros. and beyond. The entire history of cartoons, he points out, has been marked by almost nonstop technological disruption. “Animation is amazing at adapting to a different economic reality or a different consumption habit,” he says. Even so, Adult Swim will have to continue to grapple with the same downward viewership pressure that is affecting all of cable TV. According to Variety’s yearend analysis of Nielsen ratings data, in 2014 Adult Swim averaged 1.3 million total viewers in prime time. By last year that figure had dropped to 210,000.
Fortunately, Adult Swim’s shows tend to live easily these days alongside the kind of prestige HBO dramas, edgy comedies and indie A24 movies that have come to largely define Max’s core offerings. In February, Adult Swim began airing Common Side Effects, a comedy caper about an amateur scientist who discovers in the mountains of Peru magic mushrooms capable of healing just about every human ailment and is subsequently hunted down by a shadowy cabal of big pharma execs. The bloody, paranoid gonzo show seems perfectly engineered for the current “Make America Healthy Again” moment. It’s the output of an impressive creative pedigree that includes a former writer for Veep, the co-creator of Scavengers Reign and Mike Judge, from King of the Hill and Beavis and Butt-Head.
Following its debut, Common Side Effects regularly appeared in the top 10 most popular series on Max, and among critics it has received the kind of effusive praise often reserved for auteur-driven serialized dramas. In March, Warner Bros. announced it was re-upping the show for a second season—a rare bit of good news amid the broader funk hanging over the industry.
“See?” Ouweleen says. “We can have nice things.”
Bloomberg (archive.ph)
By Felix Gillette
2025-05-13 11:00:27GMT
Illustration: Niro Perrone for Bloomberg Businessweek
One night in August, a group of animators headed out on foot through the streets of Burbank, California, cloaked in Mission: Impossible-style black outfits. At about 10 p.m., the crew arrived at its destination, a deserted office disconcertingly close to the neighborhood police station. For decades, the building had served as the bustling studio of Cartoon Network, which, like much of the cable universe, has fallen on challenging times. Until recently, the facility was a place where young animators daydreamed of launching their creations into the world. Now it sat empty and foreboding—another reminder of the grisly cost cuts that had been sweeping through Cartoon Network’s parent company, Warner Bros.
On the sidewalk outside, the animators hurriedly set up a generator, a projector and a laptop outfitted with video-loop software, and hit play. For the next several minutes, an animated vignette played on repeat across the building’s facade: A large disembodied hand clutching a pencil rubs out “Cartoon Network” from the top of the building, then tries to erase a nearby worker, who scampers for safety. After a brief pursuit, a pack of colleagues band together and collectively shove away the menacing pencil pusher. The film ends with an unsubtle message: “Dear studios: Don’t erase animation jobs!”
Cartoon Network studios in Burbank.Photographer: AaronP/Getty Images
The group circulated the video online, adding to an expanding body of work bemoaning the state of the US animation industry, where concerns about unemployment are high, new series scarce, overseas outsourcing rampant and anxiety over artificial intelligence widespread. Among online commentators, much of the resulting ire has been directed at David Zaslav, the chief executive officer at Warner Bros. Discovery Inc., who’s emerged as a frequent target in Hollywood since orchestrating the stormy 2022 merger of WarnerMedia with Discovery Inc. Discovery was best known for low-cost reality-TV and crime shows—and not known at all for animation.
On Zaslav’s watch, sweeping cuts have roiled the combined company’s animation assets. Beyond the shuttering of the old Cartoon Network studios, Warner Bros. has backed out of theatrically distributing several almost-completed animated movies, including Fixed, a feature from revered cartoon auteur Genndy Tartakovsky (since picked up by Netflix); it pulled the plug on the Boomerang network’s standalone animation streaming service; it closed Rooster Teeth, a subsidiary in Austin that made several popular animated web series; and it removed numerous animated movies, classic Looney Tunes shows and Cartoon Network programs from the company’s streaming service, Max. Somewhere amid the changes, #RIPCartoonNetwork started trending on X while animation fans circulated the hashtag #FireDavidZaslav on YouTube. “Discovery came in, and it went downhill fast,” says Robert Alvarez, a retired animator who worked on popular Cartoon Network shows from the mid-’90s until 2023.
