Edinburgh TV Fest 2017: Comedy Central’s Kent Alterman Admits Network Struggling With Animation

What happened?

Late last week, Kent Alterman was at the Edinburgh International Film Festival where he had a just under an hour-long conversation with the brilliant Jimmy Carr talking about all things Comedy Central, both in the United States and abroad.

Some of the topics brought up during conversation included the pros in terms of Kent’s heading of the network as well as the cons:

Pros: Comedy Central is a network that is excellent at nurturing talent. Amy Schumer, Trevor Noah, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and countless others have gone on and have had stellar careers really all buoyed by the success of their Comedy Central past.

Cons: Other than South Park which is getting ready to launch the 21st season on Comedy Central next week, the network has not been able to secure another animated comedy with as much success.

It’s not to say the network hasn’t tried because they have, ranging from excellent shows that have since aired on the network like Jeff & Some Aliens which may or may not be returning for a second season after a brilliant first season to not so excellent efforts like Moonbeam City that looked great but featured terrible execution from the writers room before the series was ultimately cancelled after one season. And then there’s a show like Brickleberry. A series that was hilarious, however, Kent notes that there are some shows on its network that are usually more liberal and do better in major markets like NYC and Los Angeles. Brickleberry sounds like it was canceled for two reasons:

1) The producers wanted to do a post-apocalyptic season four that would eventually be the basis of the comic book series

2) Brickleberry was more or less cultivating more of a Southern/Middle America audience that probably wasn’t Comedy Central’s objective. Case in point: In Kent’s remarks at Edinburgh, he notes that Tosh.0 has a trajectory aimed at an age group regardless of political leaning. Brickleberry did a good job of bringing in a portion of that audience, but because the show wasn’t produced for nearly as many episodes a year as Tosh.0, Daniel’s fanbase wasn’t staying put, and due to lack of marketing, would often go underserved whenever new episodes of Brickleberry came on.

Fortunately, it does sound like there is some good news in the future. Kent had talked about the different Comedy Central brands of the world i.e. UK, Africa, etc kind of coming together and talking about sharing of content and formats for different territories. So could an animated series produced in the UK one day make its way over to the States? It’s not out of the question. Already, the animated reality show format is one that has become popular in the United States and was almost ready to make its debut in the UK with a Comedy Central UK series known as Hotline Tings which reportedly has since been cancelled even before it had even aired (here’s a link to the website in which they were casting), but it’s a sign of things that could potentially be down the pipeline.

But what about here in the United States? It looks as though Comedy Central is focusing most of its animation efforts on social platforms like on Instagram and Snapchat with not a whole heck of a lot in production for the linear network (though, Kent did mention passing on an animated Donald Trump series, not sure if he was talking about this one because there are a few out there). I think most fans would agree that Jeff & Some Aliens and Brickleberry were or are on the verge of REALLY busting out and being something special for the network much in the same way Rick and Morty are for Adult Swim. Already the talent behind other animated comedies is beginning to spurn the network in favor of Netflix or TBS, networks willing to take chances on the type of animated comedy they want to air, and Comedy Central seems to be more numbers focused in the short-term versus seeing a franchise through and diversifying their revenue portfolio with possible investments in merchandise or different mediums in which animated comedies can tell their stories (comic books and feature films come to mind).

Kent mentioned in the interview (that you can watch below) that he was a big proponent of doing away with the “one and done” model of picking up shows (a view not shared by MTV who does this all the time) and believing in the creators. Jeff & Some Aliens is by far the most full-filling animated comedy they’ve premiered in decades, and I’m afraid it’s going to be one and done which has really been the typical Viacom way.