Toon In: Animated TV Highlights for October, from Smiling Friends to Hazbin Hotel

Welcome to the ink, paint, and pixel corner of Paste TV, where we’re highlighting some of the best premium animation projects on streaming or direct-to-video aimed at teens and adults. This monthly column not only provides an overview of the new animated series to check out, but we’ve also collected some of the finest creators and voice talents in the medium to give updates, or introductions, to their series.

The Sisters Grimm (October 3)

In the late 80s, Michael Buckley graduated from Ohio University and then moved to New York City to make television shows. He got work in his field but wanted to make his own idea, and started developing an animated series about two sisters with powers rooted in fairy tales. He pitched it around with no success and then was encouraged to turn it into a book. Two weeks after he started shopping it around, Buckley had a book deal for The Sisters Grimm, which was a huge hit and has since become a series of nine titles about the adventures of Sabrina and Daphne Grimm of Ferryport Landing. 

It took a decade but now The Sisters Grimm is finally coming to life in the medium it was originally intended, as an animated series for Apple TV+. Buckley is an executive producer with Amy Higgins (Wander Over Yonder) showrunning and Titmouse animating the series. 

Buckley tells Paste that he immediately bonded with Higgins because she understood his world of orphaned sisters who relocate to a town full of fairy tale creatures with powers they can tame. “I would say that Amy knows these books maybe better than I do at this point,” he says with admiration. “She had the right sensibility, the right humor, and she had the right take. When I had to inevitably hand it over, kicking and screaming, I did feel like Amy understood it in a way that no one had in the almost 20 years since [the book] first came out.”

Higgins says she first listened to the book series with her own son about five years ago and they tore through them. “He really liked them, and he has excellent taste, and that kind of sold me,” she says of her decision to bring the books to life. 

She was also taken with the complexity of the sisters, especially Sabrina who is initially very prickly about everything she has lost and in adapting to this new town. “She can be very unlikable. She has a challenging personality, in ways, but the reason is because she’s so hurt and bereft,” Higgins explains. “Her parents have disappeared. She’s basically alone at age 10, and just that is such a huge circumstance in this book. Then she finds herself in this fantastical world! Most kids would be like, “Jackpot!” but she’s still got this little sister. Apple TV+  just championed letting us do what we wanted to do,” she says of the creative freedom they were given to make Buckley’s world come to life. 

Smiling Friends Season 3 (October 5)

The global love for Zach Hadel and Michael Cusack’s Smiling Friends series on Adult Swim has only grown since it premiered in the spring of 2020. Funny, bizarre, surreal and always surprising, the series follows the adventures of the Smiling Friends charity employees, Pim, Allan, Charlie and Glep. 

Already picked up through Season 5, Cusack tells Paste that they don’t have an overall master plan and looked at Season 3 as just more fun in their sandbox. “Often we get the question, what’s different this season, or what’s the aim this season? It’spretty much the same goal of trying to figure out how to do new Smiling Friends episodes that are interesting because they are like little, contained, 11-minute movies. It’s just a continuation of that and whatever gets us interested.”

Hadel says he even thinks Season 3 could, if it needed to, function as a final season. “Obviously, we’re going to do more, but we tried to treat it as filling out the spots that Season 1 and 2 might have missed, and tried to make it feel more balanced overall, hitting, hopefully, something like a stride.”

If anything, Cusack agrees that they build out each season like an album, figuring out how all eight-episodes work best and in what order. “We very much think about, like, what’s the first episode that we’re going to bring people back in on a season? Oftentimes, it isn’t something like a special episode, or a formula breaking one. It’s often helping someone smile, but hopefully in a different, interesting way with an interesting character,” he explains. “And we definitely think of midseason stuff and the finale. It’s all planned out in a way that we’ll look at all the episodes that we’ve got on our whiteboard that we want to do, and we’ll just pick and choose what would work in Season 3?”

The season opener does introduce a new character named Silly Samuel who is more than a little stressed out by the world around him. And then the second episode is a surreal, deep dive on the controversial character, Mr. Frog. 

“Mr. Frog feels special to us,” Hadel says of the character who predates Charlie and Pim. “I’d say he’s probably the closest thing we have to a fifth Smiling Friend. We don’t have big character arcs really, but he’s kind of the only element that’s constantly evolving in the background.” 

