Season Review: The Summoner Season One

And just like that…they were gone. By that I mean Syfy’s TZGZ lineup which clearly looks to be on it’s last legs. After one promising year of quality entertainment, Syfy has learned the hard way that in order to build up a lineup of quality adult animation, you have to do some sort of marketing in which to promote and maybe not change the premiere nights so much. Because of this, we may never see the likes of The Summoner with any new episodes ever again on this network. To be honest, The Summoner is on the wrong network. The five-minute run-times of each episode most likely belong on say a Youtube or social channels like Instagram, certainly not buried on a 12:15 am ET/PT on a Wednesday. Syfy hasn’t earned that timeslot in the way Adult Swim has, as such, no ratings came with the premieres.

It’s sad, too. The Charlie Hankin-created The Summoner has all the makings of a hit series. The series follows “Rory” (voiced by Hankin) as he does his best to woo a girl who just moved in down the hall named “Shannon” (Cree Summer). Unfortunately, his alien roommate Summoner (Hankin) usually ends up embarrassing Rory in a multitude of hilarious ways that at first causes confusion or ire for Rory but usually seems to work out in the end. As we traverse through the season, the common trope of the cat and mouse game between Rory and Shannon does come to a heart-warming head, but we also get to meet additional characters and have access to different settings that largely remove Shannon but still gives us the heaping amounts of comedy that comes from Rory and his roommate.

The writing has Charlie Hankin’s hilarious finger prints all over the place delivered by excellent voice acting (Charlie and Cree do all of the voices, the way it’s supposed to be done). Solis Animation follows up from Syfy’s Gary And His Demons, teaming up with Stoopid Buddy Stoodios for a stellar one-two punch for strong animated production all done on minuscule budgets that more than measure up to anything else you can find. The entire result is a strong effort that deserved better treatment. Maybe The Summoner can summon additional episodes on a different network that will appreciate it.