Christopher “Jackson Publick” McCulloch, co-creator ofThe Venture Bros.on Cartoon Network, has confirmed via Twitter that the show has been cancelled after seven seasons. The word reportedly came down a few months ago, while McCulloch and his partner Eric “Doc” Hammerwere writing scripts for season 8.
The Venture Bros.had been renewed for an eighth season back in October of 2018, following its seventh-season finale. On September 5th, however, atweet from Ken Plume, the author of the making-of art bookGo Team Venture!,suggested the show had been canceled. This got the rumor mills spinning, up until McCulloch confirmed the news on the afternoon of September 7th.
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This may not meanThe Venture Bros. is gone for good,however, as the producers of the Adult Swim programming block on Cartoon Network have tweeted that they are “working with Jackson and Doc to find another way to continue theVenture Bros. story.” This could mean anything,such as a special, a movie, or the eighth season airing on another network. A piece in Variety suggests that ifVenture Bros.does survive, it may move to HBO Max, but nothing is final right now.
At time of writing, no one has disclosed what exactly led toThe Venture Bros’scancellation. It does suffer from having one of the slowest production schedules in television history, with only seven seasons and 81 episodes in 17 years on the air. If there wasn’t at least a two-year gap between each new season,Venture Brothersmight be a multimedia juggernaut by now. As it is, it’s a genuine hit among both audiences and critics, and is one of the tentpole shows that definedAdult Swim’s trademark high weirdness.
The Venture Bros.began as a dark parody of the oldJonny Questcartoons, following an appropriately dysfunctional family of scientific adventurers as they fight against an assortment of spies and supervillains. As the show developed, itbroadened its focus to include superheroesand adventure fiction in general. In 2013, in an interview with the AV Club, Hammer described the comedy ofThe Venture Bros.as that its cast is “so terribly human in a world of comic book inhumanness, and that’s kind of our long joke. These people are stuck in a world that could only exist in an inhuman Saturday morning show, and they’re real.”
Whilethe titular brothers, Hank and Dean, are ostensibly the show’s protagonists, it’s overall an ensemble piece, particularly with a higher focus on the Ventures' archenemy the Monarch. The boys' bodyguard Brock Samson (Patrick Warburton) is easilyVenture Bros’sbreakout character. In addition to showing up in memes and avatar images across the Internet, Brock makes an appearance in Telltale Games’s delisted 2013 crossover gamePoker Night 2. Weirdly, that still seems to be the only licensedVenture Bros.spin-off to date.
