Fans of Adult Swim‘s absurdist animated series Smiling Friends have a lot more reasons to smile.
The show from co-creators Michael Cusack and Zach Hadel has landed a two-season pickup, The Hollywood Reporter has learned exclusively. The two additional seasons will take the cult-favorite comedy series to season five, with the previously announced third season set to premiere this fall.
Cusack and Hadel joined Adult Swim vp of development Cameron Tang for the show’s panel at the Annecy Animation Festival on Wednesday, where the team announced that seasons four and five are currently in production at Williams Street. The presentation also included an exclusive first look at the forthcoming third season for the show Smiling Friends that launched in 2022 and centers on co-workers Charlie (voiced by Hadel) and Pim (Cusack) trying to bring positivity into others’ lives.
“It means you don’t have to make the same episode that the engine of the show relies on, which is the smiling friends go out and help a depressed character,” Cusack tells THR about the pickup. “Just like the shows we love and grew up with, the best part is now we can make a whole episode about a secondary character and zoom in on them more and explore the town.”
Smiling Friends
Courtesy of Adult Swim
In terms of which previously introduced secondary characters might be prime for more screen time, Cusack explains: “There’s so many. Of course, Mr. Frog is always someone it’s fun to go back to. His spirit really is the spirit of the insanity of the show. Secondary characters can be tough because you don’t want to bring back people that they have already helped because we feel like that might be running out of ideas, in a sense. But there are some repeat characters that can come back, like DJ Spit.”
Cusack and Hadel both cite their show’s pilot and the episode “Gwimbly” that kicked off season two as among their favorite episodes to have been released. But they also find certain episodes growing on them.
“Even some episodes that we were not happy with at the time, we’re happy with later,” notes Cusack. “‘Frowning Friends’ [from season one] was a good example of an episode that we just felt wasn’t right. We always say episodes that feel off, we call them stress episodes because usually we have a deadline, and it’s like, ‘We have to get this done.’ And we have to just write a whole script in a day that we feel like isn’t working. But something about the energy of having that deadline makes some weird stuff come out. The ‘Renaissance men’ in the ‘Frowning Friends’ episode is a good example of that. That really came out of just panic. So we’re really proud of that one now, too, because of how stupid it is.”
Although it can sometimes be a scramble to finish a script, they don’t plan to add more writers to the mix, with the duo remaining responsible for the ideas and writing. “Even the pilot, it’s always been like, ‘You and I can write it, and if we really feel like we need to expand it, we can expand it,’” Hadel says about himself and Cusack not hiring a writing team. “For the most part, every episode idea, every script, it’s really just Michael and I and whatever we think works.”
As can now be expected, season three will include a Christmas episode, with Cusack teasing that this year’s “focuses on a character that needs more attention, so that will be a fun one.” He adds about what else is in store for the third season: “As always, it’s fun to play with new formats, new mediums of animation, so we’ve done that a few times. The first episode [of season three] has a fun character that plays with the medium a lot. That’s got a guest voice of someone we really like, too.”
With the show now having cultivated a devoted fan base, including a wide contingent of Gen Z viewers, the show’s creators have gotten used to receiving plenty of feedback. “The method I found is when an episode comes out, I will try to read everything that I can for about 24 hours,” says Hadel. “Once you’ve read about 20,000 comments across all the platforms, you’re like, ‘OK, I feel like I’ve absorbed most of people’s reactions to this episode.’”
Although the show’s current deal will take Smiling Friends through five seasons, the creators have already started to think about the end of the run.
“It won’t go and go and go,” Cusack emphasizes about the series. “We want it to be like a nice little box set, and we’ve talked about potential seasons that we’d want to stop at, for sure, and it depends on the day. Sometimes we’ll wake up and be like, ‘You know what? Three seasons could be enough.’ But then the next day, we’re like, ‘No, actually, another number sounds better.’ So we always go back and forth, but we are pretty staunch on it not going on forever.”
