Pinning down what exactly we should rank was a challenge in and of itself. On the one hand, the block is as beloved for its bumps and experimental short films as it is infamous for its transgressive specials and April Fool’s Day pranks. A generation of anime fans who grew up on Dragon Ball Z, One Piece, and Cowboy Bebop tuned in to the same channel as fans of adult animation did to watch Futurama, Family Guy, and King of the Hill reruns. But the strongest and most lasting representation of the brand’s spirit and voice is in its original series. That means we excluded syndicated shows (Futurama, Family Guy), Toonami programming (Cowboy Bebop, FLCL), specials (Yule Log, The Greatest Event in Television History), and infomercials (Too Many Cooks).
What was left were 88 original series, which our team of writers, editors, and critics pored over for more than a year, revisiting classic shows and digging up lost ones. We went through multiple rounds of voting to stress test each title’s placement. In ranking from worst to best, we weighted heavily toward shows that represent Adult Swim at its best: the characters, jokes, and sequences that define the network’s style, influence, and longevity in television. The bottom-tier shows are the worst the network has offered, when the Adult Swim sensibilities curdled into the unwatchable and the forgotten. The shows in between are everything else: the fun but derivative, the ambitious but too experimental, and the well-made but missing key Adult Swim flavors. The resulting list covers every series in the block’s history, past and present: the animated sitcoms, surrealist talk shows, sketch comedies, horror anthologies, mockumentaries, and everything in between.
