In the run-up to Adventure Time's final episode in September 2018, a variety of thinkpieces began appearing in prestigious publications. An ode to Adventure Time, one of TV's most ambitious – and yes, most adventurous – shows appeared in Vox. Adventure Time, TV's Surreal Masterpiece, Comes to an End showed up in the New York Times. Adventure Time: goodbye to the most ambitious cartoon since the Simpsons ran in the Guardian.
This is in a lot of ways typical; Adventure Time was, for a while, a pop cultural juggernaut. At its peak in its fifth season, Adventure Time pulled more than 3 million viewers, which is exceptional for a Cartoon Network show, as well as higher ratings than comparable shows like Regular Show, Steven Universe, or We Bare Bears ever achieved. By its fifth season, Adventure Time had already earned its spot in the New York Times.
However, it is worth taking a glance at what some of the articles have to say on the subject of the show, and particularly what kind of language they use to discuss it. Let's begin with the Vox article:
"Even as Adventure Time told bizarre tales of trickster gods from Mars and penguins that turned out to be world-threatening alien abominations, it worked hard to incorporate them into its complicated backstory and world, maintaining dense continuity through multiple long-running story arcs. In the grand tradition of prestige TV, it featured overarching plots about Finn’s search for his birth parents, or the recurring threat of the fearsome undead sorcerer the Lich."
The explicit mention of prestige TV makes this frankly a bit of a softball to write about. When Dan Schindel writing in Vox compares the show favorably to prestige TV, he is essentially saying that it is interesting despite its connection with children's television, or, to frame the same idea differently, it is interesting only because it breaks radically with a non-prestigious genre. Thus Adventure Time, a kid's show, can be lauded as something more than a kid's show – it can be given a veneer of respectability by the critics that write about it.
Here is a list of the comparisons drawn in the New York Times article: Hayao Miyazaki, Yellow Submarine, Hieronymous Bosch, Lost, Harry Potter, Orange is the New Black, the Simpsons, Boyhood. First of all, there's the top layer of prestige – high-art Hieronymous Bosch, prestige adult-focused shows and films like Orange is the New Black, the Simpsons, and Boyhood, and, finally, the other children's media – all explicitly children's media that adults are permitted to like and still be respectable: Harry Potter, Yellow Submarine, Miyazaki. Notably, there are no other American children's cartoons that Adventure Time is compared to in the article: no Spongebob, no Looney Tunes, no He-Man or She-Ra, not even any of its contemporaries like the ongoing Steven Universe or the recently finished Regular Show.
Why is it that Adventure Time needs to be treated in this way? Why is it that critics feel the need to justify their enjoyment of Adventure Time by turning it into a prestige TV show? The answers have a lot to do with the material conditions of television production. Cook and Elsaesser, in their (now somewhat outdated) essay Definitions of Quality make the point that definitions of quality, always in flux, come about in significant part for economic reasons. Quality in the United States at one point meant TV shows like Hill Street Blues, which had high-standard production values and focused more on script consistency than, say, a soap would. Simultaneously, in Germany, quality television means something like Berlin Alexanderplatz: an auteurist and art-house piece, serialized, with a definite endpoint. Despite the vast differences between these two cultural products, both fall under the umbrella of "quality television" when exported outside their country of origin. Both countries, then, have carved out a "quality" niche, and things are expected to conform to this niche. American television companies stand to benefit when quality television is made, and television critics, who are part of the quality apparatus, stand to benefit from hegemonizing this mode of television production.
The idea that Adventure Time can be good without being part of the prestige televisual landscape is, in this sense, a challenge to a particular brand of media hegemony. In order to preserve this hegemony, Adventure Time must then be co-opted into the language of the prestige television critic and change its shape from that of kids' television to that of adults' television.
This is in a lot of ways typical; Adventure Time was, for a while, a pop cultural juggernaut. At its peak in its fifth season, Adventure Time pulled more than 3 million viewers, which is exceptional for a Cartoon Network show, as well as higher ratings than comparable shows like Regular Show, Steven Universe, or We Bare Bears ever achieved. By its fifth season, Adventure Time had already earned its spot in the New York Times.
However, it is worth taking a glance at what some of the articles have to say on the subject of the show, and particularly what kind of language they use to discuss it. Let's begin with the Vox article:
"Even as Adventure Time told bizarre tales of trickster gods from Mars and penguins that turned out to be world-threatening alien abominations, it worked hard to incorporate them into its complicated backstory and world, maintaining dense continuity through multiple long-running story arcs. In the grand tradition of prestige TV, it featured overarching plots about Finn’s search for his birth parents, or the recurring threat of the fearsome undead sorcerer the Lich."
The explicit mention of prestige TV makes this frankly a bit of a softball to write about. When Dan Schindel writing in Vox compares the show favorably to prestige TV, he is essentially saying that it is interesting despite its connection with children's television, or, to frame the same idea differently, it is interesting only because it breaks radically with a non-prestigious genre. Thus Adventure Time, a kid's show, can be lauded as something more than a kid's show – it can be given a veneer of respectability by the critics that write about it.
Here is a list of the comparisons drawn in the New York Times article: Hayao Miyazaki, Yellow Submarine, Hieronymous Bosch, Lost, Harry Potter, Orange is the New Black, the Simpsons, Boyhood. First of all, there's the top layer of prestige – high-art Hieronymous Bosch, prestige adult-focused shows and films like Orange is the New Black, the Simpsons, and Boyhood, and, finally, the other children's media – all explicitly children's media that adults are permitted to like and still be respectable: Harry Potter, Yellow Submarine, Miyazaki. Notably, there are no other American children's cartoons that Adventure Time is compared to in the article: no Spongebob, no Looney Tunes, no He-Man or She-Ra, not even any of its contemporaries like the ongoing Steven Universe or the recently finished Regular Show.
Why is it that Adventure Time needs to be treated in this way? Why is it that critics feel the need to justify their enjoyment of Adventure Time by turning it into a prestige TV show? The answers have a lot to do with the material conditions of television production. Cook and Elsaesser, in their (now somewhat outdated) essay Definitions of Quality make the point that definitions of quality, always in flux, come about in significant part for economic reasons. Quality in the United States at one point meant TV shows like Hill Street Blues, which had high-standard production values and focused more on script consistency than, say, a soap would. Simultaneously, in Germany, quality television means something like Berlin Alexanderplatz: an auteurist and art-house piece, serialized, with a definite endpoint. Despite the vast differences between these two cultural products, both fall under the umbrella of "quality television" when exported outside their country of origin. Both countries, then, have carved out a "quality" niche, and things are expected to conform to this niche. American television companies stand to benefit when quality television is made, and television critics, who are part of the quality apparatus, stand to benefit from hegemonizing this mode of television production.
The idea that Adventure Time can be good without being part of the prestige televisual landscape is, in this sense, a challenge to a particular brand of media hegemony. In order to preserve this hegemony, Adventure Time must then be co-opted into the language of the prestige television critic and change its shape from that of kids' television to that of adults' television.
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