The Sublime Weirdness of Max’s Most Popular New Show (2024)

One of the early episodes of Smiling Friends, the cult-favorite Adult Swim cartoon, opens with the lovably optimistic purple little fellow Pim learning that he’s been eating a bowl of earthworms—not peanuts, as he had believed—for breakfast. We get a close-up of the worms writhing wetly. In one of her popular recaps of the series, NONNON, a Japanese artist and Smiling Friends fan, remarks upon a different aspect of the scene: “No … it’s almost 7 a.m. They come to work too early!” she says, her gentle voice a contrast against a show that is otherwise frenetic, feral, and fantastical. Her commentary is often like this, quotidian observations filtered through her life in Japan and her personal experiences. “Otaku room,” she quips when we’re introduced to the squalid gamer den of a weeb-ish shrimp; another scene, of a goblin bombing a brutal job interview, makes her spiral off into recollections of her own similar failures, projecting herself into a world that seems too dense—too crammed full of little beasties—to fit her in it.

There is something about Smiling Friends, created by animators Michael Cusack and Zach Hadel, that compels you to think like this. Its limitlessness works as a sort of Rorschach test, inviting you to spew your own experiences between the cracks of its joke-jammed mayhem. The show, which is popular on Max in the U.S., is built upon a foundation of multimedia cross-cultural references, and it hyperactively mucks about with form and medium in the same way Bugs Bunny mucks about with Elmer Fudd: It dares you to meet it on its level, if you can.

The premise is simple enough: Four employees work in an office—shaped like a giant smiley emoticon—for a company whose sole purpose is to make others smile. What could be a sweet premise for a 2010s Cartoon Network feel-good show leapfrogs instead into a realm of oblique horrors and ghastliness, where lead characters Pim (Cusack) and Charlie (Hadel) scream, mumble, and banter their way through a world Charlie described in a recent episode as “never-ending constant chaos, it never lets up, I hate it.” Never-ending constant chaos is right: Smiling Friends is a show packed with grimy little details and spasmodic vibrations (See: a character having his head stomped in at the edge of frame) that can rocket from looking like the waiting room of the DMV to a still from a Ghibli film.

Each episode of the show plays like a perfectly realized viral flash cartoon from the golden age of webtoons, only much funnier, smarter, and more daring in its goofiness—fitting, as creators Hadel and Cusack, who are also the voice actors for the protagonists and other characters, cut their teeth on Newgrounds and YouTube. It contains a kind of concertina history of cartooning—from Fleischer Studios to Looney Tunes to South Park to Dr. Katz—and its simple premise allows the series to prosper as a cartoon sandbox where anything goes. This is what differentiates Smiling Friends from some of the biggest “adult” cartoons of recent history (BoJack Horseman, Rick and Morty): It is, simply, fun.

When I witness Smiling Friends’ cavalcade of melty-mugged uglies and gremlinoids, I can’t help but think, much as how NONNON might look at a goblin and recall Japanese corporate culture: “Bugger me, that boofhead looks like Mark Latham!” or “This scene is so Midland-line coded.” The series is not necessarily defined or marketed as Australian—and, in fact, there is nothing explicitly Australian about it, other than Cusack’s native accent coming through—yet there is something about Smiling Friends that absolutely reeks of an Australian “vibe.”

To understand what I mean, there are two Australian terms I need you seppos (that’s Australian for “Americans”) to get a handle on. The first is “munted,” which can mean pissed, wasted, or drunk, but also disgusting, hideous, or f*cked-up in a specifically, well, munted, manner. The second is “dag,” which forms the basis of “daggy” and “dagginess”; a “dag” is someone who is shabby, odd, tedious, faded, just a little off.

Cusack, who was born and raised in the New South Wales suburb ofDapto, is a poet of munt and dag. He is best known in Australia for a series of viral cartoon shorts that accurately (perhaps too accurately) skewered the day-to-day daggy-muntedness of some corners of Australian life. His Damo and Darren series contains gnarly caricatures of the Australian horror show, eerily spot-on portraits of scenes and people that some of us, like myself, have witnessed on an almost daily basis our entire lives. Cusack’s Australians are shrill, cruel, and psychotic, ugly in a way that a carnie running for mayor is ugly; they’re chillingly visceral realizations of our nation’s bounty of giant, bloated, melty heads. His Australia is banal and barbaric. I don’t know of a more viscerally honest portrayal of the place where I was born, raised, and call home.

