Feeling nostalgic, in the middle of 2025, for the cartoons of the 80s is like being fascinated by a little stone on the ground without looking at the meteorite. The only thing that the old series had over the current ones was in your child’s eyes, which obviously were fascinated by everything. However, nowadays the number of true audiovisual wonders that fill our screens is endless, with extraordinary animation and intelligent scripts full of running gags that go beyond the weekly adventure. Gumball, Adventure Time, Phineas and Ferb, Regular Show, Gravity Falls, BoJack Horseman, Big Mouth… The list could go on for hours, but there is one series that better defines the crazy times we live in and that you would do well to watch: Smiling Friends.
Our job is to make you happy
Each episode of Smiling Friends lasts just ten minutes. Enough time to take you through a washer of madness, meme culture, shitposting, brainrot, and gags that are as sharp as they are completely insane. What other animated series could start with a boss playing the knife and hand game and end with a gigantic smiling face destroying a city? This is just the plot of the first episode of season 3 that just premiered on HBO Max, but if you’ve never seen it, you have 17 other episodes to catch up on. You can binge it in an afternoon, if you have the guts.
Its own concept is a rarity: Smiling Friends is about a company that sad people hire to make them smile again. But if you’re expecting a feel-good series with sentimental music and morals at the end of each episode, you’re in for a big surprise: with creativity overflowing at the edges, literally anything can happen. Unexpected deaths? Sure. Frog-men eating people? Yes. Glop? Count on it. For 3 seasons, the Adult Swim series has managed to challenge its audience’s expectations and give them exactly what they didn’t know they wanted to see. And it’s a delight.
Zach Hadel and Michael Cusack, both in their 30s and from the Internet subculture, created Smiling Friends as a place to unleash all the silliness they had inside, after absorbing the wildest animation culture and memes. The result is like Gumball multiplied by five, or as if the world around you is running a thousand miles per hour while you are standing still. The series itself breaks its own rules whenever it wants, tricks the viewers, and doesn’t even care if its own characters have internal logic. Who needs it when you’re creating pure audiovisual anarchy?
It is true that it is not designed, at all, for a marathon: its humor is so self-aware, so meta, and so absurd that watching all the episodes in a row can cause headaches and may not even be funny at all. However, Smiling Friends trusts you more than you think, and wants you to enjoy its hallucinogenic mix of 21st-century storytelling, a blend of styles, animation pushed to the limit, and culture that once could only be found in some fanzines. If you don’t enjoy it – that’s possible, and perfectly valid – you can always choose to knock on their door. The Smiling Friends are always looking for new cases, after all, even if it’s just to perpetuate their madness and audiovisual barbarism.
