Adult Swim Fans Confront How ‘Moral Orel’ Got Canceled For Making The Network Feel Bad About Abuse Jokes

Back in the mid-aughts, turning sexual abuse into a punchline was completely fair game for TV comedy, but showing the effects of sexual trauma with shocking frankness was a fireable offense.

Nowadays, even as the zeitgeist slides toward the political right who bristle at the suggestion of self-censorship, TV-watchers will rarely see the topic of sexual assault brought up in a comedy series in a flippant manner. However, back when George W. Bush was in office and Adult Swim was still establishing itself as the mecca for fucked-up humor, TV writers played it pretty fast-and-loose when it came to rape jokes — hell, there’s even one in an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants. 

For a time, the irreverent black comedy Moral Orel was one such series, as it characteristically made light of the darkest topics in American culture, but in the Season Three episode “Alone,” the show took a sharp left turn and instead confronted Adult Swim viewers with the devastating effects that sexual abuse can have on a young girl’s psyche. In the episode, Nurse Bendy, who was previously portrayed as a ditzy sex object, age regresses to a state of childlike innocence in response to previous off-screen sexual abuse at the hands of Dr. Secondopinionson when she was underaged. According to Moral Orel creator Dino Stamopolous, “Alone” was the "final nail in the coffin" for the show, as Adult Swim apparently said it was “getting too depressing.”

This week, the scene that got Moral Orel canned with seven unproduced episode’s left in the run resurfaced as Twitter users wondered why the hell Adult Swim thought that sexual assault was only an acceptable topic for comedy when it didn’t make us think about the victims. Content warning ahead for anyone who is upset by the sexual abuse of children — which should be everyone:

Seriously, we’re talking about a network that greenlit a Robot Chicken sketch called “Rape Ghost,” in which the joke is just that there’s a ghost that rapes people. Adult Swim has never shied away from platforming the most juvenile and obvious jokes about deeply disturbing topics, and neither have their most popular shows. For instance, Family Guy, which Adult Swim famously saved from irrelevance by acquiring the reruns in the early aughts, once escalated its cartoon war with The Simpsons by straight up having Quagmire rape Marge and murder the rest of the Simpson family.

Adult animated comedies have been using the shock value of sexual assault to make unoriginal, lazy and tasteless jokes for decades, but only one was willing to make its audience relate to the pain of sexual abuse victims. And, for that crime, Adult Swim canned Moral Orel with more prejudice than when they canceled Metalocalypse and live-streamed themselves shredding all the fans' complaints.