When I was growing up, all the cartoons I watched — be they the likes of Doug, Rugrats, or Hey Arnold! on Nickelodeon or Dexter’s Laboratory or The Powerpuff Girls on Cartoon Network — aired in twelve minute chunks. I’ve never really researched the reason why, though I’d guess that it probably had something to do with the short attention span of children, with the networks resolving their story and offering up a new one starring the same beloved characters before kids could get bored and change the channel.
Much has changed since then, but twelve minute episodes are still the norm for most of Cartoon Network’s modern offerings, and even much of Adult Swim’s early animation used this format as well (I’d imagine because the premises of, say, Aqua Teen Hunger Force or Sealab 2021 — which relied heavily on mid-aughts “randomness” and improvisation — couldn’t sustain half-hour stories). There’s a key difference between the twelve minute episodes of today and those of the nineties, though.
Today the twelve minute episodes stand alone, airing in their own fifteen minute time-slots in any order the networks wish. In the nineties, though, two twelve minute stories would be combined to form a single twenty-two minute long episode, airing in a half-hour time-slot without any variation. Both the heat wave and the blizzard stories in Hey Arnold!, for example, were part of the same twenty-two minute episode, so as soon as I saw one, I knew the other was coming up after the commercial break.
I’m far less sure why this choice was originally made, or why it changed over time. I’d imagine it was originally a decision based on scheduling rather than anything creative — keeping the bite-sized stories for kids without disrupting typical network time-slots — but I’d venture to guess that the shift to standalone twelve minute stories has more to do with modern cartoons being more serialized. Steven Universe, for example, leaned hard into continuity and storylines that could last five or six episodes in a row in its later seasons, which would’ve felt awkward paired up in an automatic two-story format.
Regardless of the reasons, I’d almost forgotten about the two-twelve minute episode format, allowing it to become a fuzzy, nostalgic artifact of my childhood, until I encountered Close Enough this week.
Close Enough is an animated comedy created by J.G. Quintel and airing on HBO Max, about a married couple in their early thirties and their young daughter moving in with their newly-divorced best friends in order to save money on rent. Close Enough owes a lot to Quintel’s previous series, Cartoon Network’s Regular Show, especially the animation style and Quintel’s voicing the main character; I don’t consider those flaws, though, just Quintel and his crew recognizing their strengths and the brand recognition this style brings them.
The greatest debt Close Enough owes to Regular Show, though, is its story format. On paper their premises couldn’t be more different — a millennial couple raising a child is a far cry from Regular Show’s cast of anthropomorphic animals and creatures running a park — yet both series tend to follow the same formula: a simple, mundane conflict grows out of control when it becomes tinted with the supernatural and absurd. In Regular Show this took the form of, say, Mordecai and Rigby abusing the power of “doing you a solid” and their breaking their promises subsequently nearly shattering reality, or Rigby getting a song stuck in his head that becomes so aggressive that it grows into a physical entity that threatens to destroy the entire park, forcing the staff to assemble their own super-catchy band to combat it.
Close Enough takes this same idea and applies it to slightly more adult problems. Young Candice needs to raise her test scores at school, but her robot tutor asks purposely-impossible questions so that it can show ads whenever she gets one wrong, and when the family tries to skip the ads, unleashes an entire drone army on them. Josh’s attempts to teach Candice to skateboard (which his father never did for him) leads to his shattering his taint and having to get it replaced with a metal plate, and to a deadly downhill skate race complete with explosions. Emily enjoys visiting Open Houses to get away from the stress of family life, but when she indulges too much in the fantasy, she becomes trapped in a sitcom-inspired simulation1. You get the picture.
I’ve got to say, after spending Saturday night laughing my ass off as I binged through the first season with a friend I hadn’t seen since before Covid hit, I think I like Close Enough more than its predecessor. There was a juvenileness to Mordecai and Rigby that always rubbed me the wrong way, while the adventures of Josh and Emily are more earnest even when they’re silly and surreal (plus, unlike its predecessor, Close Enough actually has female characters! With stories told from their perspectives!). Regular Show always had an audience that skewed older than its target demographic, and I think they’ll have aged perfectly into this show.
What hit me most interesting about Close Enough, though, was its format; twenty-two minute episodes consisting of two twelve minute stories, just like back in the 90s! Now, I’m not shocked about the twelve minute stories part — Regular Show had them too, so that’s on brand — but it’s the two-per-episode part that surprised me, as I hadn’t seen a show following this format since I was a kid, and had never seen adult animation use it before. Plus, it’s on HBO Max, a streaming platform, so why would it need to pair shorter stories together to reach an arbitrary run-time? Streaming episodes can be as long or as short as they want! This warranted more research.
