Insight: “Cake” Was Yet Another Failure By FXX In Launching An Original Adult Animated Series

We’ve been having this discussion for like ten years now. FXX just can’t figure out how to launch an original adult animated series. I don’t know if it’s the producers, the PR (a lot of it is), or if it’s because this network, despite announcements to the contrary, just does not care about this industry. Other than a renewal to FX Networks mainstay Archer which was flirting with cancellation until Adam Reed just opted to give the main writing duties to the Floyd County Productions staff, all attempts at launching a new Ip have been moot. Two years ago, it was the failed pick up of Deadpool the animated series. Two years before that, it was the cancellation of Cassius & Clay which sounded promising only to not air.

So, when FXX announced Cake as a possible incubator for original animated series for the network, I got excited. I’m thinking, “Oh good, maybe they’ll take this seriously, now!”. Several weeks later, I came away thoroughly disappointed. To be fair, only half of the show is an animated series with the other half live-action that actually was quite better than anything animated included in the weekly episodes. And this isn’t taking anything away from the producers, this isn’t their fault. The problem is, nothing on Cake looked like an animated series worth picking up. Nothing. Nothing was “tv ready”. Worst yet, most of what was shown was already on Vimeo and Youtube and some of it really old. So old, that Abbi Jacobson forgot that she had narrated a Bernardo Britto short.

Everything about Cake was bad. Marketing, the curated shorts, the socials, and everything in between smelled of a collective elitist asshole less concerned with actually getting a TV show on the network and more about trying to justify a poorly produced counterprogramming hour to Comedy Central’s one-two punch of South Park and Crank Yankers. With the network slated to get syndicated TV rights to Bob’s Burgers, Family Guy, and more episodes of The Simpsons, it appears that FXX will go yet another year in 2020 without any prospects for an original animated series to companion with Archer. Judging by what was selected for Cake, they don’t deserve one.