Cusack agrees and adds, “We always say this series is episodic so we can do whatever we want. But Mr. Frog is that excuse to do serialized stuff because he is such a stupid character, and the contrast between him having story elements is fun.”

“Le Voyage Incroyable de Monsieur Grenouille” goes to some crazy places, even for Smiling Friends, and Hadel says it was just going to be a third installment in Mr. Frog’s story which felt too small. “I think we realized, ‘Oh, this might just be the same thing a third time, unless we do something interesting with it.’ So I think it came from that, realizing you’ve got to do something here so people don’t get bored with this character.”

Both agree this is their favorite season to date, and they’re making it harder on themselves by pushing their ambition. Cusack laughs, “We’ve kind of screwed ourselves a little bit because now we’re always trying to outdo ourselves a bit. I love our new characters. I feel like they’re all surprising and weird. But you know, this could be the worst one. Who knows?”

Solar Opposites Season 6 (October 13)

As much as human Solar Opposites fans would have liked the Earth-based adventures of aliens Korvo (Dan Stevens), Terry (Thomas Middleditch), Jesse (Mary Mack), Yumyulack (Sean Giambrone) and The Pupa to last forever, it’s a given that all good things must come to an end. The Hulu adult animation series from co-showrunners Mike McMahan (Star Trek: Lower Decks) and Josh Bycel (Happy Endings) brings their antics to a climax this month with 10 final episodes. 

Luckily, McMahan tells Paste that Hulu gave them the creative heads up early enough so they could craft their last season with intention. “They told us pretty early, but we’re little stinkers so we were making a real effort to be like, ‘It’s not really going to be the end, right?’”

McMahan says they didn’t want the season to be morose so they wrote towards fun and closure. “What we talked about is that we want to make sure that we treat this like the ending of a chapter of Solar Opposites,” he explains. “We have good resolutions for all the stories, and for us that means the Solar family has a story that’s been running the entire time about coming to Earth for this mission, there’s a story with the people in The Wall that have been shrunk down, and there’s a story about the Silver Cops out in space. There’s other little things out there too, but those were the three main things…and we wanted to feel like there was also an identity for the season. So, the Solars being broke at the beginning of the season and coming together as a family, and taking steps into new [stories] at the same time was as important as the wrap up.”

Bycel adds that The Wall thriller that’s been playing out in parallel entirely in Yumyulack’s room from Season 1 became just as important to land as the Solar’s. He even called dibs on the last Wall-centric episode, “The Last Flight Of Ariana 1,” to close it out himself. “We really are able to wrap up this piece of the story in a satisfying way,” he assures. “And also, if we were ever able to get more seasons, we’ve opened ourselves up to something that would be so much fun to explore.”

They also promise to go out with some creative swings, such as the episode, “The Family Memories VHS Mix Tape,” which Bycel says is their version of a classic sitcom clip show, but with mostly all new clips. And he says, there’s one final adventure for the Solar’s ship AI, A.I.S.H.A. (voiced by Tiffany Haddish) and the Pupa to experience together too. 

In the end, McMahan hopes fans enjoy how they bring it to a close but he hopes to come back to this playground sooner than later. “Doing a big Solar Opposites movie would really light my creativity on fire because that would be our chance to do an unhinged movie, like how we’ve done an unhinged show,” he laughs. 

Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Deathwatch (October 14)

Ubisoft released their first Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell video game way back in 2002, and then proceeded to perfect the stealth, first-person shooter genre — button mashers, begone with you! — across six original game releases. Ubisoft Film & Television then spent the last five years developing an animated series based on their mythology, specifically around an older Sam Fisher from the games. They hired screenwriter Derek Kolstad (John Wick) to craft an original story that honored both Clancy fans and players of the video games. The result is the Netflix original, adult animation series, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Deathwatch.

A first-timer in the animation series space, Kolstad tells Paste that a lot of his initial time on the project was leaning into his learning curve, and then finding common ground to build a series around. “It all begins with, “a good character is a good character, and a good story is a good story,” even if you’re coming from something that is as massive and as loved, in regards to the IP space,” Kolstad explains. “If, when we’re introduced to Sam, we don’t actually love him in the first 30 seconds, who’s going to keep watching? So a lot of the conversations had to do with that.”