David Zaslav walks the red carpet at an event in New York in 2022.Photographer: Nina Westervelt/Getty Images
In August, Warner Bros. announced it was taking a $9.1 billion charge, writing down the value of its traditional TV networks, which include, along with the Discovery Channel and Cartoon Network, the Food Network, TBS and TNT. Warner Bros. doesn’t break out the individual financial performance of each channel, but Cartoon Network’s struggles have certainly contributed to the downturn. According to estimates from S&P Global Market Intelligence, the annual advertising revenue for Cartoon Network and Adult Swim, its spinoff animation brand for grown-ups, plummeted from $668.3 million in 2014 to $133.7 million last year.
The viability of the Cartoon Network brand in streaming doesn’t look much more promising. A few years ago, network executives were touting Max as the next natural step in Cartoon Network’s evolution. But since its debut five years ago, a string of programming misfires and increased competition from YouTube have meant that Max has largely failed to emerge as a go-to destination for young viewers. According to data from PreciseTV, a video advertising firm, only 13% of 10- to 12-year-old viewers have recently watched programming on Max, versus 32% for Hulu, 57% for Disney+ and 72% for Netflix. Among preschool audiences, the numbers for Max are even worse. The company recently decided that children’s programming is no longer a core part of Max’s strategy, further clouding Cartoon Network’s prospects.
Cartoon Network’s struggles have been playing out at a time when animation at large has arguably never been more popular. From Dog Man and Inside Out 2 to The Super Mario Bros. Movie, animated features continue to rule the box office. Bluey—a cartoon series from Australia that Cartoon Network executives once unsuccessfully sought to license—has been a huge hit for Disney+. And animated shows such as Peppa Pig and CoComelon regularly attract big audiences of youngsters on Netflix. The global anime market is projected to grow from $34.2 billion in 2024 to $60.1 billion by 2030, according to research by Jefferies Financial Group Inc. Surely, many animation fans still hope, there is room for the Cartoon Network brand to flourish once again.
Vanessa Brookman, a Warner Bros. executive in London who manages the brand abroad, says that the network has a strong, growing presence overseas and that the company is “dialing up” its investment in Adult Swim’s older-skewing shows, which jibe better with Max’s current strategy. (Both Zaslav and Sam Register, the head of Warner Bros. Animation, who now oversees Cartoon Network Studios and its diminished output of shows, declined to speak to Bloomberg Businessweek.) Brookman attributes the online uproar over the cutbacks at Cartoon Network to pent-up nostalgia for the time when it was first emerging as an engine of cutting-edge animation on par with the most esteemed anime shops in Japan. She says she’s optimistic about the network’s current direction. “It’s not maybe how the fans remember it,” the executive says. “But it’s not dead.”
Illustration: Niro Perrone for Bloomberg Businessweek
About a decade after Ted Turner started CNN, he came up with an idea for a new cable channel that would air cartoons at all hours, not just on Saturday morning or after school. In 1991 he bought Hanna-Barbera Productions, a mother lode of classic series—Scooby-Doo, Yogi Bear, The Flintstones, The Jetsons and The Smurfs, among many others. The next year, he started Cartoon Network, initially reaching some 2 million US homes.
The tricky job of figuring out which of the thousands of episodes to air each day largely fell to an omnivorous consumer of pop culture named Mike Lazzo. Around Cartoon Network’s offices in Atlanta, Lazzo was hard to miss. With his shoulder-length blond hair, puckish eyes and curious wardrobe (including fishing hats and kilts), he looked more like a new wave pop star than a corporate middle manager. As they fiddled with the network’s schedule, Lazzo and his small team studied the competition. In the early ’90s, critics were buzzing over Nickelodeon, Sumner Redstone’s channel for kids, and its two growing hits, Rugrats and The Ren & Stimpy Show. Lazzo’s crew concluded that rather than just airing endless Hanna-Barbera reruns, Cartoon Network should also make shows of its own. “We went to Ted and said, ‘Give us money for originals,’ ” Lazzo recalls. “And he just threw us out of his office.”
