The Fattest Party in Anyone’s Stomach

The second screen always needs something running. Not something to actually watch—something to exist in peripheral vision while the main work grinds forward, low-grade noise that keeps the brain from turning on itself. Films demand too much. Series are better, animated series best: eleven-minute chunks, dense with color, no memory required between episodes. After cycling through the entire Simpsons/Futurama/Family Guy/American Dad/Cleveland Show/Bob’s Burgers/SpongeBob pipeline you eventually hit the floor of the familiar and have to go looking.

Cartoon Network’s answer, starting in 2010, was Adventure Time with Finn and Jake—a hero named Finn, his shapeshifting dog Jake, and a candy kingdom stuffed with princesses and horny giant snails and wizardry and Korean unicorn rainbows, everything so thoroughly unhinged that you fall for it immediately, every keening, flailing creature in it.

Each episode stacks WTF moments until the structure itself seems to bend. The Ice King kidnaps the Hot Dog Princess yet again, intending to marry her by force with his penguin army. Stoned teddy bears throw the loudest party of their lives inside the stomach of a depressed monster, then have to flee through its asshole before the lava catches them. Frozen zombie businessmen attempt a power grab by making Finn obese. None of this is played for irony. All of it lands.

The critics loved it almost embarrassingly, and the fans made it a religion, and season three just started in the US. Anyone already pulled into Ooo knows the feeling—you want to mainline the whole thing immediately, get back in there, rescue the squealing slime babies, let yourself be transformed into oversized feet, do whatever it takes. Watch it in English. Always English. Something is genuinely happening inside this show and dubbing it would murder it.