From the viral mania of Too Many Cooks to a show all about talking french fries, Adult Swim has used a mix of madness and genius to become one of the top basic cable channels in the US. Christina Lee spent a day at their Atlanta headquarters to find out how

The old man with a grey beard appears out of nowhere. He slowly climbs the gently sloping hill and boards the white mini-bus that’s taking us on a tour of the Atlanta Movies lot. At this point on the tour we’re supposed to see Candler Mansion, the former estate of Coca-Cola heir Asa Candler Jr, which became a popular filming site for shows like CW’s The Vampire Diaries. But no one seems that interested in the architectural quirks of the former psychiatric hospital – right now everyone is snapping photos of actor William Tokarsky’s grim face, as he reprises his role from Adult Swim’s 70s and 80s sitcom title-sequence parody Too Many Cooks. In his right hand is a large paper bag. In his left hand is a fake machete. It’s a fittingly odd welcome to the world of Adult Swim.

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There are people who are still trying to figure out how Adult Swim consistently ranks among the top 10 basic cable TV channels in America, when its block of programming has traditionally run from 9pm to 4am and its first all-original programming starred a milkshake, a carton of fries and a wad of raw meat. But as it enters primetime for the first time in its 14-year history (Family Guy reruns kick off the programming block at 8pm), what is now clear is that this station, which began as Cartoon Network’s late-night continuation, has TV figured out. There may not appear to be a method to this madness, but it has been there and still works.

In 1994 Cartoon Network launched Space Ghost Coast to Coast, which recast the 1960s cartoon superhero as a bumbling late-night talkshow host. Dave Willis and Matt Maiellaro co-wrote about 50 of its episodes, including the one that introduced Master Shake, Frylock and Meatwad – the eventual cast of the equally low-budget Aqua Teen Hunger Force – to its late-night audience. As they recall, not even Space Ghost’s creator initially got the point behind this squad of food court fare. Mike Lazzo, also Adult Swim’s founder, envisioned a next-generation Scooby Doo, while they wanted an anti-Scooby Doo instead. (The 100th episode even parodied the mystery cartoon.)

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A hell of a day: Claude (Craig Rowin) and Gary (Henry Zebrowski) star as demon co-workers in season two of Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell. Photograph: Adult Swim

“The template the network was used to is just forcing them into a vanilla situation: ‘Oh, you’re a detective. You’re a police officer. You’re a fireman,’” said Maiellaro, during a press conference at Adult Swim’s headquarters before the Atlanta Movies Tour. “So it took a while for them to understand that while these characters are different-looking, they’re really organic in that they’re people that you know.”

Adult Swim’s workplace comedy Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell, created by Willis and Too Many Cooks creator Casper Kelly, has similar appeal. (Its second season premieres on 12 July.) Gary, played by Henry Zebrowski, is a demon who is employed by Satan but isn’t evil enough to properly carry out his work duties. Today’s tour guide is actor Dan Triandiflou as Benji, the demon who stars in the Satan’s office training videos. Like some journalists aboard the mini-bus, he wears a polo, khakis and loafers. He just happens to have two horns glued to his forehead, while his face and arms are spray-painted red.

The tour’s next stop is Silver Scream FX Lab, home to Your Pretty Face’s art director Shane Morton and costume designer Chris Brown. When one of Adult Swim’s reps announces that lunch will be provided, the killer yells “I got my lunch!” as he pulls out a red-faced mannequin head from his paper bag, holding it up by its ratty black hair as he gets off the bus. The props created for Your Pretty Face are only slightly less terrifying. A life-size hellhound puppet stands guard in a large room, where monster limbs hang from the ceiling like pork parts at a butcher shop. Morton wields a single hairy leg of the giant masturbating spider that heads hell’s HR department. The ejaculate is J-Jelly, which is traditionally used to artificially inseminate horses and cattle.

If this sounds like a mix of juvenile and puerile, it’s because it is; the combination works really, really well and is catnip to a certain type of viewer.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The killer emerges. Photograph: Adult Swim

Like Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell has helped Adult Swim lock in the much-desired 18-to-34-year-old viewership. When ATHF launched in 2000 as Adult Swim’s first all-original programming, it represented a marked a shift in the network’s focus from acquisitions such as Family Guy and anime series Cowboy Bebop. Critics weren’t used to seeing what they frequently dismissed as “stoner humor” (“It’s the Beavis and Butt-head of today without the wit or artistic talent,” an animation expert said to Associated Press in 2008). But now that brand of weird, unnerving and outsider humour can be seen everywhere from Broad City to Netflix’s BoJack Horseman and FX’s Archer.

