Drawing the Golden Age

ADULT ANIMATED COMEDIES ENJOY AN EVER-GROWING TELEVISION FOOTPRINT

WHEN “THE SIMPSONS” PREMIERED IN 1989 , it was an outlier. Animated shows in primetime were by no means unprecedented — “The Flintstones” broke that barrier in the ’60s — but never before had an animated series aimed at adults resonated so powerfully or had as significant an impact on a network as “The Simpsons” did for Fox. Three decades later, though, such series are having their moment in a big way. Mike Moon, head of adult animation at Netflix, began his career as an artist on “The Simpsons.” What he’s seen in the years since has been a blossoming of adult animation on U.S. television. “Adult animation [over] the last 25 years has been a really incredible story,” says Moon, who charts the format’s growth through shows such as “The Simpsons,” Comedy Central’s “South Park,” Fox’s “Family Guy” and Netflix’s “Bojack Horseman,” to a recent crop of new shows. “I think in those early seeds, you saw a lot of variety, a lot of different types of tone.” Netflix, which Moon joined two years ago after the premieres of foundational series such as “Bojack” and “Big Mouth,” has been at the forefront of adult animation’s rapid recent growth. Much of that expansion has been driven by the entry of deep-pocketed streamers (including Netflix itself) into an area that for a long while had been limited to Fox’s longstanding Sunday-night “Simpsons”-anchored animation block, Turner’s Adult Swim and a smattering of cable shows. But the proliferation of new platforms in the market translated into an insurgence of programmers unencumbered by the same

DRAWN TO THE MEDIUM “The Simpsons” started as a series of shorts in the late 1980s before becoming a half-hour animated sitcom that has inspired new generations of comedy writers.