MacGYVER YOUR ENTHUSIASM (15)

By: Marc Weidenbaum
February 20, 2025

One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating favorite TV shows from the Eighties (1984–1993). Series edited by Josh Glenn.

LIQUID TELEVISION | 1991–95

There’s an old saw about how MTV doesn’t play any music anymore — old as in MTV dropped “music television” from its logo in 2010, so quit griping. More to the point, music doesn’t need MTV, and hasn’t for almost as long, because music videos are ubiquitous (hello, YouTube and social media). We no longer must weather Glenn Frey’s “Sexy Girl” and Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl” while waiting for a network executive, bearing an Excel spreadsheet with the word “demographics” on the Y axis, to deign to share some of the good stuff.

Plus, even back in the day, much of the good stuff wasn’t even music. Take Liquid Television, the network’s classic animation anthology, which ran for four delectable seasons during the early 1990s. The sheer anarchy and variety of Liquid Television was its own special zone of mainstream weird.

In a way, one might argue that the world doesn’t need Liquid Television for the same reason it doesn’t need MTV. Animation today is broadly “adult” — as in Adult Swim, Scavengers Reign (RIP), Castlevania, such modern anthology shows as Love, Death & Robots and Secret Level, and widely accessible Japanese (and derivative) anime, not least of all Studio Ghibli’s — in a manner that wasn’t really the case at the time of Liquid Television.

MTV’s Liquid Television was one of those moments when the truly strange bled from an unlikely crevice in corporate culture. Liquid Television is where Beavis and Butt-Head was born (much as The Simpsons, which debuted two years prior, sprung from another variety series, The Tracey Ullman Show), and where Beavis and Butt-Head creator Mike Judge drew (and voiced) a trial run of what later became the live action Office Space.

Each episode was a cornucopia of the peculiar. One minute you were watching the title character in Æon Flux die again (she did so every episode), the next you were getting a taste of what Pixar would someday become (thanks to an early CGI experiment titled “Beach Chair”), and then some member of the RAW magazine posse would pitch in, like Charles Burns, whose Dogboy comic became a hyper-stylized live/animated hybrid, or Drew Friedman, whose repulsive Uncle Louis traveled through sewer pipes. Some of these bits were recurring (like the Stick Figure Theatre cartoons and the late Richard Sala’s Invisible Hands); others were seen once and then flushed down the memory hole.

What kept all the pieces together was how much the pieces didn’t fit together. The shifts in tone, from violent to bizarre to cornball, were as important to Liquid Television as were the shorts themselves. Kudos go to the show’s creator, Japhet Asher, and his fellow producer Prudence Fenton, whose editorial oversight dependably bent toward the surreal. While there is plenty of adult animation 30-plus years after the fact, there isn’t anything today with a broad viewership that is as chaotic, surprising, varied, and dialed-in. In short, we really don’t need MTV, but we sure could use another dose of Liquid Television.

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MacGYVER YOUR ENTHUSIASM (15)

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