Season Review: The Cyanide & Happiness Show Season Three “The Pain Wars”

Eff you, NBC.

For what it’s worth before Seeso dies, we’ll all know that the streaming service featured some quality original animated programming. Gentleman Lobsters was an excellent series as is The Cyanide & Happiness Show which may or may not be alive by the time you read this.

The first half of the season showcased a writing team that wanted to try something new. If you wanted a bunch of random Cyanide & Happiness animated shorts, Youtube and numerous other free channels await. If you want a Cyanide & Happiness animated series served with a bit more mustard, The Cyanide & Happiness Show is a good fit. Certainly featuring a premise inspired by the litany of superhero movies that come out on a seemingly everyday basis, the first half of “The Pain Wars” featured a classic battle of good versus evil intertwined with hilarious send ups of numerous franchises i.e. Batman vs Superman, RoboCop, and more.

For the show’s second half of the season, it was fairly evident that the forces of evil were winning out in terms of I’m sure corporate pressure to hurry up and finish production on a series so that NBC can kill of Seeso and just be done with it. Fans of the show’s second season will certainly notice season three episodes indicative of that era as opposed to what came as part of the first half of “The Pain Wars”. What we get as a whole, an inconsistent effort that still produced highly entertaining cartoon efficacy that would make the networks blush.

NBC has a bad history with animated television, which is why the network’s entire clusterfuck of television networks hasn’t had a successful one in a real long time. That same disdain for animated comedy, unfortunately, collided with a franchise that has a rabid fan base that longs for an expanded portfolio of Cyanide & Happiness offerings. I do hope this wing of the animated franchise will get a new home on Netflix or Hulu, because the show deserves better treatment than it got.