During the “Making of” Smiling Friends panel at Annecy Festival today — featuring series co-creators Michael Cusack and Zach Hadel, alongside Adult Swim’s Vice President of Development Cameron Tang — it was revealed that Adult Swim has greenlit the hit comedy for two additional seasons.
After sharing an exclusive first look at Season 3 of Smiling Friends, set to debut this fall, it was also confirmed that the fourth and fifth seasons of the series are currently in production at Williams Street. The series was also selected for official competition at this year’s Annecy International Animation Film Festival.
Co-created and starring Cusack and Hadel, Smiling Friends follows the employees of a small company dedicated to bringing happiness to a bizarre yet colorful world. The series, which has been a Gen Z favorite, first premiered on April 1, 2020, during the early days of the COVID pandemic.
Cusack told The Hollywood Reporter, “[The pickup] means you don’t have to make the same episode that the engine of the show relies on, which is the smiling friends go out and help a depressed character. Just like the shows we love and grew up with, the best part is now we can make a whole episode about a secondary character and zoom in on them more and explore the town… Of course, Mr. Frog is always someone it’s fun to go back to. His spirit really is the spirit of the insanity of the show. Secondary characters can be tough because you don’t want to bring back people that they have already helped because we feel like that might be running out of ideas, in a sense. But there are some repeat characters that can come back, like DJ Spit.”
Cusack confirmed that the third season will also include a Christmas episode that will focus on a character that needs more attention. “As always, it’s fun to play with new formats, new mediums of animation, so we’ve done that a few times,” he added. “The first episode [of season three] has a fun character that plays with the medium a lot. That’s got a guest voice of someone we really like, too.”
The show creators also noted that the show “won’t go on and on.” Cusack explained, “We want it to be like a nice little box set, and we’ve talked about potential seasons that we’d want to stop at, for sure, and it depends on the day. Sometimes we’ll wake up and be like, ‘You know what? Three seasons could be enough.’ But then the next day, we’re like, ‘No, actually, another number sounds better.’ So we always go back and forth, but we are pretty staunch on it not going on forever.”
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