TV

Couch Avocados: TV Discussion Thread – August 27, 2026

Welcome to the weekly TV thread. What a shitty week.

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is tenor saxophonist Kamasi Washington’s “Vortex,” the Emmy-nominated OP theme from Lazarus, an anime series about a team of spies and hackers from different countries who are assigned to save billions of consumers of a popular painkiller from dying from the drug. Lazarus is one of several anime series Adult Swim co-produced.

Kamasi Washington, “Vortex” (from Lazarus) (1:44)

Adult Swim will celebrate its 25th anniversary on September 2 by recreating the schedule—which included an all-new Space Ghost Coast to Coast episode with special guests Björk and Thom Yorke—from its first night. September 2, 2001 was a Sunday, and all the network shows that night were in repeats. It was an unremarkable night for network TV.

Meanwhile, over on basic cable, Cartoon Network’s launch of its Adult Swim block for older viewers was a quiet one (compared to, for example, each of Adult Swim’s splashy premieres of Adam Scott’s The Greatest Event in Television History specials later on in the early 2010s). But for those of us whose tastes in TV lean more towards shows like Lazarus, The Venture Bros., The Boondocks, Childrens Hospital, and the upcoming The Terrors of Jordan Mendoza from Filipino American comedian Jordan Mendoza, a former Mike Judge’s Beavis and Butt-Head writer, that night matters to us.

The first sketch Adult Swim posted from The Terrors of Jordan Mendoza (3:09)

Adult Swim’s first new live-action series in six years, The Terrors of Jordan Mendoza will also be the first Asian American sketch comedy series on TV since the short-lived Asia Street Comedy. That series aired on the International Channel in 2004, and, as a Filipino American viewer, I find that detail to be depressing. But I’m glad that Adult Swim gave a funny and inventive Pinoy sketch comic his own show.

I dumped linear TV a few years ago. One thing I miss about linear TV is Adult Swim and its mix of anime, American adult animated sitcoms, 11-minute single-camera comedies, and clever interstitials. I liked those white-text-on-a-black-card interstitials so much that I paid tribute to their aesthetic in a trailer I made in 2020 for my self-published book.

A trailer I produced for 2020’s If You Haven’t Seen It, It’s New to You, my first and most likely only self-published book (1:49)

Though Lazarus isn’t one of Shinichiro Watanabe’s best creations—it’s no Cowboy Bebop or Samurai Champloo—its unique “Chad Stahelski-choreographed fight scenes soundtracked by Kamasi Washington’s band” vibe made me miss Adult Swim and its odd corner of the basic cable landscape when I watched Lazarus’s only season on a pirate site.

Bonus track: Had Washington’s Lazarus theme won the Emmy for Outstanding Original Main Title Theme Music, Lazarus would have become an Emmy-winning Adult Swim show like Rick and Morty and Primal. Here again is Washington’s terrific “Vortex,” this time in its full six-minute version. The best part of this full version is when it goes into Jimi Hendrix mode.

Kamasi Washington, “Vortex” (from Lazarus) (album version) (6:23)

Today’s prompt: Early ’00s Adult Swim star Space Ghost has the following powers: flight, superhuman strength, teleportation, invisibility via his Inviso-Belt, energy blasts via his power bands, and the uncanny ability to make the most articulate and coherent celebrities sound like they lost their brain cells while he interviews them.

You can have only one of Space Ghost’s powers. Which one of them do you choose?

I choose invisibility because I could commit thefts of paintings and the master copy of Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah’s unjustly shelved Batgirl movie without getting caught.