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![Video thumbnail — [Adult Swim] 2001 Pool Bumps](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/hoWcIE8VRMI/hqdefault.jpg)
Cartoon Network's late-night block launched in 2001 as a joke about pool rules — and became a proving ground for surreal, irreverent animation that refused to fit anywhere else. Deadpan bumpers over footage of elderly swimmers announced shows like Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Harvey Birdman to an audience that had grown up with the network and wasn't ready to turn in.
Daria Morgendorffer—deadpan, sardonic, and thoroughly unimpressed—became the patron saint of 1990s teen-girl outsiderdom. Spun off from Beavis and Butt-Head, this MTV series followed Daria through the town of Lawndale alongside her artsy best friend Jane Lane, her popularity-obsessed sister Quinn, and her perpetually frustrated parents. Created by Glenn Eichler and Susie Lewis Lynn, Daria captured the 90s teen experience with sharp-edged humor and surprising emotional depth. Two final TV movies, 'Is It Fall Yet?' and 'Is It College Yet?', capped off a beloved five-season run.
A wiggling, half-sketched therapist nodding along while Ray Romano, Dave Chappelle or Conan O'Brien did their act from the couch, between breakfasts with his aimless son Ben. Comedy Central's first animated series, drawn in a cheap technique called Squigglevision, ran from 1995 to 2002 and won a Peabody along the way.
Jason Alexander as the voice of a lewd, widowed private-eye duck in the USA Network's adult cartoon, animated by Klasky Csupo. It ran 70 episodes, earned three Emmy nominations, and ended on a cliffhanger that was never resolved.
The Griffin family of Quahog, Rhode Island—led by bumbling dad Peter, his wife Lois, and their motley crew of kids and pets—became a Fox phenomenon after its Super Bowl XXXIII premiere in 1999. A sharp departure from typical sitcom fare, Family Guy was built on rapid-fire cutaway gags and irreverent humor. Though Fox canceled it after just three seasons, a DVD renaissance in 2003 became so successful it sparked a network reversal—the show's comeback is considered television's first revival based on DVD sales.
Delivery boy Fry cryogenically freezes and wakes in the year 3000 to join a space-shipping crew led by the sardonic Leela and foul-mouthed robot Bender. Created by Matt Groening, this sci-fi comedy was staffed with Ph.D.s—the writers brought genuine math-smart humor and surprising emotional depth. Fox premiered it in 1999, but it became a cult phenomenon on Comedy Central; episodes like 'Jurassic Bark' showed its tearjerking side, and it won six Emmy Awards over its life.
The washed-up 1960s Hanna-Barbera superhero who traded crime-fighting for a law degree and spent twelve minutes a week defending Fred Flintstone, Shaggy and the rest of the Saturday-morning gang in court. Adult Swim's surreal legal sitcom premiered the night the block launched in 2001, with Stephen Colbert voicing both the deranged boss of the law firm and a paranoid prosecutor.
In the fictional Texas suburb of Arlen, Hank Hill tends his post as assistant manager at Strickland Propane—where he sells 'propane and propane accessories' with the understated decency that defines him. Mike Judge and Greg Daniels created a grounded animated comedy that treated its working-class characters with genuine affection, centered on the beer-drinking alley banter of Hank and his neighbors. Premiering on Fox in 1997, King of the Hill won an Emmy in 1999 and became a quiet landmark of late-90s television, proving that a show about a propane salesman could outrun trends and speak to the heart of American ordinariness.
MTV's late-night animation grab bag, where a music video would melt into a stick-figure film noir, a sketch about art-school girls, and a wordless spy named Æon Flux who died at the end of nearly every short. It ran three seasons from 1991 and hatched two of the channel's defining cartoons: Beavis and Butt-Head arrived as a Mike Judge short called Frog Baseball, and Æon Flux grew from a six-part serial into her own series.
The construction-paper kids from Colorado who never stopped talking. South Park arrived in 1997 as basic cable's biggest shock — then spent the 2000s proving it was television's fastest satire machine, with episodes built in days so it could mock the news while it was still news.
Aaron McGruder's anime-styled Adult Swim satire about Huey and Riley Freeman, two Chicago kids transplanted with their Granddad to a white suburb called Woodcrest, with Regina King voicing both brothers. It opened in 2005 by declaring "Jesus was Black, Ronald Reagan was the devil, and the government is lying about 9/11," and it never got less confrontational.
"It stinks!" Jon Lovitz voiced Jay Sherman, a New York film critic — cold and elitist on the air, gentle and self-doubting everywhere else — whose review show tore apart movie parodies like Honey, I Ate the Kids and Abe Lincoln: Pet Detective. Cancelled by two networks in two years, it became one of the 90s' great cult cartoons.
A purple-clad hero who is a homeless man in the real world and the Leopard Queen's protector in another, with much of the animation drawn straight from Sam Kieth's comic panels. MTV aired it in 1995 under its Oddities label, in 13 short episodes.
Adult Swim's saga of a failed super-scientist, his two dim teenage sons, their secret-agent bodyguard Brock Samson and a butterfly-themed archnemesis who gets his arching assignments from a villains' guild. Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer's riff on Jonny Quest grew from a 2003 pilot into seven seasons of comics-nerd world-building, all of it, as Hammer put it, about "beautiful sublime failure."