Muto, the focus and highly specific themes of “Steven Universe” were only possible after learning that lesson from Mr. Pen taught me to do that.” According to Mr. “Writing smaller and writing about feelings - it might be a little surprising, but that was not something I did at all,” she said. Sugar said, gave her the opportunity to begin making animation that felt truly personal. Sugar likened her work on “Adventure Time” to making independent films, with the commercial structure of a television series acting as a Trojan Horse for material about loneliness, anxiety and occasionally bacon pancakes.

‘The Underground Railroad’: Barry Jenkins’s transfixing adaptation of the Colson Whitehead novel is fabulistic yet grittily real.

‘Succession’: In the cutthroat HBO drama about a family of media billionaires, being rich is nothing like it used to be.

‘Dickinson’: The Apple TV+ series is a literary superheroine’s origin story that’s dead serious about its subject yet unserious about itself.

‘Inside’: Written and shot in a single room, Bo Burnham’s comedy special, streaming on Netflix, turns the spotlight on internet life mid-pandemic.

Here are some of the highlights selected by The Times’s TV critics: Television this year offered ingenuity, humor, defiance and hope. “It’s a plant, and it just kind of grows in different directions,” said Adam Muto, a storyboard artist who later became the series’s showrunner. It is an adventure series where one of the hero’s biggest challenges was getting over his unrequited crush a fantasy show whose mystical elements included candy and a children’s cartoon that regularly featured cannibalism.īeyond the show itself, “Adventure Time” served as an animation talent incubator: Many of the series’s writers and artists went on to develop their own projects, mirroring the dispersion of writers and producers on prestige shows like “The Sopranos” and “Breaking Bad.” In part, this was because “Adventure Time” accommodated and cultivated the different artistic sensibilities of each person who worked on the show. “Adventure Time” grew from its sword-and-sorcery origins to become something surreal and difficult to define. Finn and Jake balloons are fixtures of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. The show, which follows Finn (a teenage human boy) and his adoptive brother Jake (a magical stretching dog) as they traverse the fantastical, post-apocalyptic Land of Ooo, has aired just shy of 300 episodes, won seven Emmys and spawned video games, a collectible card game and ongoing comic book adaptations. Instead “Adventure Time,” the animated series that airs its final episode on Cartoon Network on Labor Day, will conclude as a global success. History suggests “Adventure Time” should have been a cult classic - the sort of show that ran for 30 episodes and found a second life online with a small, dedicated group of fans.

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