“[O]dd humor, strange humor, the type that not everyone gets, has always been around, and it, too, has its value. Often, it grows best in narrow spaces,” New Yorker TV critic Emily Nussbaum wrote in 2012. She cited a handful of then-recent examples from Adult Swim’s roster, like the Eric Andre Show, which was inspired by Space Ghost Coast to Coast, and The Boondocks, where creator Aaron McGruder matched his anime-inspired drawing style to raw social commentary on black America and BET.

That ability to stay socially switched on by embracing creatives that’d been ignore by the mainstream was perhaps best realised with the police brutality episode of Black Dynamite, which took on Ferguson via the vehicle of an animated Blaxploitation comedy. Hip-hop is also another part of Adult Swim’s output. Odd Future have their own show (Loiter Squad); Kanye West has a proposal for a show pending; and there was T-Pain’s 2010 special Freaknik: The Musical – further proof of how Adult Swim has also allowed polarizing black male voices to thrive in the low-risk environment that is late-night TV. The channel has also got into music with an online singles series continuing that idea of embracing outsiders with music from the likes of Radio One guest DJ Flying Lotus (as his alias Captain Murphy) and Chicago thrash metal trio Oozing Wound.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Loiter Squad hard at work

Adult Swim has also allowed polarizing black male voices to thrive in this low-risk environment that is late-night TV

Adult Swim’s sense of humor, filled with non sequiturs, gross-out gags and blood, may never be considered mainstream, certainly not to those who pay more attention to The Tonight Show than The Eric Andre Show. “Comedy Central is great, but there’s not a whole lot of really absurdist stuff on that channel,” Willis says, citing Broad City and Workaholics as personal faves. (There is that one Broad City scene where a giant, Ugly Doll-resembling plush toy shops with Abbi at Whole Foods, though usually her and Ilana’s stoned misadventures are slightly more grounded.) Still, the network’s unique point of view also seems more relevant than ever before, at a time where YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and Vine creators – people who often rely on oddball humor to make an impression, fast – can actually score advertising deals, if not TV shows themselves.

The tour’s final stop is back at Adult Swim’s headquarters. A 10ft Mike Tyson statue – a reminder of the Mike Tyson Mysteries that imagined the boxer as a Hardy Boys-style crime solver – greets visitors at the doorway past the receptionist’s desk. Twin cardboard cutouts of Aqua Teen Hunger Force’s cow rapper Sir Loin stand on opposite ends of a narrow hallway. Nearby the digital department, a small camcorder hanging from the ceiling films the aquarium in the weekday call-in show FishCenter Live. Every leftover prop or promo product is an excuse to take yet another photo – for the people working quietly in the offices it’s a reminder of how much original output Adult Swim produces.

“I still work here as a freelancer every day, but I was in the company for 19 years,” Willis says by phone the week after the tour. “Every five years, they give you this very uninspiring Lucite square with the year on it. If there is any reason to jump off a bridge … that is a token to remind you of how much of your life has passed you by.”

“We need to have a Lucite episode,” Kelly says.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Too Many Cooks

This year the station has more than 30 series, specials and pilots in the works. The vast majority are just 15 minutes long and riff on TV mainstays such as educational shows for kids (Mr Neighbor’s House), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Neon Joe, Werewolf Hunter) and golf championships (Untitled Golf Special). In this bizarre world, Aqua Teen operates like an alternate-universe sitcom – presenting an utterly absurd situation in an otherwise mundane existence, and while refusing to bother with continuity (most shows fail at this anyway), much less an origin story.

The season premiere of Aqua Teen Hunger Force Forever sees the ever-nerdy Frylock shrinking his tubby, pervy, New York Giants-loving neighbor Carl so that he can enter his backyard beehive and see why it isn’t producing honey. Spoiler: This problem doesn’t get solved. But by now, that all makes more than enough sense.

Aqua Teen Hunger Force Forever starts on 21 June