Season Review: YOLO: Crystal Fantasy Season One

Overview(Spoilers Below):

YOLO: Crystal Fantasy is the ultimate story of friendship. Sarah and Rachel are two besties from Wollongong, Australia who are always ready for a party or an adventure. Rachel’s brash and fearless attitude balances Sarah’s more cautious nature, but the two of them frequently find themselves roped into situations that have gotten wildly out of hand. Rachel and Sarah just want to experience good vibes, but their exploits put them up against giant heads, living horoscopes, ancient crystal prophecies, and ex-boyfriends. At least Sarah and Rachel have each other to help make this crazy world feel a little more manageable.

Our Take:

Adult Swim is a programming block that’s featured some of the most creative and unique shows to air on television. However, while Adult Swim’s content can feel iconoclastic to the rest of television, the eclectic network has gradually developed a lot of shows that can feel similar to each other, not necessarily in terms of content, but with the tone and formula. Adult Swim has gotten better at this in recent years, with one of the most helpful solutions being to reach out to creators that are outside of their regular talent pool, or in some cases, outside of the continent.

YOLO: Crystal Fantasy’s Michael Cusack hails from Australia, but it’s curiously been America’s Adult Swim that’s given him his biggest canvas to create with so far. Cusack’s previous properties like Koala Man or Damo and Darren weren’t able to be truly realized over on Australian television, but these are strange shows that would flourish on Adult Swim (seriously Adult Swim, air the Koala Man pilot, if possible! Test the waters!). Thankfully this sublime pairing of sensibilities has been able to take place and the end result, YOLO: Crystal Fantasy, is one of the most hilarious and fully realized shows to air on Adult Swim in a long time. Cusack has been refining his skills and comedic voice for so long that YOLO is able to run before it can walk. It’s been a serious delight to watch this demented cartoon grow over the course of its first season.

Part of the strength of YOLO: Crystal Fantasy is that it can dress itself up as a run of the mill show that features stereotypical protagonists and isn’t interested in challenging the status quo. YOLO would rather focus on other things and give the audience the benefit of the doubt so it’s able to maximize its absurdity and cram as much comedy into every episode as possible. It’s a strategy that works for it and even though Sarah and Rachel aren’t terribly innovative characters, the audience is still able to feel empathy for them and root for their friendship. This is especially impressive because YOLO: Crystal Fantasy is so intensely absurd that the idea of experiencing an emotional connection with anyone in the show seems like it would be laughably impossible. The series cleverly uses stock tropes as a way for the characters to gain depth.

Every episode from the first season features Sarah and Rachel taking part in some new social activity and while this formula becomes telegraphed very early on in the season, it’s not a deterrent to YOLO. Each episode goes to radically different places, even if they all involve a comparable premise and if anything it speaks to the versatile nature of this show and its style of storytelling. These established and reliable tenets are then wonderfully juxtaposed to the show’s aggressive nature to scream in the audience’s face. The viewer never truly gets a chance to catch their breath and let their guard down as both characters and visual information assault the screen in an attempt to make sure that not a single character interaction or line of dialogue is wasted here. It also achieves the perfect balance between nonsense, normalcy, and Australian culture in a way where the three intermingle and it’s impossible to tell which is which by the end.

Michael Cusack voices the majority of the characters in the show and despite how he sounds the same in all of these roles, it never becomes a problem because the delivery is so unhinged. On the note of casting, an important distinction between the YOLO Adult Swim series and the web shorts that precede it is that Sarah is voiced by Sarah Bishop, rather than Cusack himself. Rachel and Sarah go on a surprisingly complex emotional journey in the season, which culminates in a truly ambitious and shocking season finale, but this is made all the stronger by Sarah’s performance as a softer foil to Rachel. Cusack in both roles would diminish this.

YOLO: Crystal Fantasy’s strong sense of humor is consistently obvious in the show’s writing, but it’s impressive how the show’s visual aspects, like the animation and music, can often be doing just as much work. YOLO is a show that skews towards more of a crude look with its animation, but every episode features brief, gorgeous sequences where the animation inexplicably works overtime. Some of the best jokes in the season involve characters that show up who are suddenly highly articulated and detailed. It’s a strange reconciliation of extremes, but it always makes me laugh and it’s quickly become one of YOLO: Crystal Fantasy’s most defining features. It’s also pleasant to see that nearly every episode features some kind of musical interlude. These typically aren’t groundbreaking, but they’re presented with a simplicity and innocence as if a child has prepared a song for their parents.

Every episode in YOLO: Crystal Fantasy’s first season is a success, but there are some highlights from the episodes that demonstrate just how crazy the show is wiling to get. Beyond the standard Dadaist sense of humor, YOLO: Crystal Fantasy also makes several jokes that deconstruct the medium itself and try to do new things with an animated series that show reckless disregard for the format. There’s a gag with Rachel where her audio loops and works against the animation because it knows the shoddy nature of its execution makes it funnier. Storylines will be at war with each other to the point where one will literally push the other off the screen rather than engage in a standard edit. The best joke from the entire season involves Sarah going on a hallucinogenic drug trip that briefly sees YOLO: Crystal Fantasy morph into a live-action dance sequence to establish just how high she is at the moment. And of course, there are also rampant fatalities.

YOLO: Crystal Fantasy has set such a high standard for itself that a second season will be hard to top these episodes, but I don’t at all doubt that the series will be able to do it. YOLO doesn’t need to rock the boat in a second season and the simplistic nature of the plot is part of why is works as well as it does. That being said, YOLO did some impressive work with a subtly serialized story in season one. Even more of this approach, while still keeping the show episodic, could lead to even richer episodes. It also wouldn’t hurt to experiment more with Sarah’s family. Sarah and Rachel should of course remain the focus, but having the dad go along for an adventure or two could lead to some great material. YOLO: Crystal Fantasy has more than earned the privilege for more episodes and whatever approach the series decides to take for its second season will no doubt be phenomenal.