Please enjoy the second in a new five-part series from guest author Henrik M. – Ed
It feels almost quaint to look back at the past 20 years and see just how drastically and quickly the entertainment landscape changed. In 2000, everything had its own little niche. Sure, video games and the Internet were already there, and showing signs of their future dominance of our lives, but there was no Netflix, no YouTube, and television was still the great, unquestionable overlord of media. Unfortunately, it was during these early days of the 21st century that the inherent flaws of network TV cost us five classic animated shows. In this five-part series, I’ll be taking a look at several short-lived gems of animation lost to us for a variety of factors, the biggest of which being that ratings-based television was a dying dinosaur 20 years ago, and hasn’t gotten any livelier in the interim.
New York occupies a strange place in popular culture. It’s simultaneously portrayed as both the greatest city in the world, and an open, festering canker sore on the business end of the American East Coast. Granted, a bit of urban decay is probably inevitable if you put eight million people on one island and charge thousands in rent for apartments the size of discount coffins, but still, the city’s media presence is somewhat indecisive. Despite the extensive urban renewal in the ’90s, New York was, and still is, often portrayed as a metropolitan nightmare, and for our second entry in Criminally Underrated Cartoons, we will be heading Downtown!
The late ’90s was a strange time for MTV. Beavis and Butt-Head had just ended, but it was not yet time for the network to mutate into a bloated horror of reality shows about pregnant teenagers and douchebags with spray tans. However, the success of BnB had shown MTV that there were more ways to get attention from jaded Generation X-ers than just music videos, and that was adult-oriented cartoons! These included the BnB spinoff Daria, which would go on to modest success, and claymation classic Celebrity Deathmatch. However, there is one series that is often overlooked, mostly because MTV fired it off in five months, and then tried to forget it ever existed so they could make people watch Johnny Knoxville punch himself in the crotch. This was Downtown, the creation of former BnB animator Chris Brynoski.
While I never saw the series during its original run, I did manage to catch it not too long after the cancellation, unlike Mission Hill, which I never even heard of until a good 10 years after it crashed and burned. It was back in 2000, when I was 14 and at just the right age for the seeds of Generation X cynicism to appeal to me. My family had only recently moved to an area with cable TV the previous year, and MTV was one of the channels we suddenly had access to. That summer, MTV began airing reruns of Downtown, and I was immediately hooked on the show–what little there was of it. While cartoons for adults was nothing new to me, with The Simpsons, South Park and Beavis and Butt-Head having thoroughly corrupted me by that time, Downtown depicted a far more cynical and dark image of the world than any of those shows did. Sadly, it didn’t last long, and it was only years later as an adult that I stumbled across the show again by accident on YouTube. This was in 2010, while I was laid up with a back injury from weightlifting and pretty much watching my way through the entire YouTube archives to stave off my boredom, certainly not expecting to rediscover a memory from a teenage life happily squandered on basic cable.
Deputing August 3, 1999, Downtown documented the daily life of a small group of friends trying to make it through the day to day existence of lower middle class New York life. Like every New Yorker who isn’t Donald Trump, the characters exist in a kind of twilight limbo consisting of shitty apartments (that you still need roommates to pay for), even shittier forms of public transportation, the seemingly endless variation of lunatics that wander the streets, and just a general feeling of living in a human sewer. And this is still a step up from what the city was like in the ’70s. Unlike shows like Friends, which infamously had their characters live in palatial apartments even though most of them had service jobs and wouldn’t be able to rent a cardboard box in New York, Downtown had a stark portrayal of the rotting infrastructure of lower class New York. Despite this, the show made a point of demonstrating WHY people flocked to the city even at its worst. For all its problems, poverty and misery, New York City was FUN! Episodes such as “The Con” and “Insomnia” focused on the many subcultures of freaks and weirdos that formed their own communities in New York and similar cities, as much as mainstream media would try to ignore them. However, the show also portrayed the dark side of coolness–the dreaded plague known as gentrification, which torments us to this day. The episode “Hot Spot” showed the slow destruction of underground culture and communities by trendy nightclubs, who bought out fringe clubs and bars and rehaulded them in an attempt to attract “hip” customers. Much like the characters themselves have to face in that episode, this was not a battle that could be won.
