Last night, Adult Swim uploaded a video from Michael Cusack and Zach Hadel, the creators of the smash-hit animated comedy series Smiling Friends, titled “Important Announcement.” Rather than focus on the status of its previously announced fourth and fifth seasons, the video took a turn that many longtime YouTube channel viewers dread, with the added emphasis that this isn’t a bit; the show is ending.
In the video, Hadel and Cusack revealed that the show’s sudden cancellation, despite being renewed for two more seasons, wasn’t because it had been ended from on high but because the duo felt burned out after working on the show for the past five years. Rather than continuing to work on the show and seeing its quality drop—a fear the duo had previously voiced in an IndieWire interview—they instead decided it’d be best to leave on top with the three seasons they’ve already made rather than force themselves to be funny while making more episodes that don’t have the same spark.
“After we finished season three, Zach and I both had the same feeling where we feel pretty burnt out after putting years and years into this but also pretty accomplished, like we just came to this feeling we’re all like, ‘I think that could just be it after season three,’” Cusack explained.
“From the very, very beginning of the show, we always said, ‘Oh, man, how great would it be to try to make the show as good as it could be, put 110 percent into it, and then go out what feels like on top, what feels like [leaving] them wanting more,’ rather than people going, ‘Oh, that show is still on the air,’” Hadel said.
“After several years of really, really grinding on this show, non-stop, without any breaks, 24/7, we got to a point where we just felt like that’s a good spot to end it. We wouldn’t want to be doing more seasons [that feel] half-hearted [or] burnt-out. That’s not fair to us. It’s not fair to the audience to give you guys fucking slop.”
Regarding their decision to conclude the show with season three, which finished airing last November, the pair said Adult Swim was very supportive, offering them the opportunity to return if they ever want to. While they stopped short of getting fans’ hopes up that they might eventually do so, they did give fans something to look forward to in the form of two “straggler” episodes that’ll release on April 2. While not serving as a big series finale, the episodes will leave the door open should they decide to spin the block on the show.
They closed out their video, imploring other shows to hire their crew and telling fans that the pair still plan on being collaborators in whatever way that’ll manifest in the future.
“It’s been a ride of a lifetime,” Cusack said. “The show got way bigger than either of us ever imagined: all the fan art, all the costumes, people sharing memes, all of it.”
Smiling Friends first aired back in 2021. The series follows Charlie and Pim, two office workers (voiced by Hadel and Cusack) who go around helping people smile. How they do so is manifested in fantastic bits of animation crammed into 11-minute episodes that blend rotoscoping, 3D animation, and puppeteering to bring a colorful cast of characters to life, all through realistic, off-the-cuff lines of dialogue. What’s more, the show also accomplished this feat while collaborating with YouTube creators like Red Letter Media, Joel Haver, and Channel Awesome, just to name a few.
As the Wrap notes, the show quickly shot up the ranks of Adult Swim’s animation block, becoming one of the network’s most popular shows alongside Rick and Morty. With its video game referential humor and oddball ensemble of characters, Smiling Friends got so huge that swaths of fans would take to social media to recreate scenes in cosplay and full-body costumes and even laud it to the same degree as The Simpsons for predicting how dumb our reality would become.
Smiling Friends, what does it mean? Smiling Friends, you were my everything! World’s fucked up, man. Smiling Friends, am I losing my GODDAMN mind? If it’s gone, where will I find… it? 🫳🎤 pic.twitter.com/E13XLyixLG
— The Green Kasey 🎃 (@RawbertBeef) February 26, 2026
For the most part, the fandom is taking the announcement in stride, with referential posts on social media that are pretty much laughing to keep everyone from crying over the show that, in the span of five years, has quickly become the vocal stim and referential treasure trove for fans, cracking them up the moment they reminisce about them. Speaking purely anecdotally, I’m gutted. As someone who’s a bit hard to please with comedy series, much less with animation, I watch for my leisure without the need to turn it into a blog post. Smiling Friends quickly became my comfort show. So much so that whenever I wasn’t insisting that friends turn on the Brazil episode so my brain could go “yippee, dopamine!” we’d all quote the show and do voice impersonations of its cast to get a quick laugh out of each other.
A lot of my love for the show, aside from its cool animation and realistic dialogue, came from how steeped it felt in the old-world internet—the pre-YouTube era, before it became more of a shit corporation, when animators from Newgrounds, which the show frequently collaborated with, would make animated shorts parodying video games and anime just to make people laugh. In the same way a club classic would embody the vibe of 2016, Smiling Friends became a time capsule in which hypothetical jokes and non-sequiturs spouted in the middle of a Let’s Play video would be brought to life with all the imagination and snappy humor a viewer could hope for. And I’m gonna say what no one else is willing to say: Smiling Friends became as big with millennials and Gen Z as SpongeBob SquarePants. Ooh. Ooh. Ooh.
Suffice it to say, it’s going to be sad to see the show not continue forever as other animated sitcoms have, but it’s good to know that its creators are only doing so because they want to go out on top rather than force themselves to be funny and have the bloom come off its rose. Until those straggler episodes premiere on Adult Swim and HBO Max, I’ll be rewatching “Shrim’s Odyssey,” “Allan Adventures,” and “Shmaloogles” until my therapist insists upon different coping mechanisms.
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