Kolstad did know the video games and he was immediately excited about telling a story about “Old Man Sam” Fisher (voiced by actor Michael Ironside in the games), who has to help a new operative get out of a botched mission alive. As Fisher is a canon character, Kolstad says he avoided any storyline problems by setting it in his retirement years. 

“A lot of the problems that you might have faced if I had landed at the beginning or in the middle in regards to their canon, were solved by going, that’s his history,” he says of staying in the future. “I think the only frustration was its giant IP and the process is different. Animation is different. The screenplays have to be a living, evolving entity. We broke and re-broke the season and the characters. But ultimately, if you take a note and it makes it better, regardless of the number of hours you have to invest in it, you made it better.”

The series also introduces the original character of Zinnia Mckenna (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) which gave him a lot of freedom to compare and contrast operative eras, and let directors Guillaume Dousse and Félicien Colmet-Daage get very cinematic with their action blocking and framing. 

“What we wanted to do here is say, here are some characters you remember from the games, here are the children of some of the characters you know from the games, and here are the shadows and the memories in flashback getting a taste of what the world was before,” Kolstad says of their generational approach to the series. “When you look at the mechanics of the game, and when you look at the mechanics of a movie and a TV show and this anime, it’s realizing out of the gate that they’re two different mediums. I didn’t want to get too far into the weeds as to, in this sequence it looks like the game because then I think you’ll be ripped out of the story you’re watching.”

He also confirms that the series tells a complete story, much like the games do. “If you look at the first John Wick, it ends and if there was only one John Wick, I would be just as proud of it. But we earned our way into the franchise, and you wanted to do that here too, where it ends and there’s a little bit of a cliffhanger. But to be honest, if there’s only one, I’m proud of what we did here.” Although he confirms there’s still plenty of story to explore with McKenna and company. “I would love to go across the sub genre ‘scape in regards to action/thriller, and really branch out and know these characters in animation, live action series, movies and the like, if it works. And I think it’s working, so here’s hoping!”

The Twits (October 17)

Adapting the delightfully dark children’s novels of British author Roald Dahl is no easy feat. Figuring out how to translate his absurdism, black wit, and lack of sentimentality to the screen has vexed many, but screenwriter/director Phil Johnston (Ralph Breaks the Internet) was up for the challenge in 2023 when he took on Netflix’s adaptation of The Twits. 

Initially commissioned as a streaming series, Johnston tells Paste that he loved the book because there was plenty to interpret. “The Twits is the best because there’s a very slight story in the book, so that would give me the most creative liberty, I thought, to use it almost as “inspired by” and use these characters to tell this story.”

He wrote an eight-episode series with a writers’ room…and then the project was canceled. With animatics already complete and a musical episode featuring original David Byrne songs in progress, Johnston says they asked to turn what was already made into a movie instead, and Netflix agreed. 

As with all of Johnston’s screenplays, he roots them in very relatable, real problems that resonate with audiences. Dahl’s Twits (as voiced by Johnny Vegas and Margo Martindale) are pretty loathsome characters who are selfish to the core. Johnston says in his adaptation, he wanted them to be charlatans who prey on a town that’s already lost its industry, so the citizens are pretty desperate to believe their solutions. 

“It’s easy to let hate get in your heart and to start blaming people and to look for quick, easy solutions, and I don’t want that to happen,” he muses. “I want people to have whatever opinions they want, but screaming and hating is not going to get us anywhere. And that was the stew that was swirling around in my mind as I started working on this and were figuring out a way to make that palatable to kids. But Dahl isn’t like other kids’ stuff. You can go to those places and go a little darker, go a little meaner and you have antagonists that do not need to be redeemed. And the lesson that some people will not change is the point.”

The Twits was brought to life by Jellyfish Pictures in the U.K. They worked with Johnston to translate Sir Quentin Blake’s Dahl book illustrations into CG creations that look like something out of a stop-motion animated feature. He credits the “genius” of Kevin Spruce, the former head of character animation at Jellyfish, illustrator Peter de Sève, and production designer Rémi Salmon with figuring out how to make the CG characters and environments so tactile and unique to this world. 

