Hulu has handed down new season orders for two of its freshmen adult-oriented animated series, Solar Opposites and Crossing Swords.
Hulu originally picked up Solar Opposites from Ricky And Morty co-creator Justin Roiland with a straight-to-series two-season, sixteen episode order. The first season premiered on the streamer last month to rave reviews. The series centers on a family unit of aliens who have crashlanded on Earth and are attempting to evaluate the planet as a potential new home for their own species following a planetwide catastrophe on their homeworld.
Crossing Swords, a fantasy-based series, only debuted on Hulu last week. Despite very poor reviews – it is currently sitting with an 18% on Rotten Tomatoes – the show has performed well enough in Hulu’s eyes with viewers to grant it a second season of an additional ten episodes.
Given the ongoing uncertainty as to when live production can get back to full capacity the way there were before the start of the ongoing novel choronavirus pandemic, leaning into animation seems like a smart move. A writers room can be conducted over Zoom or other video conferencing solutions while the voice recording, animation and post-production can be all done via work from home solutions. I would not be surprised if we saw an upswing in animated projects over the next several months.
While I haven’t had a chance to sample Crossed Swords yet, I really enjoyed Solar Opposites. The show’s comedy runs rampant in the same playground of science-fiction tropes that Rick & Morty does but with a much different family dynamic that fuels much of the storytelling. The first season also sports a running secondary plotline that starts off in what just seems like a throwaway joke but builds in an incredibly unforeseen but satisfying way. It’s pretty much the reason I’m anxious to see how Roiland and his partner on the show Mike McMahan further develop this story in the second and freshly commissioned third seasons.
