Checkered Passed

You probably should have saw this coming, and if you haven't, you really haven't been paying attention to Adult Swim.

Checkered Past will no longer be a part of Adult Swim's weekday afternoon. The block, which was the catalyst for Adult Swim's expansion beyond primetime and into weekdays, was a daily showcase of some of Cartoon Network's most iconic originals like Dexter's Laboratory, Ed, Edd 'n Eddy, Courage the Cowardly Dog, Cow & Chicken, I Am Weasel, Grim & Evil, The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy, Evil Con Carne, What A Cartoon!/Cartoon Cartoons Show, and Cartoon Planet. 

Its final broadcast aired moments ago at the time of this posting (June 27, 2025). What's replacing Checkered Past shouldn't be of any surprise to anybody.

It's King of the Hill. 

It's ALWAYS King of the Hill, the safest, most banal choice to open Adult Swim, and now, it'll be the opening series on weekdays and weekends at 5 PM E/P starting on June 30. 

Just in time to promote the revival coming to Hulu in August, which will likely make more money for the show's owner, Disney. 

Disney has Warner Bros' Adult Swim on lockdown nearly every day from 5 PM to 11:30 PM. Honestly, of the 13 hours Adult Swim now has every day, Disney-owned shows take up over 80% of the lineup.  

I have a few thoughts about Checkered Past and nostalgia blocks of kid shows aimed toward the millennial crowd in general.

Nostalgia blocks like Checkered Past, The '90s Are All That, The Splat, That's So Throwback, and Toonami Rewind are misplaced in timeslots where the ones who would watch could do so, especially on linear television. Early evenings and late nights are terrible for the audience who would enjoy those kinds of shows. The audiences are misplaced, and the limitations these programmers put on themselves have made those blocks irrelevant and complete failures in the process.

There were MANY problems with Checkered Past, but the biggest ones were the limited lineup choices, trying to find a balance between eras of CN (which they never did), and the fact that for an Adult Swim block, all of these shows were originally aimed towards kids and got a younger audience than they wanted.

Also, there were many glaring omissions from Checkered Past, most notably Johnny Bravo (which would have been a natural choice for the block), Megas XLR, Secret Mountain Fort Awesome, Robotomy, Sym-Bionic Titan, The Problem Solverz, and Uncle Grandpa, all of which could have fit that bridge between Cartoon Network and Adult Swim. 

And then there's the shows that would have fit in the Checkered Past block for nostalgia purposes but couldn't because they're still commercially successful properties aimed towards younger audiences. In other words, brands that they don't want associated with Adult Swim. The Powerpuff Girls, Codename: Kids Next Door, Ben 10, The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack, and Chowder definitely have earned their nostalgia points, but they're still largely kid-friendly brands. Powerpuff Girls and Ben 10 are also still commercially viable ones as well, which also would have been problematic under the Adult Swim brand. 

I get why they didn't want to put KND on the block. The very first mission was to get rid of the period of pool activity known as "Adult Swim" and have kids reclaim the pool. That would have been awkward.

Same thing with Adventure Time and Regular Show, both of which have been used as natural bridges between Cartoon Network and Adult Swim.

The fact is Checkered Past was never meant to last on Adult Swim. It was always going to be something to create more timeslots for the block, and once they got the slot, Adult Swim didn't know what to really do with it. 

By filling it with the same repeats of King of the Hill they've been airing for nearly 20 years, we now see how weak the Adult Swim brand really is. Even the power of Cartoon Network's classics couldn't save the expansion of Adult Swim, which has been a total disaster.

The Adult Swim brand is slowly becoming like FX in the eyes of Warner Bros Discovery, and much like that brand, their shows are more popular online than on linear television. Hell, there are more FX originals on Hulu than on the FX linear channel. 

Much like Cartoon Network Studios originals, the shows produced by Williams Street for Adult Swim are FAR more valuable than the Adult Swim linear network in the eyes of Warner Bros. With the impeding split of WBD, the divide is going to be even more visible, though most viewers won't really notice it since they'll continue to air third-party shows more than in-house originals. 

Yes, shows from Warner Bros and Cartoon Network Studios will still be on Adult Swim after the split, but Adult Swim will still rely mostly on third-party programming, and nobody will notice any differences.  

The end of Checkered Past was inevitable because they really didn't know what they wanted it to be, who they were aiming it for, or what they wanted to put on it. In the nearly two years it aired, it had remained largely the same, and its end is just another reminder of how the expansion of Adult Swim at the expense of Cartoon Network was a mistake.