“I loved stop motion growing up, and I love miniatures and little dioramas. And so that style was really important to me,” Johnston explains. “We couldn’t do it stop motion and we couldn’t do it with puppets, which I also kind of wanted to do. And so this was taking a bunch of different styles, disparate elements, and putting them together into this aesthetic that is illustrative and stop-motion, and a little bit of Looney Tunes in the insanity of the Twits. It’s the wabi sabi, broken pieces coming together to form a whole that’s kind of hideously beautiful and finding beauty in ugly, weird places.”

As beautiful as the result is, The Twits almost didn’t make it to the finish line as Jellyfish shut down suddenly in March 2025 due to financial insolvency. Johnstone says he heard on a Friday that they were closing ,but they still didn’t have all of their finished rendered files as they were completing the final sound mix.  

“It was like a garage door shutting and you’re sliding under it,” he remembers about waiting for those files. “We literally just squeaked in. The people there are such kind, brilliant artists who really bled for this film. I hope they will have a phoenix rising moment, for sure. But if nothing else, they’ll have this movie as a testament to their work.”

The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror XXXVI (October 19)

For the 36th edition of The Simpsons’ annual Treehouse of Horror, series co-executive producer and writer Mike Price got to live out a dream, finally getting his creative hands on the coveted Halloween episode. 

“Going back as a fan of the show, before I started working on it, I never missed the Halloween ones. They were always my favorite. And I’ve never done one, so I was so excited and so happy to not only write one of the segments, but I’m producing and it’s been so fun to really live in this world after all this time,” Price tells Paste about getting to take creative point under the guidance of current The Simpsons showrunner Matt Selman. 

As the episode producer, Price says he was able to get Selman’s approval to create a new animated open in the style of illustrator Ward Sutton’s fake editorial cartoons for The Onion. “I was able to track Ward down through social media and luckily, he was into it,” Price reveals. “The opening segment is like 20 seconds long and it’s an animated version of one of his cartoons that introduces the show. It plays into the times we’re in right now, with the anxiety and crazy things happening in the world. I think people will get a kick out of it.”

The trilogy of stories are directed by Matthew Faughnan. Broti Gupta wrote the first story about a grease monster from the city sewer that comes alive and wants to feed on more fat. It attacks Springfield while they’re hosting the state fair. The second story is Price’s homage to the recent movie, Late Night with the Devil, as Krusty the Clown makes a deal with the devil on his 1995 live Halloween show. Lastly, Dan Greaney wrote a post-apocalyptic wasteland story akin to Waterworld, except it’s not water that’s taken over the planet. Instead, all the plastic that we’ve thrown away has taken over the world.

Price says it’s the episode that plays most outside of their signature 2D animation style. “Since the whole world is made of plastic, certain people have now become plastic people, and they’re all done in this very photo-realistic CGI,” he teases. “It’s a combination of our drawn characters and stacks of plastic recycling bins and garbage cans that are all rendered in CGI.”

Excited to see the audience reaction to it, Price says, regardless of that, he did everything he wanted to do in a The Simpsons Halloween episode. “I almost felt like this might be my last one, so I wanted to get out of it everything I could get. We wanted it to be really, really funny, but also legitimately scary so it’s fairly gory,” he warns. “There’s a lot of people exploding, especially in the Krusty one. It’s cartoonish, but you’ll see people exploding and faces being ripped off. And it was really gratifying to me that we were able to hit on this theme of ’70s, ’90s and the future. And then, we also had a full orchestra on the music stage. Our composer, Kara Talve, did an amazing score.”

Haha, You Clowns (October 19)

Adult Swim continues their legacy of giving truly original creatives a bigger platform, with the launch of Joe Cappa’s animated family sitcom, Haha, You Clowns. Cappa first introduced his Campbell brother characters, Preston, Tristan, and Duncan, and their super supportive dad, in a self-produced/animated YouTube sequence. He was then invited to make a segment for the network’s Smalls series, which was so well-received that it got picked up as a series. 

Cappa tells Paste that the super sincere and enthusiastic bros just came to life as he sketched them, and then voiced them with the dynamic that they were just three teenage boys who really adore their dad and think he’s the coolest. He says their origins go back to his high school days, when he observed a family shopping for shirts at a local Target. “It stuck with me my entire life,” he chuckles about their odd interaction that is now folded into the DNA of this series.