Mike Lazzo.Photographer: Ian White/Corbis/Getty Images
Admittedly, Lazzo’s team had zero experience in such endeavors. What they needed was a clever idea and some minimal proof of production competence. At the time, the entertainment industry was enthralled with the drama taking place in late-night comedy. In 1992, Johnny Carson retired from The Tonight Show, touching off a fierce succession battle. That summer, HBO began airing The Larry Sanders Show, a parody of a late-night show that successfully drafted off interest in the real-world power struggle. Critics adored it, and so did Lazzo.
The Cartoon Network staff aimed to do something similar. On a threadbare budget, they cobbled together a pilot for a parody of a talk show hosted by Space Ghost—a caped, intergalactic crime fighter with laser-shooting fists who’d starred in a 1960s Hanna-Barbera series. By splicing together clips of the vintage cartoon hero with TV footage of contemporary, real-world personalities, such as comedian Carrot Top and Bill Nye (“the Science Guy”), they were able to mimic the familiar patter of a Hollywood talk show. Turner, impressed by the bizarre mashup of animation and celebrity, gave a thumbs-up to Space Ghost Coast to Coast—which would go on to run for 11 critically admired seasons—and agreed to fund more series.
Space Ghost Coast to Coast.Photo: Alamy
For years, American cartoons had been mired in mediocrity. For much of the 1980s, shows based on toy lines from Transformers to G.I. Joe crowded the airwaves. The Cartoon Network team thought the merchandise-driven shows lacked the feral ingenuity of animation’s early years, when imaginative, wigged-out directors like Tex Avery and Chuck Jones ruled the rambunctious medium. It was time, they agreed, to re-embrace a creator-driven approach.
Cartoon Network announced in 1994 that it was teaming up with its corporate siblings at Hanna-Barbera to sponsor a new “shorts” program. Forty-eight six- to seven-minute cartoons would be chosen from an open call for submissions, then aired on the network. They would turn the best ones into recurring series. Before long, the shorts initiative ushered in a wave of popular, long-running shows appealing to elementary-school kids and young adults, including Dexter’s Laboratory from Tartakovsky, about a science prodigy with a flair for mayhem; Johnny Bravo from Van Partible, about a preening airhead and his dating misadventures; and The Powerpuff Girls by Craig McCracken, about a trio of precocious, pint-size superheroes.
As Cartoon Network grew, its staff settled into offices at Turner’s broadcasting center on the site of a former country club in Atlanta. There, Lazzo’s team enjoyed life as the campus oddballs. They held an annual Velma Day in honor of the nerdy Scooby-Doo heroine. On April Fools’ Day each year they pulled pranks on their viewers, such as scheduling a round-the-clock marathon of Screwy Squirrel, a wickedly deviant cartoon from the 1940s. When they attended animation trade shows, they’d bring back costumes and parade around the office park, dressed as monsters and villains.
Over time, the mischievous spirit of Lazzo’s staff came to define the Cartoon Network brand, and legions of absurdism-loving cartoon heads happily gobbled up whatever they were serving. Before long, Cartoon Network was starting to rank as one of the 10 highest-rated channels on cable TV. And while the network never spawned a hit as massively popular as Nickelodeon’s SpongeBob SquarePants, it consistently delivered cult classics, including Tartakovsky’s Samurai Jack, Pendleton Ward’s Adventure Time, John Dilworth’s Courage the Cowardly Dog and Rebecca Sugar’s Steven Universe. Those shows hooked fans who eventually found themselves exploring the broader Cartoon Network cosmos. “Primarily children watch cartoons, but adults watch cartoons too,” Turner would later tell an interviewer from the Television Academy. “On the average evening, more adults are tuned to the Cartoon Network than are tuned to CNN.”
