Adult Swim: 21st Century MTV

In today's world of high speed internet, social media and web 2.0, television is on it's way out, especially amongst the younger demographics. An entire generation of young people now consume their media their way, without the need for the traditional gatekeepers. But, like how MTV represented the cultural voice of an entire generation in the 1980s there is still a television channel out there which caters to the needs of a growingly disillusioned young audience, and that is Adult Swim.

Adult Swim embodies the postmodern stylings that characterised much of what made MTV a cultural force to be reckoned with in the late 80s-early 90s, with it's content geared towards a younger demographic, uncompromising in it's multiplicity of different styles and anarchic presentation. Adult Swim is a subversive television network in that it is constantly playing on audience expectations, famously with it's psychedelic idents and satirical informercials, the programme makers are constantly out to catch the audience off guard and surprise them.

Much of it's programming too is the sort of self aware, adult oriented animation you'd expect from Cartoon Network, with shows such as Space Ghost Coast to Coast and Sealab 2021, which are constructed from recycled animation cells from the Hanna Barbera archive, in order to parody and subvert the cliches of animated programming in the 60s and 70s.