Forget Rick and Morty; this is the best cartoon for adults on TV 

Forget Rick and Morty, Hazbin Hotel, or whatever the hell Hoops was; the best cartoon for grown-ups currently on TV is Smiling Friends. 

Ever since Simpsons mania swept the US and proved cartoons aren’t just for kids, TV execs have been doing their best to try and replicate the secret formula that made America’s most dysfunctional family pop culture legends. 

The results have, admittedly, been mixed. For every Futurama and Bob’s Burgers, there have been several shows that never made it past their first season. Indeed, the graveyard of adult animation is littered with the corpses of good and bad cartoons (RIP Inside Job; you were taken from us far too soon). 

Still, the genre’s in a pretty healthy place, and plenty of great shows are on the air — Solar Opposites, Invincible, and Arcane (speaking of which, when will we hear more about Arcane Season 2?) immediately spring to mind. Yet I don’t think those shows hold a candle to my new favorite cartoon, the delightfully deviant Smiling Friends, which returns this week for its second season. 

Smile like you mean it!

If you’ve never seen it, the show’s premise is simple. Each week, we follow Charlie and Pim, two employees at the titular Smiling Friends charity, as they try to make a new client smile. It sounds like a pleasant enough show, right? Well, this simple premise belies Smiling Friends’ grotesque brilliance. 

So, if the show’s so good, why does the title of this article claim that people aren’t watching?  Despite the fact that Smiling Friends has been a critical darling and taken over the internet, the viewing figures for the first season were around 200,000-300,000, well below The Simpsons’ average of 1.8 million viewers or even Rick and Morty’s 400,000 viewers. 

To be completely honest, that’s not bad for an Adult Swim cartoon, but it’s a lot lower than the show deserves. So, indulge me while I bang the drum for a show that deserves a lot more viewers. 

Adult Swim

So what makes Smiling Friends so good?

The best thing about the show is its sense of humor. It’s probably best described as the world’s first sh*tpost cartoon, which sounds like a bad thing, but I promise you it’s not. The jokes are preposterous, silly, and often disturbing, but they’re always hilarious. Take the first episode, which deals with the Smiling Friends trying to help Desmond, a man on the brink of taking his own life. 

For the entire 11-minute run time, Charlie and Pim try to convince Desmond that life is worth living by showing him how great life can be if you try to be positive. In the end, though, they fail, and all seems lost until Desmond shoots a bliblie (don’t ask) and finds what he’s been looking for, a reason to live. It just so happens that the thing that gives him purpose is murder. 

It’s a super dark joke, but it’s laugh-out-loud funny if you like black comedy and the absurd. 

Honestly, the closest possible frame of reference is Salad Fingers. Those shorts had a similar disconcerting atmosphere, and anyone who’s seen Salad Fingers rub his limp digits against a rusty spoon has basically experienced what it’s like to watch Smiling Friends. 

That’s not to say the only ingredient in Smiling Friends’ beguiling blend of spices is Newgrounds Flash animations. There’s definitely some Simpsons in there as well. The Desmond gag actually reminded me of some of the ghoulish gags we used to get from Springfield’s finest. 

Something like the gag from Season 5 Episode 20, “The Boy Who Knew Too Much,” where Marge mentions Bart’s Uncle Arthur and his old saying, “Shoot ‘em all and let God sort them out,” a theory which he one day put into practice (Now let us never speak of this again) wouldn’t be out of place in Smiling Friends. 

I love jokes like that; they’re clever, well-written, and not immediately apparent to the viewer. Too often, lousy adult cartoons rely on the lowest common denominator to cover the fact that the jokes aren’t that good. Yes, it was shocking to hear a cartoon say “f**k” in the late ’90s, but nowadays is about as outrageous as a trip to the chiropodist. 

Smiling Friends doesn’t have to fall back on that. Instead, it leans on the silly jokes that defined the Internet in the early Aughts without falling prey to the irritating RANDOM (t3h PeNgU1N oF d00m) humor that haunts many Millennials’ old Tumblr pages. If you’re not convinced by my words, I recommend checking Smiling Friends for yourself. The episodes are only 11 minutes long, so if it doesn’t leave you smiling, at least you’ve not wasted your life, and you can always start murdering bliblies to get through the day. 

If you love great cartoons, then check out our list of the best animated movies of all time. We’ve also broken down everything you need to know about Invincible Season 3 and Beyond the Spider-Verse.