American prime-time cartoon seemed overly focused on non-serious work.
Don't get me wrong, I loved Courage, the Cowardly Dog, but there's a reason why I continue to watch anime.
Don't get me wrong, I loved Courage, the Cowardly Dog, but there's a reason why I continue to watch anime.
With live actors, I guess dealing with your stars is already a series-longevity issue, so maybe people are more willing to countenance finitude? And there are different kinds of hype-train available with real actors, and the audience for live shows has self-segregated.
My dream is that some day someone at Cartoon Network who watched Puella Magi Madoka Magica will get an experimental budget to launch a dozen episodes of a real, serious cartoon series with incredibly good writing, and win all the awards. (Bonus points if they also troll people into thinking it's fluff for the first two-and-a-half episodes and try to break their minds.) In the meantime, I guess there's Steven Universe? which at least deals with serious issues a little (still in episodic ways)
You might like Space Dandy. Japanese again, but they really play around with continuity expectations between their episodes. I'm pretty sure most of s1 is meant to occur simultaneously in parallel realities due to the (lack of) continuity between episodes and occasional story-ending events. It's never really explained. And then s2 seems to tie some of the threads back together into a cohesive story arc over the season. Bonus: it's almost always available on Netflix, with their recent push for more anime.