Illustration: Niro Perrone for Bloomberg Businessweek
In 1996, as a wave of consolidation swept through the cable industry, Turner sold his company to Time Warner, an entertainment conglomerate already well versed in the cartoon business. Warner Bros. Animation was one of Hollywood’s revered studios, home to Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. As the merger progressed, Time Warner announced it would shut down the Hanna-Barbera studios in LA—where Cartoon Network’s handful of original shows were in production—and move everyone nearby, under the same roof. The cartoonists would work alongside their corporate cousins.
Right away, the two cultures struggled to mesh. For the most part, Warner Bros. Animation was focused on lavish reboots of its famous characters for a new generation, while Cartoon Network was all about conjuring novel universes from scratch on shoestring budgets. Some skeptics inside Time Warner questioned Cartoon Network’s approach. Why not just make shows based on intellectual property that kids were already primed to devour? “I remember having huge fights in the 1990s with the ad sales people, who wanted to put toy shows on our air,” Lazzo says. “We were mostly able to keep it off the air and concentrate on original voices.”
By 2000, Cartoon Network executives were able to open their own animation studio in Burbank. To make it feel like home, managers handed out cans of spray paint to their incoming animators. Soon, a mosaic of colorful doodles was spreading across the facility’s main stairwell. The same playful vibe that enlivened the on-air brand took root, with each floor featuring a particular culinary attraction—a soda fountain machine, a candy smorgasbord, even a pancake station. Cartoon Network Studios favored a creator-centric approach: New episodes would unfold with an artist in front of a storyboard, sculpting the plot lines, writing the dialogue and fine-tuning the jokes. “A lot of control was given to the artists, because we felt that they would do right by the shows,” says Linda Simensky, a creative executive who joined Cartoon Network from Nickelodeon during the early days and who now teaches a class on the history of animation at the University of Pennsylvania.
At the time, roughly a third of the network’s audience was adults, not kids, a dynamic that shaped its programming strategy. Where Nickelodeon intensely focused on elementary schoolers, Cartoon Network artists pursued edgier, more convoluted stories that appealed to a broader demographic, from tweens to college kids—basically, anyone who loved animation. “We used to explain it as, ‘We target a psychographic, not a demographic,’ ” Simensky says. The resulting shows, from Maxwell Atoms’ The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy to C.H. Greenblatt’s Chowder, were often comically absurd and crammed with slapstick gags, screwy punch lines and surreal atmospheres. “Disney was the kid in the class that’s sitting in front raising their hand,” Simensky says. “Nickelodeon was the kid in the middle, making jokes. And Cartoon Network was the kid all the way in the back row, shooting spitballs.”
Almost overnight, the studio turned into a powerful magnet for early-career animators, many of whom arrived fresh out of art school with their imaginations on fire. The pay wasn’t great, former Cartoon Network animators say, but the opportunities for creative advancement were unmatched. New arrivals were integrated into an apprentice system that could quickly transform a jittery twentysomething into a steady-handed showrunner. Everyone was encouraged to pitch ideas for series, and most of what got picked for the lineup came from within their youthful ranks.
Meanwhile, the round-the-clock animation network was grappling with a persistent business challenge. Most of their advertisers were reluctant to buy commercial airtime at night, when kids were asleep. And so, in 2001, Cartoon Network announced it was turning a chunk of the nighttime schedule into a new programming block, beginning at 10 p.m. two nights a week, geared toward grown-up audiences. The network called it Adult Swim.
Adult Swim showed a cackling mix of subversive originals alongside reruns of irreverent animated programs from other channels, including Matt Groening’s Futurama and Seth MacFarlane’s Family Guy, which had originally aired on Fox. From the start, it was a winning late-night recipe that, as legions of college students could soon attest, paired particularly well with dorm room bong hits. Advertisers feasted on it.
