The Canceled Adult Swim Comedy That Was Too Dark For The Network

For the past 20 years, Adult Swim has been the premier outlet for the most messed-up, downright depraved TV shows and cartoons you can find anywhere (legally). From the multi-dimensional "Rick & Morty" to the radical "The Boondocks," Adult Swim has produced numerous zeitgeist-defining shows that warped the minds of impressionable kids and stoners worldwide.

Across all its shows, from its best to even its worst, Adult Swim has pushed the boundaries of what you can get away with on cable TV. You never know WTF you're going to see on Adult Swim, which makes watching the channel actually feel dangerous, especially in an era where so much TV plays it safe.

One major factor in their ability to accomplish this is the enormous freedom they give their creators, which they can't find on any other platform. The team behind "Rick & Morty" says they have hardly any guardrails around the show, which allows them to innovate on what the show is capable of deep into its run.

But is it possible to push too far? One show did, producing an episode that was so dark that its creator says Adult Swim canceled them "out of spite." The show in question? "Moral Orel."

Created by Dino Stamatopoulos, "Moral Orel" was a stop motion series about young Orel Puppington, a God loving child coming of age in the perfect Middle America suburb of Moralton. While on the surface, Moralton is as wholesome as a Norman Rockwell painting, where every family lives in a house with a white picket fence, under the surface is a darkness that touches every resident of Moralton.

"Morel Orel" used the audience's preconceptions about a wholesome animated cartoon and flipped it on its head by touching every taboo under the sun, with each season becoming progressively darker and darker. In a retrospective on the series published in Vice, Stamatopoulos explained how Adult Swim creative director Mike Lazzo wanted the series to be "the funniest show possible," but he intended to create an anti-"Simpsons" in which a cartoony family became "darker and more interesting" as time went on.

Lazzo, according to Stamatopolous, "still swears that season one ... is the best one," but Stamatpolous disagrees, and he used the subsequent two seasons to get even darker, much to Lazzo's chagrin:

"I don't think Lazzo wanted to get that serious all the time. In some ways, I sabotaged [the show]."

Lazzo's favorite character was young, wholesome Orel, who, despite undergoing severe hardships, maintains his faith in God and family will set the world right. That is, until season 3, when Orel has a near-death experience and is disillusioned to discover there is no God waiting for him in the afterlife. This crisis of faith changes Orel, who Stamatopolous says was Lazzo's favorite character, and he now realizes was a major part in what got the show canceled:

"Lazzo realized I had killed his favorite character, Orel, as an innocent. He's right ... I f**** up [Orel] ... I think Lazzo felt personally affronted by what I did to Orel and cancelled it a little bit out of spite."

This was the first strike against "Moral Orel," but it wouldn't be the last.

As "Moral Orel" expanded its scope beyond young Orel to the entire town of Moralton, Stamatopolous wrote what was the darkest episode (yet) of the series. Called "Numb", the episode follows Orel's mom as she mutilates herself in order to feel something from her miserable life. When Lazzo complained that "There's only one joke in this script," Stamatopolous had a hilarious, if unprofessional, response:

"I wrote him back, tongue-in-cheek, and said 'Well, tell me where the joke is and I'll take it out.' He said, 'Well, I hope they get funnier.'"

Not content with how deep a hole he'd dug himself, Stamatopolous delivered a rough cut of the episode "Alone," which follows three women who the audience has only seen as bit characters before, revealing disturbing and horrific backstories for them. And then he immediately followed that up with a script for an episode titled "Raped."

Stamatopolous admits other episodes do get funnier, but the "one-two-three punch" of these decisions pushed Lazzo to say "That's it; I gotta pull the plug," and the show's third season was cut from 20 episodes down to 13.

The series did come back for a special titled "Beforel Orel," but Stamatopolous says he's not interested in making the "hilarious" show that Adult Swim wants:

"To me, the seriousness has humor in it."

It might have been too much for Adult Swim, but time has proven Stamatopolous right. "BoJack Horseman" became a critical darling by playing the same trick as "Moral Orel," setting up the trappings of a silly animated cartoon before turning its characters into real people against their will. It might have been too much for Adult Swim in 2008, but the times have caught up to young Orel.