Season Review: The Jellies Season One (Adult Swim)

Let’s give this show its balls back.

A couple of years back, Tyler Okonma and Lionel Boyce introduced a new animated series on Tyler’s app known as Golf. It’s an interesting experiment, for $5 a month, Tyler has a direct link to his fans to sell merch, promote original programming, and shill exclusive intellectual properties. The Jellies, produced by Augenblick Studios (Superjail), was a solid series that almost played out like an uncontrollable puppy that was a joy to look at and shat all over the floors much to our amusement. When Adult Swim surprised everyone and picked up the series, we still got a puppy, just a better behaved one. The worry here is whether that’s a good thing.

Ahead of the show’s premiere, a lot was made out of the fact that Cornell Jelly was a white lead character for the Golf App version of the series and for the Adult Swim version of the series, the character was made a black lead character. I don’t buy the fact that this was for any society-driven reason, what probably happened was that the series tapped Phil LaMarr, who was coming off a stellar role on Samurai Jack, and was probably a more attractive name to lead the series than what Brock Baker would’ve been able to bring. Let me tell you something kids, 99% of casting in TV or movies has almost nothing to do with any serious consideration of race or ethnicity or gender as it does with demographics for advertising or potential audience.

That said, LaMarr is definitely a correct upgrade for the lead character of “Cornell”. Phil is a far superior actor with decades of experience in playing leading roles in animated shows and it’s on exhibit here. The problem I have with Adult Swim’s take on the series is that the first eight episodes felt like the writing for The Jellies was really watered down when compared to the app version, almost to the point of typical. Hell, the producers even aired “Ray’s Perfect Date” which was actually an episode featured on the app, just made a little worse for the wear.

Adult Swim wasn’t much help either. For starters, they aired the pilot episode on the third week of the show’s run. Now, I know there are people who work on The Jellies that may be trying to extrapolate some sort of Andy Kaufman-esque tendencies that are probably not needed. But my money is this was someone at Adult Swim scheduling an episode out of order, which, doesn’t make sense at all. Adult Swim has done this before, however, that’s usually because they may air a pilot episode for a series first, months in advance, and then they kinda throw it in there when they run the full gamut of episodes. Still doesn’t make sense, but it happened.

Augenblick Studios turned in a stellar performance for The Jellies, but that’s to be expected. Those guys are good. They’ve also been great at producing gag-laden scenes and this show was no different and was probably one of the most admirable parts of the series. The TRUE muscle of the studio comes when the action or crazy climactic scenes happen which, for fans of Superjail, should appease those that miss the one-time Adult Swim mainstay.

I was a bit worried that The Jellies was going to just be an utter collapse due to the show’s writing. We had tired cliched scripts with silly hip-hop gags that were done way funnier on Legends of Chamberlain Heights. But THEN, the finale came around, known as “The Invasion”, and I saw a glimmer of hope that this show could be insane again. And that’s what The Jellies needs to be. The promos leading up the series on Adult Swim insinuated that we were gonna get a real nasty bent personality that really could’ve been special, like Mr. Pickles- the level of crazy shit going on. We didn’t get that, for the most part, but perhaps a 30-minute runtime could be just the recipe The Jellies needs to TRULY go off. A canvas that allows you to throw in the cliched stuff to I guess make certain producers happy, but then still enough time to show off the strengths of Tyler, Lionel, and Augenblick in terms of presenting more of a visual feast that should certainly make happy the ardent Adult Swim viewers.