Disclosure: I work for CNN, a subsidiary of the Turner Networks, which owns [adult swim], AKA, the place that just cancelled One Piece… again. Also, I only found out a couple of hours before you guys did, I have no real insight behind the decision, but I’ve been working in television my entire adult career so I speak from some experience.

In case you hadn’t heard the news, One Piece has once again been removed from American television. Toonami announced yesterday that March 18th will be the last night One Piece airs in it’s 2:3o AM timeslot, and it will be replaced by Tokyo Ghoul.

Whatever your thoughts on the latter show, it’s very sad for readers of our site and listeners of our podcast that One Piece will no longer be a part of the mainstream anime block. Especially since that block turns 20 years old the day before. So with this article I thought I’d try to put all of One Piece’s history on American television into perspective, and where the show goes from here.

Let’s start at the beginning, and I mean the very beginning. One Piece first premiered on American TV inside the Fox Box, on September 18th, 2004. 4Kids heavily edited the dub, and made some… interesting choices.

Looking back we can now laugh at the dumb choices made by 4Kids to make the show appealing to a young demographic but to anyone who was reading the manga, which was running uncut in American Shonen Jump at the time, it was truly frustrating. This was legally the only game in town. One Piece never really seemed to find it’s footing on Fox Box aiming at that really young demographic that previous 4Kids productions easily captured. Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokemon were wildly popular anime with that 6-11 age demographic and 4Kids went ahead treated One Piece like any of it’s other anime franchises. That seemed to backfire as it left the Fox Box, and ended up seeking the slightly older 9-14 demographic that watched Toonami.

Toonami premiered the 4Kids episodes on April 23rd, 2005, promoting the series with it’s trademark Peter Cullen narration, and a Pelican City song. At this point, 4Kids’ time with the license was coming to an end, and it’s clear they didn’t really want it. The episodes became a little less edited thanks to the eased restrictions of basic cable versus over the air broadcast, but that didn’t really change anyone’s mind on the show.

Once FUNimation got their hands on the show, you can tell they cared. They recast the dub and simultaneously began dubbing the show from the first episode, as well as continuing on from where Toonami was airing the show. FUNimation’s episodes started airing on Toonami on August 25, 2007, but it seemed too little, too late. Not only did the show not really pick up an audience on TV, but Toonami itself was beginning to near its end. March 28th, 2008, the show met it’s end, on its second network. Toonami itself, only ran for six more months after that on Cartoon Network.

While the series chugged along on Japanese TV, American DVD, and eventually simulcast streaming in 2009, there weren’t really any avenues for it on TV anymore. [adult swim] action was still going, but it was clear to most people that it was basically on auto-pilot at this point. In that time though, One Piece continued on, growing in popularity without a presence on TV.

Cut to April 1st, 2012. [adult swim] plays an innocuous prank on an unsuspecting public by bringing Toonami back, bumps and all, for one night. The response was so uproariously positive, it became permanent a little less than 2 months later, and immediately, One Piece fans thought the show could come back. And they finally got their wish less than a year later when the Toonami staff announced at MoMoCon that the show would be given a third chance.

This time it would be aimed at the more 18-34 adult audience. Of course, a show as big as One Piece presents a lot of challenges. Where does the network start?

At the time of it’s [adult swim] premiere, One Piece was 596 episodes long. The episodes have to be dubbed to air on television, so starting with the most recent Japanese episode was out of the question. You could start from the very start, but that would mean potentially stretched-out SD episodes for three or more years, likely making it look unappealing next to newer shows. You could start with the most recently dubbed episodes, but for those new to the show, they’d likely be completely lost.

Ultimately Toonami decided to start from episode 207, because that’s when the show first went HD and shortly after the Davy Back Arc, there was a couple of filler episodes that happen to flashback to earlier events of the series, giving people an idea of how the crew came together.

Of course all that planning doesn’t work if you don’t promote it. However, Toonami did that and more. They teamed up with FUNimation to make sure the previous 206 episodes were streaming and encouraged viewers to stream it before the premiere. FUNimation even made one of their staffers binge watch all 206 episodes before the premiere, and streamed it online. It was in regular [adult swim] bumps, it had Naruto as a strong lead in, and they even had Steve Blum, the voice of TOM, speak like a pirate to sell the show. The One Piece Podcast even spoke with Toonami co-creator Jason DeMarco when it premiered in 2013.

And it worked! One Piece won it’s timeslot when it premiered, and continued to win it’s timeslot for a while. However, as these things go, eventually the newer shows started to outdo it and it began to slip further down the schedule.

That didn’t mean they stopped promoting One Piece. Along with its usual appearance in the line-up promos, it even got a Enies Lobby promo, and it had an extra run at 8:30 PM on Saturdays, outside the block. Dragon Ball Z Kai was it’s lead in at 8pm, and there’s no better lead in than that (except Family Guy, never underestimate the lead-in power of Family Guy).