But what about the cast itself? Well, Downtown did a pretty thorough job of hitting all the MTV demographics. We have the cynical, disaffected 20-somethings working day jobs they hate and crushing on girls way out of their league, the club hopping high school kids who put more work into their fake IDs than their schoolwork, and even the creepy middle aged guy who’s way too old for the scene but still hangs out with kids half his age. The show’s main character is Alex, a nerd of the highest order whose post-college slump has left him working a dead end job at a copy store (remember when those were a thing?) and who has just gotten his first apartment, because it’s still New York, so unless you want to live on the subway, you won’t be moving out at 18. Alex’s main interaction with the outside world consists of his best friend Jen, a second-hand store clerk whose loathing of the trendy scene in the city borders on the pathological, which isn’t helped by said trend seekers often using her store to scavenge for old nostalgia merchandise. Keep in mind, this was a good decade before hipsters really became a thing; much like Mission Hill, Downtown was ahead of the curve. Jen and Alex also share the familiar sexual tension you often see in this type of media, but unusually, they both acknowledge said tension, and agree that it’s not really a thread they want to start tugging at, choosing instead to ignore it. For a show that catered to the MTV demographic, discovering that two of the main characters were not going to hook up despite a mutual attraction (or in this case, a mix of attraction and desperation) was like finding a bar of gold in a cereal box.
As for the teenagers of the group, there was Chaka, Alex’s party-obsessed younger sister and her best friend Mecca, as well as their classmates and weird sort of friends/crushes/drinking buddies Fruity (real name unknown) and his best friend, graffiti artist and skater punk Matt, AKA Minus. These four formed a secondary main character clique, going on separate adventures from what Alex and Jen were up to, often getting involved in plots revolving around the clubbing scene, the street culture, and of course, high school. They also gave the show a way to explore what it was like being a teenager in the last gasping breaths of the ’90s, not to mention the timeless experience of trying to get around drinking age laws, something every generation can identify with.
Rounding out the main cast is the man known only as Goat. Remember the creepy, middle aged guy who’s way too old to have friends this age that I mentioned? Yeah, that’s Goat. Very little is ever revealed about Goat’s background, or even his real name, but the best way to describe him would probably be “white trash metalhead drifter,” as Goat has grifted his way across New York longer than most of the other characters have been alive. He lives an existence of horrifying cheap bars, apartments that are shitholes even for New York, and trying to pick up women that look like extras from American Horror Story. He is basically the personification of the absolute rock bottom of the Big Apple, as far as you can fall before you’re literally camping in an alley. Which makes it ironic that Goat is very likely an avatar for the show’s creator, as he’s appeared in other shows Brynoski has worked on, both as a main character on Megas XLR, and as a cameo on Adult Swim’s Metalocalypse.
It’s like looking in a skeevy mirror!
Aside from the main cast, the show also featured a few supporting roles, most notably Serena, a goth girl whom Alex nurses a gigantic crush on for the entire series. Several episodes feature him trying to build up the guts to ask her out. (We’ll be getting back to that later.) Other characters involve the manager of Starbase 12, a comic book store where Matt and Serena work, as well as Alex’s group of nerd friends–you know, the clique you hang out with because it makes you seem less like a loser in comparison? Admittedly, these characters serve little purpose other than making Alex look like less of a dork (one of them thought “laid” was a Star Wars character), and are one of the few blemishes on the show’s otherwise near-spotless lineup. It actually gets a bit uncomfortable to watch them sometimes, such as the scene where they accidently wander into the Adults Only section of a comic convention in “The Con”.
The worst portrayal of nerds this side of Big Bang Theory aside, what about the show itself made it special? Well, something that set Downtown apart from other early forays into adult animation like South Park, is that for all its focus on young adult culture, the show itself is actually surprisingly mature. While its contemporaries reveled in cursing like sailors with Tourette’s, or in seeing how much depravity they could get away with on primetime, Downtown took a higher road. Even though it constantly had jokes about sex or underage drinking and all manner of things that by all logic should be obscene, it comes off as surprisingly… classy, for lack of a better word. One explanation for why this works is probably the show’s surreal, dark animation, which makes New York look almost like an urban purgatory that the characters haunt rather than inhabit. The colors are subdued and rather washed out, even in the episodes set during the daytime, or even on the beach in the summer (though if you’ve ever been on a New York beach, “sad” would be a nice way of describing it). As such, Downtown manages to take plots like “teenage girl shaves her pubes and takes pictures” or “guy can’t bear to part with a Cookie Monster pillow” and not make them seem ridiculous. And yes, those are actual storylines on the show, the A- and B-plots from “Before And After”.
This was before smartphones, so if you wanted to carry around pictures of your genitals, you had to hide them in books.
