Genre Animation

Darkwing Duck (Disney+)

The 1991 classic gets the revival Disney+ took six years to order: Mark Hamill as Drake Mallard, Seth Rogen as Launchpad, Point Grey producing, Sean Tretta and Borja Pena Gorostegui running it. Early word, no score until episodes drop.

The Tick (1994)

The perfect Saturday morning cartoon, built by Ben Edlund from his self published comic and aimed at kids who paid attention. The Tick (Townsend Coleman’s full chest, Cam Clarke’s entire career as Arthur) is superhero absurdity done in seven minutes…

The Ren & Stimpy Show

John Kricfalusi took the buddy cartoon, deleted the plot, and filled the space with faces: the gross up close of Stimpy’s tongue on a honeycomb, the sweat, the snot, the veins. The Ren and Stimpy Show is the reason nineties…

The Critic

Jay Sherman reviews movies on a local Boston television show watched by almost nobody, hates nearly everything, and does it brilliantly. Simpsons alumni Al Jean and Mike Reiss built the sharpest Hollywood satire of the decade around Jon Lovitz’s nasal…

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Four mutant turtles, a rat sensei, a pizza fixation, and a theme song that infected a generation. The 1987 series took Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s indie comic, ran it through the kid friendly filter of the decade, and became…

The Real Ghostbusters

After Gozer got tossed through the skyline, the franchise’s smarter move was to animate the property instead of chasing it. The Real Ghostbusters keeps the firehouse, keeps the containment units, and turns the team loose on a weekly parade of…

Belzebubs

JP Ahonen's webcomic about a black metal family man made the jump to animation and lost none of its warmth in translation. Sløth, frontman of the world's least successful satanic band, is a stay at home dad raising Lilith and Leviathan with his wife Lucyfer, and the show's genius is playing every domestic beat completely straight: school interviews, in law visits, band practice in the garage, all conducted in corpse paint. The mockumentary confessionals, where family members speak to a documentary crew that is never explained, give it a Modern Family rhythm filtered through church burnings.

South Park: The End of Obesity

Special number seven takes on the weight loss drug era with the show's usual lack of mercy. When Cartman is denied the new miracle medication because he is not diabetic enough, he and Butters start sourcing it from Canada, and the plot builds to a full Cartman empowerment arc that satirizes body positivity discourse and pharmaceutical gatekeeping at the same time. A Lizzo subplot, where she is rebranded as the face of the drug to make it relatable, drew the loudest headlines and remains the special's boldest swing.

South Park (Not Suitable for Children)

The sixth special is the influencer economy takedown fans had been waiting for. A new energy drink called Cred takes the school by storm, and the boys' quest to score it becomes a genuinely cutting look at how brands manufacture belonging and sell it to kids who cannot afford it. Meanwhile Randy launches an OnlyFans career with tragic optimism, and the special's most savage joke is that the adults' exploitation economy and the kids' hype economy are the same machine wearing different outfits.