Inside a former carpet factory in Atlanta, across a highway from Turner’s original campus, Adult Swim built a second studio, dubbed Williams Street, which cranked out droll marketing promos and batches of new bizarro shows. By the 2010s, according to people familiar with the company’s financials who asked not to be named discussing nonpublic information, the two-headed network was regularly generating $1 billion or so in annual sales and roughly $500 million in profit. Looking back, former executives say the key to all the success—from Cartoon Network’s significant profits to its sizable pile of Emmy awards—was their independence. Without adequate breathing room from Warner Bros. Animation, they say, none of it would have been possible.
Illustration: Niro Perrone for Bloomberg Businessweek
David Zaslav, a dexterous, acrobatic and prodigious dropper of names, was just getting started puffing up his new media empire. It was April 26, 2022, and weeks earlier, the telecom giant AT&T Inc. had ended its rocky, short-lived foray into Hollywood by spinning off Cartoon Network’s parent company, WarnerMedia, into the merger with Discovery. Zaslav, addressing investors on a quarterly earnings call for the first time as the new CEO, praised the company’s name-brand entertainers and assets, at various points calling out Oprah Winfrey, Harry Potter, Ted Lasso, Batman, Game of Thrones, Chip and Joanna Gaines, Euphoria, The Gilded Age, 90 Day Fiancé, the Olympics, the Food Network, The Big Bang Theory, Looney Tunes and CNN—which he described as a “true reputational asset” and invoked no less than 17 times. Not once did he mention Cartoon Network or Adult Swim.
The previous years under AT&T had done much to dull Cartoon Network’s shine. Leading up to the rollout of HBO Max in 2020, AT&T vowed to build a streaming service that could compete head-to-head with Netflix, in part by loading up on original programming, including series for kids. At first, Cartoon Network employees assumed its management team would be tapped to lead the charge. Instead, they were largely marginalized. To build buzz for the new app, HBO Max executives trawled the broader market for kids shows based on conventional, unlikely-to-fail IP. Among other splurges, they acquired an expensive package of streaming rights to Sesame Street and the latest in a long line of rebooted Looney Tunes shows from Warner Bros. Animation. They also commissioned a new talk show starring Elmo.
Meanwhile, Cartoon Network Studios—adept at low-cost original kids programming—mostly spun its wheels. Behind the scenes, AT&T began planning a reorganization that in the months ahead would consolidate Cartoon Network Studios back in with Warner Bros. Animation—essentially reinstating the uncomfortable arrangement that had proved so unpalatable decades earlier. Feeling sidelined, several team members jumped ship, including Lazzo, who retired.
In the spring of 2020, when AT&T finally rolled out HBO Max (later rechristened Max), sign-ups were sluggish. “Pricing is high, the buzz is not there,” industry analyst Michael Nathanson said a few days after the app appeared, noting that his own children were totally indifferent to it. Somehow a company with three celebrated animation studios and one of the world’s largest collections of cartoons had failed to generate much interest from young viewers. “Nobody came to me yesterday and said, ‘We should get HBO Max now, Dad.’ ”
Zaslav, now dealing with his new company’s ballooning costs and vaporized cash flow, implemented a multibillion-dollar cost-cutting plan that touched every part of Warner Bros.’ business. It particularly irked creatives, including cartoonists who felt they were even more vulnerable to the scythe-swinging than their peers in live action. When cuts hit Turner Classic Movies, for example, Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese jumped on a Zoom with Zaslav and ultimately won some concessions for the cherished classic-film channel. Who would ride to Cartoon Network’s rescue?
The animation industry’s stars weren’t famous actors or silver-tongued directors; they were fictional characters—by and large a bunch of anthropomorphic animals and bug-eyed misfits with nebulous executive function skills. Samurai Jack and Gumball couldn’t exactly roll up to the boss’ mansion and sweet-talk budget protections over cocktails and sign autographs for the nephews. Quite possibly, the cartoonists were screwed.