Another good example of the show’s focus on youth culture is the episode “Graffiti”, which delves into the ’90s street art scene. Matt, who goes by the pseudonym Minus while doing his paintings, is given a rare opportunity to tag the subway trains when a fire breaks out in the subway, forcing severe delays and laying up the trains between stations. Fruity and Chaka go with him, and what follows is not just an interesting exploration of graffiti art, but also a journey into the literal bowels of New York, and the urban legends surrounding the spiderweb of tunnels beneath the city. Those range from believable, such as the third rail that electrocutes you if you touch it (true), and the vast population of homeless people and survivalists forming their own communities in the tunnels (sort of true), to somewhat more esoteric myths like the subway security personnel using an old flatbed train as a fight club after hours (okay, that one PROBABLY isn’t true). The characters also stumble across one of the mythical abandoned subway stations that haven’t been in use for decades, yet are kept somewhat clean and up to code, for some mysterious purpose. One of the many long-forgotten rooms in the underground have even become a sort of taggers hall of fame, with Matt discovering the tags of dozens of famous underground artists hidden away from the world, though he ultimately decides not to add his own tag there, as he doesn’t think himself that level yet. In his own words, “I’ve never even been to prison.”
There’s also an interesting bit of trivia that shows up in Episode 5. Many people were first exposed to the concept of the furry fandom with the 2003 CSI episode “Fur And Loathing”, which is also often considered to be the first appearance of furries in a mainstream TV series. But as it turns out, Downtown beat them to it by four years. Granted, it’s not the basis of the entire plot like it was on CSI, but in “The Con”, Matt and Fruity, manning the convention booth for Starbase 12, find themselves right next to the East Coast Furry Coalition. While it’s just a one-off joke, it’s still a surprise to see furries show up on an MTV show, especially in 1999. Incidentally, the booth on the right side of Starbase 12 was manned by pro wrestler The Undertaker, voicing himself, thanks to MTV’s partnership deal with the World Wrestling Federation, or WWE as it’s known today.
Now there’s a team-up you never expected to see, nor did you ever want to.
Alex’s crush on the goth girl Serena forms sort of an overarching plot of the series, beginning in the first episode, “Sin Bin”, and reaches a resolution of sorts in the final episode, “Trick Or Treat.” Unlike what you’d see on most shows, Downtown makes it clear that Alex’s feelings for Serena are pretty shallow, founded more on physical attraction than any sort of emotional connection. It would have been easy to just make either of the characters the jerk in this situation, but the show takes care to portray both Alex and Serena as their own person. Alex simply made the mistake so many of us have made and put his crush on a pedestal, an ideal that no real person could possibly live up to, and projected his own desires onto her rather than taking time to actually get to know her. “Trick Or Treat” revolves around the consequences of this, as Alex finally gets up the nerve to ask Serena out, only to accidentally convince her to drop her goth persona in the process. Finding himself less attracted to her as a normal person, Alex has to face the idea that he might just have wanted her for her body the whole time, and that he didn’t actually feel a real connection with her, something Jen had been saying since day one. Ironically, it’s Goat who comes to the rescue, despite having a less than enlightened approach to romance himself (let’s just say this much–in one episode, he recommends that Alex “throw out his meat until he finds a girl who isn’t a vegetarian”). In Goat’s own words, “Clothes are just going to come off anyway, so what’s it matter what she dresses like?” Alex takes these words to heart, and while the episode doesn’t end with him and Serena dating, they do mend their friendship and leave the door open for more, which we might have seen had the show not been cancelled.
Dr. Love, everyone! Oh, and just so you know, those are Spice Girls Action Figures he’s feeling up.
So, why did this show fail? Was it like Mission Hill, where destiny just seemed to conspire against the shows existence? Nope. In fact, the show received quite a bit of critical praise when it first aired, even getting an Emmy Nomination, and didn’t even have to be vindicated by reruns years later. The source of the failure seems to lie with whatever nebulous corporate machinations keep MTV running. There also seems to be no official word on exactly why the show was cancelled, but it was likely caused by low ratings, not at all helped by MTV’s poor marketing of the show, as the network made the same mistake as the WB had done with Mission Hill and lost interest in pushing the show before the paint on the animation cells had dried. The series has also never been given an official DVD release, likely thanks to the use of licensed music, and Chris Brynoski eventually resorted to selling a bootleg DVD off his blog for a time. As you can probably imagine, this DVD doesn’t have a very big print run, limiting access to the show even more. Sadly, as we’ll see in our coming entries, this would not be the last time Chris Brynoski would find himself shafted by television.
For our next entry, we’ll keep harassing MTV over their terrible programming decisions, as we head to Clone High, USA!
-Henrik M.