Items21The creator’s order
  1. 1Space Ghost Coast to Coast (1994)Space Ghost Coast to Coast (1994) 7.9/10 on IMDbFirst aired Apr 15, 1994The show Adult Swim grew out of. It started on Cartoon Network in 1994 and moved to the new late-night block in 2001: a talk show where a recast 1960s superhero interviews real celebrities on a monitor, usually assuming they are fellow heroes, while his old enemies Zorak and Moltar work for him as…0
  2. 2Aqua Teen Hunger Force (2000)Aqua Teen Hunger Force (2000) 7.7/10 on IMDbFirst aired Dec 30, 2000Three fast food items, Master Shake, Frylock and Meatwad, share a house in South New Jersey and torment their neighbor Carl. Plots get set up mostly to be abandoned, and that is the joke: few shows commit this hard to going nowhere. It previewed on Cartoon Network in December 2000, became an Adult…0
  3. 3Sealab 2021 (2000)Sealab 2021 (2000) 7.8/10 on IMDbFirst aired Dec 21, 2000A crew of undersea researchers who are mostly too petty, lazy or deranged to do any research, built partly from footage of Hanna-Barbera's earnest environmental cartoon Sealab 2020. The gap between the wholesome old animation and the new dialogue does a lot of the work. It ran from December 2000…0
  4. 4Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law (2000)Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law (2000) 8.0/10 on IMDbFirst aired Dec 30, 2000The friendliest door into the early block. Former superhero Birdman now practices law, and his clients are other Hanna-Barbera characters of the 1960s and 1970s, with Gary Cole as Harvey and Stephen Colbert as his unhinged boss, Phil Ken Sebben. If you grew up on Saturday morning cartoons, every…0
  5. 5The Venture Bros. (2004)The Venture Bros. (2004) 8.6/10 on IMDbFirst aired Aug 7, 2004The one to pick if you want stories and characters that pay off. Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer started with a satire of early-1960s boy-adventure fiction, with Jonny Quest as the main reference, and grew it into a sprawling world of failed scientists, bodyguards and professional…0
  6. 6Robot Chicken (2005)Robot Chicken (2005) 7.7/10 on IMDbFirst aired Feb 20, 2005Seth Green and Matthew Senreich's rapid-fire sketch show animates toys, mostly action figures, in stop-motion to tear through movies, cartoons and commercials. If a sketch misses, the next one is seconds away. It premiered in February 2005, runs about 11 minutes an episode and has passed 220…0
  7. 712 oz. Mouse (2005)12 oz. Mouse (2005) 6.5/10 on IMDbFirst aired Jun 19, 2005An alcoholic mouse named Fitz takes odd jobs to pay for beer, then starts recovering memories of a wife and child who vanished, which pulls him into a conspiracy. Creator Matt Maiellaro drew the characters crudely on purpose to keep costs down, and the scratchy look makes the paranoia feel…0
  8. 8Squidbillies (2005)Squidbillies (2005) 6.7/10 on IMDbFirst aired Oct 16, 2005The Cuylers are a broke family of hillbilly mud squids in the North Georgia mountains, among the last of their endangered kind, and the show's gift is how specific its small-town chaos feels. It is one of the longest-running shows on the block: 13 seasons and 132 episodes from 2005 to 2021, nearly…0
  9. 9Moral Orel (2005)Moral Orel (2005) 8.1/10 on IMDbFirst aired Dec 12, 2005Dino Stamatopoulos's stop-motion sitcom about Orel, a devout boy in the town of Moralton whose literal readings of every sermon go terribly wrong. It starts as a sharp satire of wholesome religious kids' TV. Then it changes. By the third season it has turned into a bleak psychological drama about…0
  10. 10Metalocalypse (2006)Metalocalypse (2006) 8.3/10 on IMDbFirst aired Aug 6, 2006Brendon Small and Tommy Blacha imagined a melodic death metal band, Dethklok, so famous that by the end of season two it ranks as the seventh-largest economy on Earth. The music is the real draw, and it escaped the show: The Dethalbum debuted at number 21 on the Billboard 200. It ran from 2006 to…0