In 2023, Warner Bros. revealed that it would be shutting down Cartoon Network Studios’ home in Burbank and moving the remaining staffers into the “Iceberg,” the company’s glistening, Frank Gehry-designed offices a few miles away. What little remained of the network’s prized independence was over. Workers came in, painted over the treasured mural of graffiti on the stairwell walls and pried the Cartoon Network logo off the building’s facade. Van Partible, the creator of Johnny Bravo, went back for one final, dispiriting look around. “It was just really sad,” he says.
Last fall, Cartoon Network began airing Barney’s World, a sugary-sweet reformulation of PBS’s onetime live-action show, starring the soft purple dinosaur. In the decade and a half since the original series went off the air, the toymaker Mattel Inc. had snapped up the Barney IP and concocted a plan to revive it for the benefit of toddlers and shareholders. “It’s exactly the kind of thing that people at Cartoon Network would have once made fun of,” says Simensky, the former Cartoon Network executive.
But in the current media environment, the dancing dinosaur is an important draw for the network in the US and far beyond, according to Vanessa Brookman, the Warner Bros. executive in London. In some regions, such as Latin America, where cord-cutting has yet to decimate cable and broadcast audiences to the same degree as in the US, kids still spend sizable chunks of time in front of the family TV, she says. Along with Barney, the company is also developing a reboot of The Powerpuff Girls and shooting spinoffs of Adventure Time and Regular Show. This year, according to a company spokesperson, a seventh season of The Amazing World of Gumball will make its debut on Cartoon Network, as will new episodes of Total Drama Island: Reboot and We Baby Bears—both based on previous Cartoon Network shows.
Brookman disputes the widely held presumption in the animation community that Cartoon Network has largely given up on originals. In April it began airing Roye Okupe’s Iyanu, a new series about a teenage girl with magical powers. But in the current environment, Brookman says, reboots of past hits make good business sense. They’re easier to market cross-culturally to global audiences, and middle-aged parents are eager to introduce the vintage Cartoon Network characters to their own kids—the kind of multigenerational on-ramp that rivals like Disney have been so good at building over the years. “The easiest way for me to do that now is to do it with our really beloved IP,” Brookman says. Retired animator Robert Alvarez says of the future of the network: “Scooby-Doo is like a vampire. You can’t kill it.”
In the meantime, Warner Bros. Discovery continues to rent out pieces of its historic inventory as it keeps paying down debt. Along the way, most of Cartoon Network’s past shows have been pulled from Max, either shelved to save money on upkeep costs such as residual payments to writers and actors or licensed out to other streaming services, primarily Walt Disney Co.’s Hulu.
The paucity reflects a recent turn in strategy. In December, when Warner Bros. announced it would no longer pay for exclusive new episodes of Sesame Street on Max, it conceded that the intended audience—kids—wasn’t there. “Based on consumer usage and feedback, we’ve had to prioritize our focus on stories for adults and families,” a Max spokesman said at the time. Meanwhile, much of the kids material commissioned for Max’s launch in the AT&T years has already been removed from the app, such as the short-lived Elmo talk show, which has mercifully vanished. “They went with safe crap, which obviously failed,” Alvarez says. (A recent perusal of the Cartoon Network tile on the Max app revealed a total of 11 series to choose from out of the hundreds of shows that have aired on the cable channel over the years.)
If there remains a source of hope for Cartoon Network’s more disillusioned fans and alumni, it exists some 2,000 miles away in Atlanta, where the Adult Swim team still resides. On a Tuesday morning in February, Michael Ouweleen, president of Cartoon Network and head of Adult Swim, strolled through the hallways at the Williams Street studio. If you squinted, it almost felt like the heady days of Peak Cartoon. Ouweleen went past a gaggle of young art-school grads in training and a room with a guy animating a scene of a tree falling on a screaming character. He walked into a windowless room where, amid a smattering of tripods, cameras and papier-mâché, workers were preparing an elaborate April Fools’ stunt for the amusement of the network’s fans. (Several weeks later, on April 1, Adult Swim would broadcast a half-hour special of its hit show Rick and Morty reimagined as live-action theater sketches.)