But what Cusack has always had a real eye for is the daggy atmospheres and biomes that function as the enclosure for us Australian munters. It’s hard to convey the weirdness of Australia to Americans who tend to imagine this country as somewhere between Mad Max and Crocodile Dundee. We are not rife with giant spiders and venomous snakes or that kind of excitement, but rather a kind of daggyness that has, and will, drive a person troppo (translation: nuts). Cusack’s cartoons home in on the oddly unreal daggyness of so much of Australian life, be it our faded cul-de-sac-chugged suburbs and black-mold-riddled sharehouses, or the tepid emotional atrophy of a society that runs on insincerity and takes most of its pride in high rates of LCD TV ownership.

Cusack, like me (we were born three weeks apart!), was raised in the golden age of that daggyness, back in the 1990s, when the Disneyfied blockbuster smoothness of America’s cultural and aesthetic empire hadn’t quite sanded down Australia’s peculiar shadow version. I look back at a lot of the imagery and media of my youth like someone reading a book on bizarre Soviet bus stops from the 1960s. Australia in the 1990s and the early 2000s was in the throes of a schizophrenic cultural shift away from British dependence, through Aussie jingoism, onto American submission. The result was a cavalcade of media that often looked and felt like a David Lynch movie shot on video tape, where every man looked like a living thumb mutant.

I’ve come to refer to this aesthetic as “Australi-aw-nah.” Cusack, consciously or not, channels it aggressively.

We are both children of the Howard years—Prime Minister John Howard, who served from 1996 to 2007, was essentially our Reagan if Reagan looked like a melting Hobbit—and Cusack’s work is replete with the truly weird texture of Australian culture from in and around that time. In the ’90s, the ABC Kids programming block of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation was seemingly created and curated by men who spent all their days in family court on acid. Shows like Round the Twist (Twin Peaks for kids!), The Ferals (Trainspotting meets Sesame Street), and The Wayne Manifesto (Diary of a Wimpy Kid meets Columbine shooters) blasted our generation with a daily megadose of daggy-munt. Particular characters from this time in Australiawnah could slot easily into the Smiling Friends universe: The bulbous 3D Squelton reminds me of the gynocentric plasticine aliens of Plasmo, Salty’s mascots remind me of the kiddified bunyips known as Yowies, and Mr. Frog reminds me of Agro, a shaved and red-eyed stolen Muppet who, like Mr. Frog, was canceled for toxic onset behavior.

Day-to-day life in the Australia of this period had a certain heightened (or dampened, depending how you view it) Tom Goes to the Mayor quality to it. Australia then often felt like it consisted of a million liminal spaces stitched together—a country whose culture reached its truest form in infomercials for discount stores. At a certain age, you start to realize that Australia is quite a silly place, and that realization inevitably informs your art. I see it everywhere in Smiling Friends. In the first episode, we visit Pim’s distinctly awful family, who, like Pim, are seemingly Australian. A heavyset, abusive dad glued to his armchair watching the telly is not uniquely Australian, but there’s something in how he grips his beer, smokes inside, and screams, “I was down in the bloody mines for 14 hours today!” that chillingly evokes what it was like to go to a certain type of friend’s house after school as a kid.

Much of the production of Smiling Friends is split between Australia and America, with Cusack remaining based in Melbourne, and guest animators and teams coming in from all over the world. Perhaps this is how so much Australiawnah seeps through: The non-animated scene in Season 1’s Halloween episode immediately made me think AUSTRALIA, well before I learned it was filmed in an alleyway in Melbourne. The demonic entity from that same episode reminded me so much of a string of commercials from my childhood that I felt I could taste the peanut butter; it turns out the entity was animated by Glen Hunwick, the man responsible for those ads. I see Australia in Smiling Friends’ shabby shop fronts, soulless suburbia, and mean-faced background characters—every smidgen of grubbiness evokes home.

This all swirls into a show that is otherwise very much in the tradition of past Adult Swim cartoons. Cusack was from the first generation of Australians to be raised mainly on American media, subsisting on a steady diet of Nicktoons, South Park, dubbed anime (which aired every school day on Cheez-TV) and, most importantly, Simpsons reruns (which are the closest thing Australia has to a state religion). Smiling Friends is the inevitable work of an artist raised in the split world of Australiawnah and the American cultural empire—a sort of cartoon Chiko Roll of Australian cultural cabbage, deep-fried in American cartooning.

Cusack’s other shows tackle the dag/munt dynamic directly: Both Hulu’s Koala Man and Adult Swim’s YOLO are set in a bizarro Australia, and both revel in Australiawnah like pigs in sh*t. But it’s Smiling Friends, for me, that succeeds more purely than the rest of his oeuvre in capturing it. Cusack—along with Hadel, a great poet of the seppo equivalent of dags and munts—has tapped into an unconscious vein of Australian yuck and malaise that I can see on the face of every warped critter and chaotic background still. As porous, amorphous, and omnifarious as the show is, the Australiawnah sludge can’t help but seep out, as violent and inevitable and parochially anachronistic as the series’ Renaissance Men.