Smiling Friends

Rick & Morty has had its day, but there has long been a lack of an alternative to all those derailed 10-minute Aqua Teen Hunger Force-style flicks that used to air at night. Australian gem Yolo Swag Crystal Fantasy came close, but it was with absurdist comedy Smiling Friends that YouTube legends Michael Cusack and Zach Hadel found Adult Swim's sweet spot. First premiering in 2022, Smiling Friends was a resounding success and the second season continues to put a smile on this writer's face.

The plot is relatively simple. Cynical Charlie and optimistic Pim work for a charity called Smiling Friends, where the cryptic Mr Boss sends the boys out on a single mission: to make people smile. But making people happy isn't quite so simple in the chaotic nightmare that Hadel and Cusack have concocted with their creative mates like Harry Patridge, the Redlettermedia gang and many more collaborators. For those of us who grew up with the Newgrounds era and the early internet culture of the 2000s/2010s, this is a real love letter to all die-hard internet owls. A warm, violent and twisted letter.

There's so much obscure YouTube mythology and surreal scenarios that you can't help but fall on your knees and gape like a hillbilly. In one episode, we follow a mad scientist called Professor Psychotic trying to create a homonculus by injecting his DNA into a chicken egg (?!), while in the next we're thrown into a Flash-animated, high-stress hell, and in another we're disgusted by a nappy-wearing president competing with a murderous frog that pulverises people with Goblin grenades. You don't always know what's going on in Hadel and Cusack's heads, but it's fun and delightfully free of all reason and sanity.

Smiling Friends is the borderland between the bizarre and the down-to-earth, where the humour often lies in how uncontrollable the pure chaos that Charlie and Pim inhabit actually is. Smiling Friends plays by certain rules, but it's mostly just an outlet for the creators' whimsical sandbox storytelling where you never quite know what might come out of Hadel and Cusack's narrative toybox. It's all refreshingly unpretentious, and the creators' joy of storytelling is also reflected in the various animation styles that seamlessly mix green screen actors with claymation creatures, or in unnecessarily detailed hand movements and peculiar mannerisms.

Unfortunately, the second season has only eight episodes and it will be a pain to wait that long for the next season, but it is cleverly well made and worth watching again and again thanks to its unique humour, hysterical character design and excellent timing. Smiling Friends is experimental, absurd, accurate and occasionally brilliant if you know your Internet roots, which makes it really stand out among all cynical adult animation.