Season Review: Tender Touches Season One

Touch me, gently.

Typically, I don’t like Adult Swim Streams…really I don’t. I don’t buy certain assets of the whatever Adult Swim Streams is supposed to be. The Rick and Morty development meetings come to mind as just plain ridiculous, and then I remember being at Comic-Con and seeing a line for people hoping to pitch a series for the network, with no agents around mind you, and couldn’t help but wonder…really? Hot underground properties like Trill League have been turned down, but the network will listen to pitches from someone dressed up as a Yautja? Not buying any of that. But, if the Streams are a potential water well for new and upcoming talent like Dave Bonawits and Maxime Simonet as an avenue to give us content like Tender Touches, then I could be a buyer for that aspect.

For those that don’t know, Tender Touches is a limited series of Adult Swim that follows friends Steve and Curtis having a falling out after Steve was caught having relations with Curtis’ wife, Charlene. As a result, Curtis attacks and blinds Steve, and we get a couple days in a hospital run by loons for all of our troubles. Each episode is presented as a regular spoken-word yet paradoxical take on the soap opera told via animation which is then followed by a subsequent retelling every night of the week in the form of an operetta (minus Charlene).

The premise of the limited series, purposely cliched, and the plot, definitely Days of Our Lives ala Adult Swim not unlike what the network has done with the hospital drama, the cop show, and mockumentaries before it in terms of excellence in execution. Similar to the aforementioned results, a smaller than usual budget forces producers to cut corners, and while it’s evident where those corners are, the results come with a charming and effective tale that should entertain this network’s target audience. Quite literally, voice actors are phoning in their performances from a bathroom at work, but Max and Dave are smart enough to not hide their flaws, but rather accentuate and celebrate them…almost like when watching live improv you may see something screw up that wasn’t supposed to happen and performers do their best to just go with it.

Other than a slight pacing hiccup with the show’s fourth episode, Tender Touches provides a nice change of pace which has always been Adult Swim’s hallmark of success.Where else are you going to see cyborg turkeys, homicidal dogs, and a recording of Bradley Millner flushing his business all on the same day?