Television Relics: Mission Hill Feb 03, 2012

The Simpsons may be the perfect sitcom, but that doesn’t mean you can’t outgrow it.

At its best, The Simpsons pushes the limits of both animation and comedy on a weekly basis. At its worst, The Simpsons exists in a vacuum, where characters never grow older, or even wiser, despite the show’s record-breaking run. Of course, being a television show, The Simpsons is afforded the opportunity to not adhere strictly to rules of the real world. However, sometimes fans want more. Sometimes fans wanted to see the same smart dialogue and unique characters of The Simpsons through a mature len or different setting. For those fans, Mission Hill was a miracle. That was, until it was canceled in 2000.

Mission Hill first aired on the WB network in 1999, but went on a yearlong hiatus after the first two episodes due to poor ratings. The show returned in 2000, only airing for four more episodes, before being officially canceled. Mission Hill had a cult following through late-night airings on TBS and Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim block in the coming years, and solidified its place in cult TV history upon its DVD release in 2005.

Like most brilliant shows that were unjustly cancelled, Mission Hill was plagued by the typical TV network missteps: awkward advertising and little recognition from popular press outlets. Combined with the fact that Mission Hill was placed on Friday nights at 8pm, when most people are actively trying not to stay home and watch TV, the show had a difficult time locating a core audience.

Of all the cancelled animated shows of the past decade, what makes this one in particular worth noting? Most importantly, Mission Hill came from rich blood. Former executive producers for The Simpsons, Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein, created Mission Hill, alongside artistic designer Lauran MacMullan the former animation director for The Simpsons, The Critic and King of the Hill. Likewise, Mission Hill featured the vocal delights of Tom Kenny (SpongeBob SquarePants), Brian Posehn, and Jane Wiedlin (of The Go-Go’s) to name a few. Beyond the brilliant creative team standing behind the show, Mission Hill’s content appealed to the 18-35 demographic by presenting characters whose identities were torn between post-college dreams and the harsh realities of the working world.

In Mission Hill, 24-year-old waterbed salesman and college graduate Andy French (Wallace Langham) was forced to allow his genius 17-year-old brother Kevin (Scott Menville) to move into his downtown bachelor pad after their parents suddenly moved to Wyoming. Andy’s roommate, Jim (Brian Posehn), portrayed the main character’s high school pal who now works at an advertising agency where he attempts to capitalize on marketing to the very 90s youth that he identified with. We round out Andy’s loft with his last housemate, Posey, a neo-hippie stuck in the corporatism of 1990s America, and his beloved golden retriever Stogie.

The supporting characters in Mission Hill are numerous, but deserve brief recognition. Despite receiving very little attention from viewers during its time, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) took notice and awarded the program high praise for their honest portrayal of an adult gay couple. Andy’s neighbors, Gus (Nick Jameson) and Wally (Tom Kenny), are homosexuals. And that’s it. They’re not stereotypes, they’re not overtly flamboyant, they’re not walking impersonations of a ten-year-old mimicking a gay person; they’re just treated like an average adult couple who love each other. While this certainly seems like a no-brainer of a storytelling decision, it is still a landmark move considering that too many gay characters on television remain parodies of what straight people assume homosexuals live like. Instead, Mission Hill presented viewers with Gus and Wally’s character trait in a flat manner, with little need to obsess over their sexual preferences. Mission Hill was smart enough to redirect a fan’s attention away from the trivial and towards the crucial.

Unlike The Simpsons, in which problems are often created and resolved in a neat 30 minute time slot, Mission Hill presented flawed scenarios that characters could not escape.

The plot itself couldn’t be seem any more basic: older brother is forced to hang with his nerdy little sibling; hilarity is bound to ensue, right? Wrong. Remember, these are the same people who worked on The Simpsons and Futurama. Mission Hill chronicled a moment in everybody’s life that is often overlooked due to its sheer irrelevance: the awkward period between graduation and beginning a career. Most people just figure, “What was so impressive about my stint at an electronics store before landing my first real job?” Mission Hill successfully focused on Andy’s attempt to reconcile his two conflicting identities: one of an ambivalent 24-year-old and one of a young adult forced to become a parent. Mission Hill uniquely presents another set of forces in opposition: the care-free, slacker types of Generation X colliding with goal-driven members of Generation Y. Andy accurately represented the Generation X sensibility, while Kevin, the “too-smart-for-his-own-good” brother, remained the embodiment of Generation Y. It was difficult not to empathize with Andy or even Kevin, depending on your age at the time.

