The Most Depressing Cartoon on Nickelodeon
Some shows take time. I couldn’t stand The O.C. at first—all that California sunlight and operatic teen suffering—and then quietly it became the thing I wanted most on a Friday night. Invader Zim worked the same way. I kept skipping past it, assuming it was just another loud, primary-colored Nickelodeon thing aimed at people younger and less cynical than me. Then one episode caught me at the right moment, and after that I was done for.
The premise is efficient: an alien named Zim is dispatched to Earth as part of a planet-conquering mission, except his own leaders sent him there to get him out of the way. He doesn’t know this. He sets up in a suburb, enrolls in elementary school, and each episode attempts to advance his plan for world domination. He’s foiled consistently by two things: GIR, his robot assistant, who is so comprehensively unhinged that he prioritizes tacos and small pigs over any assigned objective; and Dib, a classmate who is the only human on Earth who understands what Zim actually is—and whom nobody will believe.
What separates it from anything else Nickelodeon was running is the world Jhonen Vasquez built underneath the comedy. The Earth in Invader Zim is already half-ruined, already vaguely post-apocalyptic, populated by a species too apathetic or stupid to notice that reality is collapsing around them. It’s futuristically depressing in a very specific register—not satirizing dystopia but accepting it as permanent background condition. The palette runs to sickly greens and bruised purples, the character designs ugly in the way good underground comics are ugly: on purpose, with craft. Nothing about it resembles the rest of Nick’s output from that era. Nick in the early 2000s was primary colors and screaming and slime. Invader Zim was green-tinged dread.
The show got cancelled quickly, around 2002, for low ratings. I find it hard to be angry about this. Long runs do things to cult objects—they accumulate merchandise, they build fandoms, the edge softens to accommodate longevity. Invader Zim got cut before any of that could happen. The cult grew precisely in the absence of new material, which is sometimes how the best things work: you stop making it, and people can’t stop thinking about it.
The underdog status is inseparable from what it is. Success would have required it to become something else.