Splitsider reports Adult Swim has canceled Million Dollar Extreme Presents: World Peace, a sketch show with purported ties to the alt-right. Adult Swim confirmed the cancellation with Splitsider, but hasn’t issued a press release with any more information about the matter. This news comes less than a month after a BuzzFeed article indicated the show and one of its creators, Sam Hyde, were generating content that “winks at Hyde’s alt-right fans.” BuzzFeed cites an introductory crawl for the show that reads in part “World Peace will unlock your closeted bigoted imagination, toss your inherent racism into the burning trash, and cleanse your intolerant spirit with pure unapologetic American funny_com,” and ends with something about the CIA and Mossad.
BuzzFeed also reported that, according to multiple anonymous sources at the network, many of Adult Swim’s other creators were opposed to Million Dollar Extreme from the beginning. Hyde swears he’s just making edgy comedy, but he’s also sharing videos about a Hillary Clinton-related, pizza-adjacent conspiracy, so it’s a truly peculiar strain if that’s the case. Adult Swim execs remained mostly mum about the series even after Brett Gelman cited it as one of the reasons he was leaving the network. Someone claiming to be Kim Manning, the senior director of programming, posted online that most of their shows leaned left, so Million Dollar Extreme had been the subject of “HOT, HOT debate” at the network.
What can I say? MDE is a source of HOT, HOT debate around the office. To be fair, I don’t know of a single alt-right sympathizer at Williams St, most of us at least lean more extreme left. (I gleefully wore a pantsuit all day on Tuesday, champagne ready, and am still crying, wearing my safety pin, googling what to do next.)
So… you can imagine how I feel about the issue but… I just will say it’s a source of HOT, HOT debate at Williams St, and it has been for a long time.
Look, we made the Gelman specials, and we made Tim and Eric, and we made The Boondocks – when we’ve let our programming have a political point of view, it’s always leaned more to the left. This was about letting a different point of view, a voice that was upending things in a crazy, new, way, have a shot. That TED talk was funny. If you watch the show we produced, it’s not an alt-right speak piece. I realize that social media is a totally different story. We argue about it a lot around the office. That’s all I can really say.