Creator Bill Oakley, in 1999, told the Washington Post that he created Mission Hill for young adults, complete with mature issues facing 20-somethings that might seem too grounded in reality for The Simpsons. Unlike The Simpsons, in which problems are often created and resolved in a neat 30 minute time slot, Mission Hill presented flawed scenarios that characters could not escape. Kevin always hated school, frequently dealt with bullies, and was rarely able to “fit in.” Andy spent most of the show struggling with whether or not to pursue his dream of being an artist, while selling his soul to the sales industry and performing a job he hates. There were legitimate obstacles standing in the way of Andy and Kevin reaching their goals (being an artist and going to Yale, respectively), which is hardly something that we normally see across episodes in other animated series.

Who among us hasn’t faced a similar quandary when we’ve had to go through a day-job in order to keep the possibility of fulfilling our dream alive? Mission Hill was innovative in the sense that the show’s creators wanted to present main characters who grow and progress in real-time, unlike The Simpsons where Bart and Lisa are forever in elementary school. Given the opportunity to have more than one season, audiences would have seen Andy eventually become a successful artist, and we would have been able to see Kevin go off to college.

In one episode, Andy finds himself out of a job when the waterbed store closes, and considers abandoning his dream of being a cartoonist by working at his roommate’s advertising agency. In this episode, Andy tries to negotiate the slacker sensibility of Generation X with the rise of the young middle class of Generation Y folks.

Mission Hill also didn’t shy away from mature content, best seen in an episode where Kevin masturbates to a pornographic magazine, accidentally sets a market on fire, and then must weigh the option of allowing his bullies to take the blame or admit his own guilt. Human sexuality is rarely, if ever, explored in such intimate details in animated series. However, Mission Hill approached the subject grounded through a moral dilemma, which made it seem less like smut and more so just an earnest problem.

Another fact that that sets Mission Hill apart from all other major animated programs of its time were the unique aesthetics. The design and layout of Mission Hill is truly something you rarely see on network TV. Buildings in Mission Hill creep through the background as thick outlines, with blotches of color across the screen like a watercolor painting. At the same time, the foreground featured brighter, warmer colors across the landscape, contrasting the dark city lurking behind the characters. Lines are drawn jagged and then smooth at times, shifting between focused and unfocused, that provide the show with a transitions between chaos and order. Beyond simply looking stunning, Mission Hill was able to use its distinct animation to prescribe attributes to each of its characters. The character of Andy is drawn slouched in order to personify his apathetic demeanor, while Kevin, the precocious young genius, is always drawn upright and stiff.

Mission Hill was destined to fail from the get-go. Most previews for upcoming shows that year neglected to even mention Mission Hill. Likewise, a similarly named show on MTV forced creators to change the name from the originally planned title of Downtowners, which perhaps only further confused a potential fan base. Along with the Friday at 8pm slot (a night that the network had never produced shows on), Mission Hill aired before The Steve Harvey Show and the Jamie Foxx Show, which the creators felt were incompatible. Weinstein even told the Washington Post that it was like America didn’t know the show existed.

Why did Mission Hill fail? Was the dialogue awful? Nope. Were the storylines bad? Never. Was there no potential for growth? Hardly. Every show made you more and more curious just if there was hope for Andy or his roommates. Would Generation X prevail or would Kevin, the personification of Generation Y and the dot-com boom, set to overtake the world by force?

In the end, it isn’t truly fair to compare Mission Hill as being a superb program based solely on the fact that it was created by people behind The Simpsons. Instead, it’s easier to view the program as a separate entity, detached from all other animated programs that both the creators and actors worked on before or after.

Mission Hill is a lost relic in animated TV history, which despite showing the struggle between two generations of 1990s and early 2000s young adults, remains surprisingly relevant even with today’s demographic.

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