The 2000s' Most Underrated Adult Cartoon Turns 25 — It's Time for a Reboot

Adult animation is everywhere now — 'Harley Quinn', 'Invincible', 'Hazbin Hotel', pick your poison — but the 2000s are the reason the lane even exists. That boom brought a ton of TV to life, some of it iconic, a lot of it forgotten. One oddball that never got a fair shake just turned 25, and I still think it deserves another swing: 'The Oblongs'.

How we got here: the 2000s blew the doors open

Back then, anime bulldozed into the mainstream with 'Dragon Ball Z', 'One Piece', 'Naruto', and 'Bleach'. On the American side, audiences warmed up to adult-leaning animated sitcoms — 'Family Guy', 'American Dad', 'South Park' — with HBO 's 'Spawn' doing early trailblazing. Even Cartoon Network tilted older with Genndy Tartakovsky stepping in and dropping 'Samurai Jack'. A lot from that era stuck. A lot also slipped through the cracks. 'The Oblongs' is one of the latter.

'The Oblongs' in one weird, bleak sentence

Premiering April 1, 2001 on The WB (pre-CW), 'The Oblongs' followed a relentlessly upbeat family living in a polluted valley where toxic runoff literally reshaped their bodies — and their day-to-day.

• Bob Oblong (Will Ferrell): the cheerful dad with no arms or legs.
• Marie 'Pickles' Oblong (Jean Smart): mom, an ex-rich girl from across town who moved to the Valley and lost her hair along the way.
• Biff and Chip (Randy and Jason Sklar): teen conjoined twins sharing one leg and very different personalities.
• Milo (Pamela Adlon): the middle kid dealing with mental and social disorders.
• Beth (Jeannie Elias): the youngest and only daughter, with a gnarly growth sprouting from her head.
• Grammy: the vegetative grandmother in a wheelchair who communicates via a red light/green light box.

The show it actually was

Beneath the mutations, it was a straight-up sitcom about scraping by. Think: job headaches, school humiliations, awkward romances, coming-of-age messiness. The bigger backdrop was a very pointed class divide — the wealthy 'Hills' lording it over the exploited 'Valley' — and a city poisoned by the people cashing the checks.

A short, messy run

Only 13 episodes got made. The WB aired 8 of them, then axed the series in under two months. Adult Swim picked up the strays, running the full set on cable in the summer and fall of 2002. A 2005 DVD release ( 'The Oblongs: The Complete Twisted Series') helped it pick up a small cult, and then it quietly faded again. You can watch the whole thing now on Tubi.

Why it plays better in 2026 than it did in 2001

At the time, the show got dinged for being too dark and too mean; now that exact tone is a feature, not a bug. We celebrate series like 'Hazbin Hotel', 'Rick and Morty', and, yes, the immortal 'South Park' for skewering society with a grin and a flamethrower. 'The Oblongs' was doing a cruder, earlier version of that, and a lot of its targets have only gotten more relevant. Income inequality as a daily reality? Check. Towns wrecked by environmental dumping? Also check — and no, it does not feel exaggerated anymore (see: Flint, Michigan).

Also: look who was in it

It doubled as an early showcase for people who blew up right after: Will Ferrell went on a 2000s tear ('Anchorman ', 'Step Brothers ', 'Talladega Nights'). Jean Smart became a TV juggernaut and has been cleaning up at the Emmys for 'Hacks'. And Pamela Adlon is, well, Pamela Adlon.

Quick nerd note because the timeline gets fuzzy in some write-ups: Adlon had already been voicing Bobby Hill on 'King of the Hill' since 1997, so her 'Oblongs' run sits between peak Bobby and the later phase of her career, not the other way around.

So... reboot it?

If we are dusting off every 90s and 2000s animated oddity for a revival, this one is past due. The premise is timely, the humor lane is now mainstream, and the original run is short enough to modernize without stepping on nostalgia. It got kneecapped by timing and squeamish broadcast TV standards — not by lack of potential.

If you want to see what I mean, the whole run is streaming on Tubi.