{"id":644452,"date":"2026-05-03T04:52:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-03T04:52:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/644452\/"},"modified":"2026-05-03T04:52:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-03T04:52:08","slug":"adult-swim-creators-talk-discuss-craft-at-l-a-roundtable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/644452\/","title":{"rendered":"Adult Swim Creators Talk Discuss Craft At L.A. Roundtable"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

LOS ANGELES \u2014 Irreverent as the shows themselves, this week\u2019s Adult Swim FYC panel at the Television Academy highlighted three of the company\u2019s offbeat contenders in the running for Emmy Awards: Primal<\/a>, now in its third season; Rick and Morty, which saw its eighth season in 2025; and the strangely delightful Haha, You Clowns, one of its most recent releases.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe try not to do a single aesthetic or one kind of thing or a house style. Instead, we always try to back creators that have something interesting to do, and we trust in animation to convey their vision,\u201d opened Adult Swim\u2019s president, Michael Ouweleen, who flew in from Atlanta to moderate the event. Clips from the show\u2019s specific episodes submitted for Emmy consideration screened ahead of a conversation with the trio of creators.<\/p>\n

Genndy Tartakovsky picked \u201cFeast of the Flesh,\u201d in which the protagonist, Spear, is resurrected but doesn\u2019t remember his family, as the episode to represent Primal because he thought it was simultaneously \u201cemotional\u201d and \u201chorrific.\u201d The portion screened shows Spear protecting a small grasshopper that reminds him of his dinosaur friend, Fang.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s got this duality to it. We always like when Primal starts slow, and so this one, you really want to feel the jungle and feel this naked death walking through life,\u201d explained Tartakovsky. \u201cThere was all this great juxtaposition, this great kind of visual poetry, and the whole idea of being emotionally connected to this [grasshopper] and wanting to protect it and then jumping into this cave of horrors, it kind of spoke to us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rick and Morty co-creator Dan Harmon\u2019s ongoing joke throughout the evening was complaining that Tartakovsky had an unfair advantage, given his show is hand-crafted. \u201cHe\u2019s cheating. You can\u2019t just draw your cartoon. That\u2019s cheating. I want him disqualified. For your inconsideration,\u201d he said with humorous exasperation. Before going on stage, Harmon said, he and Haha, You Clowns creator Joe Cappa<\/a> were discussing their use of the Toon Boom Harmony software, and when they asked Tartakovsky which app he used for \u201ctwinning,\u201d he simply stated Primal is hand-drawn.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis show was made for me basically. It\u2019s very sincere. I never knew if there was going to be an audience. If people would have the patience to watch it. And it\u2019s very pure me. That\u2019s probably the purest thing I\u2019ve ever done that\u2019s inside my head,\u201d Tartakovsky said about Primal. Tartakovsky has found that the series can, in fact, keep viewers invested even if it\u2019s a purely visual proposition with no dialogue, existing in a second-screen culture where people watch TV or films while also scrolling on their phones.<\/p>\n

\u201cI realized that in the second episode, I flew to Atlanta to have a screening there, and it was lunchtime, and you guys ordered pizza, and everybody gathered to watch it. And this guy was sitting next to me, and he took one bite and then the show started, and he just sat there like this [makes an entranced face] and he didn\u2019t take another bite.\u201d<\/p>\n

To represent Haha, You Clowns, which follows three kind-hearted brothers and their father, Cappa chose the episode \u201cTherapy,\u201d in which the boys have a session with a male therapist whose spiel sounds straight out of a manosphere podcast. The therapist tries to convince the kids that there\u2019s something wrong with their close bond with their dad.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cThese boys at the heart of the show, they love their dad, and that\u2019s what it\u2019s about. And I thought it was funny that they love their dad just because sitcoms, they\u2019re always rolling their eyes, but they\u2019re like, \u2018This guy is awesome.\u2019\u201d Cappa developed Haha, You Clowns as part of Adult Swim\u2019s Smalls program dedicated to fostering short-form projects from emerging talents in the animation industry.<\/p>\n

About the peculiar look of the characters in his show, which has already been renewed for two more seasons, Cappa has said it is as if a live-action director were given an animated show, but he or she doesn\u2019t know how to draw, and they\u2019re trying their best. Now that he\u2019s staffing for season two, he\u2019s also come up with another example to describe the look.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy favorite thing is when you\u2019re outside of an art class in high school or middle school, and you can see the wall of pencil-drawn portraits of athletes or movie stars that this kid loves, and it\u2019s just a little bit off,\u201d said Cappa. \u201cTo me, that\u2019s just like the height of comedy.\u201d Cappa also voices all four main characters, which allows him plenty of creative control.<\/p>\n

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Harmon spoke about how the shackles that come with being faithful to the show\u2019s canon are one of the biggest hurdles in the creation of Rick and Morty. \u201cCanon sucks, it drags your show down, but it\u2019s also what you guys love, so when you can do it without fucking up the show, it\u2019s a great thing,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The rather complex episode in contention on behalf of Rick and Morty is \u201cHot Rick,\u201d which Ouweleen tried to summarize: \u201cMemory Rick, who recruits a young Beth and trains her all of her life to try and recover the lost memory, the erased memory of Diane, Rick\u2019s wife, that another version of Rick erased, like it super, super intense. And Rick does this, so that he is emotionally available to date a hot bug woman that you saw in the clip.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Harmon noted that the idea of being haunted by a past self is \u201cas old as Dickens.\u201d Approaching the episode as \u201ca memory of Rick that\u2019s in Jerry\u2019s brain\u201d allowed them to bypass the constraints of the canon since the events that unfold in this context don\u2019t affect the show\u2019s definitive timeline. \u201cIt gets insane, so we were like, \u2018Just make it an FYC episode,\u2019\u201d Harmon half-joked about the rather intricate storytelling in this episode.<\/p>\n

Because of Rick and Morty\u2019s longevity and the imposing canon, Harmon said the show had long been religiously script-driven. Now, the fact that the show has been around for so long has enabled the production to introduce more visual storytelling as part of its process.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a culture in animation where there\u2019s a supposed dichotomy of script-driven versus board-driven. And to slowly move to a beautiful hybrid, which is what it always has been and should have been, where you realize anyone that imposed that dichotomy was the enemy, for me anyway, could only happen through time and trust,\u201d said Harmon.<\/p>\n

The times that the show has been saved by animators, Harmon said, have been plenty.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s become a normal thing, for even junior writers on Rick and Morty, they\u2019re coming into a school of thought where they\u2019re encouraged as writers to not waste their time trying to Isaac Asimov-describe a gunfight and instead actually do what feels like hackery and cheating to a writer, which is to say, \u2018Artists go crazy here,\u2019\u201d Harmon continued.<\/p>\n

Though some might see this as \u201clazy,\u201d Harmon said, relying more heavily on animators has, in fact, expedited the pipeline. Writers are not asking animators to do anything over and over again. \u201cWe found the more we did that, the less we had to re-break stories. Because it turns out, I guess people who draw stuff for a living know how to make stories happen,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LOS ANGELES \u2014 Irreverent as the shows themselves, this week\u2019s Adult Swim FYC panel at the Television Academy…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":644453,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[49,48,75,348],"class_list":["post-644452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/644452","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=644452"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/644452\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/644453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=644452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=644452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=644452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}