Ouweleen, who helped to start Adult Swim more than two decades ago and has worked in almost every aspect of animation series creation, from programming to marketing, says its mission essentially remains the same: Find talented artists with a unique point of view and help them realize their vision. He points out that it still maintains a shorts program to act as a pipeline for new talent. Under the current iteration, artists can get between $6,000 and $8,000 to develop brief videos—roughly 50 of which are presented on Adult Swim’s YouTube channel every year.
With cable TV audiences continuing to skew older, Warner Bros. keeps handing over large chunks of Cartoon Network’s daily airtime to Adult Swim, which at the moment seems poised to have a brighter future than the mother ship. It currently has two series in production at Williams Street and five other new or recurring series that will air new episodes in 2025. In late May, its biggest hit, Rick and Morty, will come back for its eighth season, albeit without co-creator Justin Roiland, who was forced out after being accused of domestic violence (the charges were later dropped) and inappropriate workplace behavior (which he has denied). Ouweleen says there’s been no pressure from above to shift into reboot mode. “We’ve never been questioned on why we do all originals right now. Everyone’s fine with it,” he says.
For now, the network’s fate remains tied to the troubled fortunes of Warner Bros., which has lost more than 60% of its market value since Zaslav took over. Earlier this year, the company completed a reorganization that essentially carves out the legacy basic cable networks, including Cartoon Network and Adult Swim, from the rest of the company’s assets. On the morning of May 8, Warner Bros. revealed it had added another 5.3 million streaming customers in the first three months of the year, and that adjusted profit from the streaming unit had grown to $339 million. Afterward, a CNBC reporter speculated on the air that Warner Bros. will “almost definitely” spin off its new cable networks division, which sent Warner Bros.’s share price soaring by as much as 8.6%—a strong sign that the market is eager for Zaslav to jettison the aging channels.
Having paid down the company’s debt significantly over the past three years, Zaslav is better positioned than ever to ramp up the company’s investment in original animation—if he wants to. To date, he’s remained mum on his plans for Cartoon Network and Adult Swim. While the future of animated kids shows for TV looks iffy at Warner Bros., the company is still pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into feature-length animated movies for kids, which mostly continue to perform well at the box office. Warner Bros. Pictures Animation has several big animated movies slated for theatrical distribution in the years ahead, from a reboot of The Cat in the Hat to a musical comedy titled Bad Fairies.
Ouweleen isn’t worried about the future of animation at Warner Bros. and beyond. The entire history of cartoons, he points out, has been marked by almost nonstop technological disruption. “Animation is amazing at adapting to a different economic reality or a different consumption habit,” he says. Even so, Adult Swim will have to continue to grapple with the same downward viewership pressure that is affecting all of cable TV. According to Variety’s yearend analysis of Nielsen ratings data, in 2014 Adult Swim averaged 1.3 million total viewers in prime time. By last year that figure had dropped to 210,000.
Fortunately, Adult Swim’s shows tend to live easily these days alongside the kind of prestige HBO dramas, edgy comedies and indie A24 movies that have come to largely define Max’s core offerings. In February, Adult Swim began airing Common Side Effects, a comedy caper about an amateur scientist who discovers in the mountains of Peru magic mushrooms capable of healing just about every human ailment and is subsequently hunted down by a shadowy cabal of big pharma execs. The bloody, paranoid gonzo show seems perfectly engineered for the current “Make America Healthy Again” moment. It’s the output of an impressive creative pedigree that includes a former writer for Veep, the co-creator of Scavengers Reign and Mike Judge, from King of the Hill and Beavis and Butt-Head.
Following its debut, Common Side Effects regularly appeared in the top 10 most popular series on Max, and among critics it has received the kind of effusive praise often reserved for auteur-driven serialized dramas. In March, Warner Bros. announced it was re-upping the show for a second season—a rare bit of good news amid the broader funk hanging over the industry.
“See?” Ouweleen says. “We can have nice things.”