“At the root of it, it really is just like a funny character study,” Cappa explains. “Making a show, all of that aside, it’s when I’m just storyboarding out these scenes, I can’t help but sprinkle in little nuances. Like maybe they’re scratching their face because they’re nervous, or they’re blinking a lot because they don’t know what they’re going to say next; that kind of thing. Before I started making animations on Instagram, I was definitely too scared to do that because I didn’t know how to tell a story. But I kind of learned that the way I tell stories is really just understanding a character — a specific, weird person — and just letting that character tell the story for me. It’s imagining what they’re going to say next, how they’re going to react, and it really just builds from there. It’s not a macro vision of what I think it should be.”

For the series, Cappa now works with two storyboard artists to help realize his ideas and get them into production with animators to make seven short episodes that comprise the first season. While he admits it’s been a crash course in learning how to make an animated series, in the end he just wanted to make something that he thinks is funny, and he’s being allowed to do that purely in his voice.

“I want to show somebody that I have a sense of humor, and I have a good sense of humor,” he chuckles. “My bar for myself is so high because I really want to make the stuff that people want to share with their friends. But these characters are so funny to me, and so the fact that there was an audience and that Adult Swim really liked it, that’s like the best feeling.”

Hazbin Hotel Season 2 (October 29)

The return of Hazbin Hotel Season 2 has Princess of Hell Charlie Morningstar (Erika Henningsen) continuing her mission of rehabilitating souls for redemption so she can send them to heaven. However, this season she’s got the Vees, a.k.a. Valentino (Joel Perez), Velvette (Lilli Cooper), and Vox (Christian Borle), trying to take over heaven for themselves. 

Creator Vivienne Medrano tells Paste that transitioning her hit original YouTube musical series to the pipeline of an A24 and Prime Video-funded streaming series was a huge learning curve that she’s happy is behind her. 

“You obviously always learn from a first season, with how people react, what we did right, and what we did wrong in the biggest ways,” Medrano explains. “The number one thing that I’m very happy that we were able to address, and partially because of Amazon allowing us to do so, was the pacing from Season 1. In Season 2, we were given the ability to make  a really solid story, season, and arc, and the themes are very, very, very relevant to life, especially right now.”

Medrano was also able to integrate her independent animators with their Bento Box Entertainment animators more smoothly now that everyone is equally knowledgeable about the Hazbin Hotel world. “In Season 2, we really figured out how to staff the show for what the show’s needs were, and to set everyone out for success,” she says. “I think that made a huge difference because when everyone is working as a unit and everyone understands the look and the tone of the show, and understands the characters, it really makes a huge difference.”

With an expanding cast of characters and an eight-episode season of new songs, Medrano says this is an arc that is going to please long-time fans of the world and those who love complex villains, especially Vox. “This season is definitely a showcase for Christian Borles’ incredible voice acting talent and just the presence of the character,” she teases. “He’s in quite a few songs, so you definitely get more of him singing.”

She is also happy to create a bigger circle around Charlie in the hotel, including Abel (Patrick Stump), Baxter (Kevin Del Aguila), and Zeezi (Alex Newell), as she battles to do right in hell. “I’m very excited for the roster of characters around Charlie and in the hotel to expand, that’s always what I wanted,” Medrano says. “Back in the day, when I first made these characters, there were certain characters in the roster that we couldn’t really put into the [series] right away, and Baxter is included in that. 

Already picked up for two more seasons, Medrano teases that they’re already working on future episodes that will surprise fans and get even more character-centric. “Every season is mapped out,” she says of the long creative runway for Hazbin. “I already kind of know how the show ends and what each season is primarily focused on. If anything, it gave us a lot of motivation.”

Tara Bennett is a Los Angeles-based writer covering film, television and pop culture for publications such as SFX Magazine, NBC Insider, IGN and more. She’s also written official books on Sons of Anarchy, Outlander, Fringe, The Story of Marvel Studios, Avatar: The Way of Water and the latest, The Art of Ryan Meinerding. You can follow her on Twitter @TaraDBennett or Instagram @TaraDBen

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