The surest sign that MTV had hit the big time was that it stopped airing music videos. Ditto VH1. The more of a mainstay Food Network became, the more it aired shows that weren’t about cooking. The big money for cable news channels is not in news, but in opinion.
Cartoon Network has hit something of a slump in the ratings lately, so it seems to be taking cable history as a guide. How do you revive a cartoon channel? With shows that aren’t cartoons!
In that spirit, the network has been airing a string of reality shows aimed at kids. And now it’s greenlit two hour-long live-action series: Tower Prep, about a mysterious prep school, and Unnatural History, the adventures of a teen anthropologist.
So where’s a wayward cartoon to go? If it’s for adults, to Comedy Central. The network just announced a deal to rerun all 13 episodes of Mike Judge’s P.C. satire The Goode Family, which aired on ABC over the summer. Variety also reports the network is considering adopting the episodes of Sit Down, Shut Up that Mitch Hurwitz created for Fox before it was canceled.
There’s no deal to make new episodes of Goode, though the show’s studio says it would be ready to put the show back into production if the rerun’s ratings so moved Comedy Central. None of which I’d bet on, though there’s precedent: Family Guy and Futurama both got revived after successful reruns on cable. Specifically, on Adult Swim, the spinoff of… Cartoon Network.