As it turns out, the answer was actually pretty simple: Close Enough was originally developed to air on the cable network TBS, not on a streaming platform. Thus, the two story per episode format appears to be Quintel sticking to the twelve minute story structure he’s most familiar with while also allowing TBS to slot twenty-two minute episodes anywhere they want into their schedule rather than disrupting it with fifteen minute time slots. This also explains another strange quirk of the show: it has act breaks at the half-way point of each story. They’re jarring on a streaming platform, but they make perfect sense when you realize that the show was developed for TBS (although it’s a shame TBS wasn’t going to accommodate the series with a single, extra-long commercial break between stories rather than four breaks per episode, like Nickelodeon used to do).
Why didn’t Close Enough end up airing on TBS, then? Well, the series was being developed as part of a new animation block2 on the network, a block that would be anchored by a Louis C.K. vehicle called The Cops. I…I’m going to assume that I don’t need to explain what happened next, other than that Louie’s crimes ended up taking down the entire animation block with it, and Close Enough — despite having its entire first season already completed at the time — went on the shelf until HBO Max bought it a few years later.
It’s a strange journey for a strange television show, but I’m glad Close Enough made it to air — not only because I think it’s pretty great, but because it helped remind me of a pretty significant detail about my youth, and has given one last hurrah to a format that once dominated an entire genre.
FALLING FOR “BREATH OF THE WILD”
I have an unintentional habit of falling behind the times. I didn’t get a Nintendo Switch until the console had already been out for two years, and I didn’t buy its flagship title until only a week ago, when I stumbled across The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on sale for only $40 (you’re really not gonna find first-party Nintendo games any cheaper).
I wasn’t purposely avoiding Breath of the Wild and had always intended to pick it up eventually, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I sometimes found the thought of the game intimidating. I’m someone who really needs structure in my life and tends to flail when not given a clear objective, especially in video games (I’ve never been one of those people complaining about linear gameplay). Breath of the Wild, meanwhile, is a game based almost entirely on exploration, discovery, and aimless wandering. There’s a story and dungeons and a boss fight and everything you’ve come to expect from a Zelda game, but 90% of the time you’ll be wandering throughout the vast ruins of Hyrule, foraging for supplies, fending off enemies, and trying to figure out the safest path to some strange landmark you happened to notice off in the distance. There’s real freedom to this kind of gameplay, but as I mentioned last week when talking about the almost limitless selection available on Spotify, I tend to become paralyzed when presented with too many options. Like I said: it’s intimidating.
Yet, I ended up falling in love with Breath of the Wild pretty quickly once I finally cracked it open. First it was the simple fact that — unlike my formative childhood Zelda experience, Ocarina of Time — there’s actually a button that allows you to make Link jump. Already I felt so much more free.
The real wonder came, though, after I exited the introductory dungeon and found myself on a dirt path with sheer rock cliffs on either side of me. In every other video game I’d ever played, those cliffs would have been boundaries, places I could never go meant to keep me moving forward on a pre-determined path. Yet, when I made Link approach the cliffs, he simply, automatically, with no thought whatsoever, just started climbing the cliffs. It’s so simple, but in that moment my entire pre-conceived notion of what the game was fell away. Breath of the Wild’s greatest accomplishment, it’s grandest gesture towards freedom, is simply allowing you to break the cardinal rules of the games that came before it. Nothing is off limits, if you put enough thought and effort to it.
Ever since then my Breath of the Wild experience has careened wildly between “magical” and “frustrating,” but I believe that’s the intention; anything is possible, but every achievement is hard-earned. Some of those frustrations work better than others — would it really have killed them to include a cooking tutorial? — but honestly, even if the rest of the game had ended up being garbage, I got my $40 worth the moment Link started climbing that cliff.
TOP “WAS GARFIELD FUNNY TODAY?” OF THE WEEK
Honestly, this week was an extremely unfunny run of strips, even for Garfield. The one below is the best of the bunch, a perfect representation of the strip’s typical brand of laziness only mildly redeemed by a decent sight-gag.
ABOUT
“Do You Know What I Love the Most?” is a newsletter from Spencer Irwin about his relationship with the stories he loves. Spencer is an enthusiast and writer from Newark, Delaware, who likes punk rock, comic books, working out, breakfast, and most of all, stories. His previous work appeared on Retcon Punch, One Week One Band, and Crisis on Infinite Chords, and he can be found on Twitter at @ThatSpenceGuy. If you like this newsletter, please subscribe and share with your friends!
This episode was created and aired before WandaVision, so who’s really ripping off who?
A block is a group of similarly themed series airing together on a network. For example, Fox’s animation block is currently Bob’s Burgers, The Simpsons, Family Guy, and Bless the Harts, all airing together on Sunday nights.