This story first ran in the animation newsletter “Sketch to Screen.” Subscribe here to receive a new entry every Thursday.
Last year, “Smiling Friends” felt like Adult Swim‘s new flagship hit. The animated series, which originally premiered in 2022, was a weird novelty, a sitcom about employees at a company dedicated to spreading happiness stuffed with bizarre experimental animation and dark, meta humor. And yet the show, during the airing of its third season, was only getting more popular, at the tipping point of being something resembling a mainstream hit.
“The Simpsons” was referencing it. Viewership was continuing to rise. It was proving steadily more and more unavoidable on social media whenever a new episode aired. Before the season even began, Adult Swim renewed the show for two more seasons, guaranteeing it would be on the air until around 2027. With the channel’s previous biggest success, “Rick & Morty,” now getting long in the tooth and losing its luster, every sign was pointing to the very-online, weird internet creation of Zach Hadel and Michael Cusack becoming the new face of arguably the most important animation channel.
Until, just as suddenly, it was all over. Back in February, Hadel and Cusack made a statement in which they announced that “Smiling Friends” was over; they decided to renege on producing the two upcoming seasons in favor of ending the show at this moment. In a video announcing the decision, the two attributed the decision to both burnout and a desire to let the show end at its peak.
“Even from the very beginning of the show, we always said ‘how great would it be to try to make this show as good as it can be and really put 110% and then really go out on top,” Hadel said.
The decision was both surprising and, in some ways, one that should have been easy to see coming. When I interviewed the duo during Season 3’s run, they told me bluntly that they had zero interest in ever seeing the series run as long as “The Simpsons,” “South Park,” or similar animated series defined by their enduring cultural power. And there’s something admirable about creators choosing to end a hit like “Smiling Friends” on their own terms, and for a channel like Adult Swim to let it happen.
At the same time, there’s an unavoidable sense that something is being cut short here. “Smiling Friends,” for all its success, was an imperfect series, one that still had room to grow to fully reach its potential.
All the issues that had been subtly affecting “Smiling Friends” are fully transparent in the show’s final two episodes, released on Sunday February 12, as one last treat for the fans. In their video announcing the show’s ending, Hadel and Cusack emphasized that these episodes are not a proper finale of any sort, and that’s very evident from watching them.
A big, goopy, dramatic goodbye would probably not be fitting for such an irreverent show. Still, the episodes, which Cusack said were being worked on last year, unavoidably feel like leftovers they polished up just enough to be suitable for release; notably, both were produced by Titmouse, as opposed to the South Korean company Saerom that largely handled Season 3.
And the two installments prove to be among the weakest entries of the entire series, failing to close the show out on a strong note. “”Friend-Bot (Version 12589218731809213528796879521)” is a lazy, unimaginative riff on the debates over AI’s role in the workplace, following the staff of Smiling Friends as they adopt a service robot that does everything for them. It’s a premise that’s uncommonly derivative for the show, and “Friend-Bot” can’t even be asked to come at the discussion with a strong point of view, ending the episode with an uncomfortable reveal that the titular robot was an Indian man inside a costume the whole time.
The true final episode, “Charlie’s Uncle Dies and Doesn’t Come Back” (named in reference to the first season finale “Charlie Dies and Doesn’t Come Back”) is even worse, indulging the show’s black comedy streak without the wit or jokes to back it up. Main characters Charlie and Pim are forced to spend the day with Charlie’s Uncle Bilbert, a proudly misanthropic asshole who takes them on a bad behavior tour of sorts, including a violent “Polygon fighter” cockfighting competition that lands them in jail. The jokes all land with a thud, the sliver of heart that comes with the reveal that Bilbert wants Charlie to stand up for himself isn’t particularly moving, and the button that Bilbert is a sex criminal is more just gross than shocking or funny.
The two episodes, especially “Charlie’s Uncle Dies and Doesn’t Come Back,” exemplify what “Smiling Friends” was at its worst rather than its best. The show became best known for its extensive use of mixed media — claymation, 3D CGI, and characters of all sorts of different sizes and shapes helped fill out the show’s surreal world. In some ways, these formal elements could serve as a crutch for the show, the main distinguishing feature in its arsenal.
Most of the time, the series wasn’t quite as weird at its core as it seemed on the surface. Like a lot of Adult Swim animated series, “Smiling Friends” predicated its humor on a very online sensibility and an often misanthropic cynicism that could be exhausting rather than smart; this is a series that directly referenced infamous internet lolcow ChrisChan.
If the show worked best as sort of an absurdist stew of animated references with a touch of the surreal — the best episode is still probably “A Allan Adventure,” a strange, whimsical odyssey for supporting character Allan that gets a followup in the final two episodes — its attempts to be edgy or topical (see: the show’s election episode in Season 2) were where its cracks as a sitcom showed. And in these final two episodes, where the experiments with animation techniques are largely in the margins, all of the show’s weaknesses are in full view.
That’s not to say “Smiling Friends” was a bad show — there’s always room for something as strange and creatively risky as this series in animation, and its best episodes managed to find a way to marry its edgelord streak with solid situational character writing (Mr. Boss is a man whom I will die for, personally). Still, the show isn’t even the best Adult Swim series that aired last year; the strange thriller “Common Side Effects,” the endearingly meat-headed comedy “Haha, You Clowns,” and the enthralling queer melodrama “Women Wearing Shoulder Pads” all proved more complete, satisfying creative visions.
Time will tell what the legacy of “Smiling Friends” will be, although it in all likelihood, it will remain a stoner classic if nothing else. Regardless, it’s a shame to see a show with as much potential as it had go out not with a bang but with a muted little whimper.
The final episodes of “Smiling Friends” are now streaming on HBO Max.