As time went on though, the show was clearly losing viewership. Everyone can point to one thing that did it, but it’s never just one thing in the TV business. There’s all sorts of variables that can be summarized somewhat, but really we’ll never know the full scope of where it went wrong.

The basic factors that I believe brought on it’s almost somewhat sudden cancellation announcement yesterday, come down to two things: Ratings and money.

I think everyone understands the basic concept of ratings. Ratings are high if people are watching, ratings are low if people aren’t. There’s more to it than that, but that is as basic an explanation that is out there. The other thing people might not be so familiar with is the money factor. With shows that [adult swim] acquires (meaning shows they didn’t create or produce, like Bob’s Burgers or Dragon Ball, versus shows they did create or produce, like Rick And Morty or Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex) means that they have to pay to air the episode every time it’s on. One Piece is one of Toei Animation’s crown jewels, and FUNimation does really well with the show, not to mention its ridiculous episode count (at the moment, 779 and still going strong). That can’t be cheap for a network to spend on a show that isn’t performing as well as they hoped it would. Especially when they could possibly get a show for less money that could potentially pull in more viewers. With the exceptions of Samurai Jack and Ghost In The Shell, every show on the block is an acquisition. If one’s not pulling it’s weight, it’s probably better to find another show.

There are outside factors as well, but the one I would place as the biggest factor is that most people are ahead. I’m going to bet that most people who read this website or listen to our podcast don’t watch One Piece on Toonami regularly. Most people on this site are probably caught up with FUNimation’s dub, are caught up with the simulcast subtitled streams, or are reading the manga as it comes out in English Weekly Shonen Jump. The fandom of One Piece, at least in my eyes, is way ahead of Toonami. Heck, I’m way ahead of Toonami, and I stopped reading the manga last year (because I got busy at work, I’ll come back to it!).

It’s really easy to armchair quarterback the TV business, but to be honest, [adult swim] had the patience of saints with One Piece and gave it every opportunity in the world. No other network would have been as kind to it, allowing it to just sink in the ratings and not cancelling it way sooner. We got nearly four years of weekly One Piece on American television, only interrupted for movies and marathons.

Even One Piece got its own marathon. [adult swim] diligently put up their episodes on their website and on cable on-demand services, making the show as widely available as they possibly could and it just couldn’t sustain that momentum we saw back when it premiered.

Despite all of that, despite the show not being able to finish it’s run on American TV, they still felt the need to give it a proper send off. What other network would do that?

No other network would do that for One Piece, so why did Williams Street?

They’re fans.

No, really, they are fans of One Piece. A couple of the employees have models and figures from the show. They may not be the most knowledgeable about it, like the readership of this website, but that doesn’t mean they don’t love and cherish the world that Oda created. They are as heartbroken as you are, possibly even more so because they wanted this show to work on TV more than anyone else. The entire TV industry is going through a lot of big changes right now (which is a whole other topic) and they have to stay really competitive. Just being a fan isn’t enough to will something into a success.

So where does that leave One Piece? Where does the show go from here? Well… it just keeps going. FUNimation is gonna keep dubbing the show, English Weekly Shonen Jump is going to continue being released, and its simulcast has never been quicker. Of course you should absolutely continue supporting the official release, whether that’s streaming it on Crunchyroll’s or FUNimation’s sites, buy the VIZ Manga volumes, going to see it in theaters when you can, everything. I will say that, at least anecdotally, One Piece‘s popularity has grown in the last couple of years. Every yearly con I go to, I always see an increase in One Piece cosplay and merchandise. The franchise is not going anywhere. It’s still the top selling manga of all time (a feat that happened to be accomplished when the show re-emerged on Toonami). Sure, probably a lot of people discovered it on TV, but there was a long time there where it wasn’t on TV and the fandom still grew.

It’s sad to see One Piece leave American television for a third time, and while there’s always the possibility it could come back, it seems to have run it’s course on this platform. We shouldn’t ignore the success it’s had on other platforms though and continue to support it. If you want to attempt to change [adult swim]’s mind (slim to none chance of that happening, but if you want to TRY), tune in these next 2 weeks and watch as much as you can on-demand and on their website.

At the very least, we can give it the send off it deserves.

Watch One Piece, Saturday, March 11th (12th) at 2:30am EST and Saturday, March 18th (19th) at 2:30am EST.

TO BE CONTINUED…



If you’d like to follow me on Twitter, @Jose_CNN is my username. I tweet a lot about news and Ghost In The Shell these days, but I’ll definitely be tweeting about One Piece at 2:30am, for as long as it’s on. Join me, won’t you?