Fox hired a guy from Adult Swim to find out how to better compete with Adult Swim and his solution was for Fox to make their own Adult Swim. Brilliant! The two hour programming block will air on Saturdays at 11pm starting next year.
Basically, they’re grabbing up all the “edgy” cartoons they don’t have room for on Sunday nights (which I will henceforth refer to as “Animation Domination Prime”) and dumping them on Saturday nights, formerly the home of MADtv, Wanda Sykes’s late-night talk show, and the remaining episodes of Sit Down, Shut Up they were contractually obligated to air. Nobody knows what’s on there now. The audience for this thing will primarily consist of Adult Swim viewers who forgot Saturdays are when Adult Swim airs The Animes.
This programming block, name still to be determined, will also be a “new digital multi-platform network,” which I guess is what they call websites nowadays. There’s too much proactive paradigming in this paragraph:
The digital channel will extend across platforms such as Web, mobile apps, game consoles and Video on Demand. It kicks off in 2012 and will feature 50 original short-form pieces per year, online windows of FOX animated shows, and user-adapted content. It will create a unique opportunity for fans and up-and-coming talent to engage with professional FOX-curated content, which they could possibly platform into their own series. FOX will also use its expertise and cross-promotional power to nurture these new assets through this pipeline.
It sounds almost exactly like MTV’s recently-relaunched Liquid Television, except less cool, especially when you consider most of the “original short-form pieces” will probably resemble Seth MacFarlane’s cartoon thing.
And then there’s this:
“These new late-night series will be assets in their own right – but the clear possibility exists for a breakout digital success to graduate to primetime.”
Oh, I get it. This whole endeavor is just a testing bed for finding replacements The Simpsons and Family Guy when those long-running staples eventually, mercifully go off the air. Time to update my brackets!