The 7 Best Adult Animated Series Ever Made
The best adult animated series run from a depressed horse to a Texas propane lawn, seven shows proving cartoons carry television's sharpest writing. Ranked.
Animation spent decades filed under children’s programming, and then it quietly became the place television hides its sharpest writing. The adult animated series holds structural advantages live action never matched, casts that don’t age out, budgets that scale by imagination rather than location, jokes per minute limited only by the storyboard, and, the genre’s stealth weapon, an audience with its guard permanently down, cartoons licensed to say and stage what prestige drama flinches from precisely because nobody braces for a talking horse to break their heart. The best adult animated series run that license to its edges, and the seven below span satire, sitcom, science fiction, and the single most devastating character study of its streaming decade, drawn.
Our picks run by BuzzVerdict rating, each linked to the full verdict. Combined runtime spans four decades of the form, several thousand episodes, and exactly one propane lawn. The genre’s oldest trick still works below, repeatedly. You will not brace in time.
1. BoJack Horseman (2014)
Top of the genre, the talking-animal show that became its decade’s best drama in any medium’s conversation. Our BoJack BuzzVerdict, rated 4.5, calls it one of the most emotionally ambitious animated series ever produced, a washed-up sitcom horse’s Hollywood purgatory converted, season by season, into television’s most honest study of depression, addiction, and the arithmetic of harm. The animal-pun surface, background gags stacked three deep, sells a show whose landmark episodes, an underwater silent half-hour, a eulogy delivered as one unbroken monologue, a final poolside conversation, rank with the medium’s bravest, and the series’ refusal of easy redemption, accountability priced honestly across six seasons, completed the genre’s coming of age. Funny animals, real damage, and the streaming era’s most complete tragedy. The genre’s ceiling, currently and comfortably.
2. Futurama (1999)
Second, the science fiction comedy with a secret heart of gold. Our Futurama BuzzVerdict, rated 4.3, credits a unique space carved from sharp science fiction concepts and genuine warmth, a pizza boy frozen a thousand years waking into a delivery job among robots, cyclopes, and lobster doctors. The show runs actual physics and math jokes under its slapstick, episodes built on time paradoxes and doomed loops, and its emotional ambushes remain the genre’s most infamous, a dog waiting outside a pizzeria, a final theorem of a finale, sucker punches launched from the middle of joke density the genre rarely matches. Cancelled, resurrected, and cancelled again into immortality, it’s the genre’s best argument that smart and sweet compound, and the professor’s delivery announcements, per tradition, remain rarely good news for anyone aboard.
3. South Park (1997)
Third, the fastest satirical reflex on television. Our South Park BuzzVerdict, rated 4.3, honors one of the boldest comedies ever aired, willing to say things no other show would consider, four Colorado kids fronting a production pipeline famously fast enough to satirize the week it airs in. The construction-paper crudeness was always the license, equal-opportunity offense delivered before the news cycle closed, and the show’s best seasons run serialized satire the genre had never attempted at that speed, entire economies, elections, and platforms audited in six-day turnarounds. Its misses age publicly, its hits draw blood no late-night desk manages, and its longevity, decades deep and still detonating, makes it satire’s standing army. Respect the turnaround, whatever else gets argued.
4. The Simpsons (1989)
Fourth, the institution that built the entire genre’s permission slip. Our Simpsons BuzzVerdict, rated 4.0, records what many consider the greatest run of comedic television ever made, the first eight-plus seasons a joke-density benchmark nothing has matched, Springfield assembling the modern sitcom’s complete reference library. Every entry on this list walks through the door this family kicked open in 1989, adult animation proven at prime-time scale, and the show’s golden era remains comedy scripture, quotable at hall-of-fame density, structurally perfect episodes taught as templates. The endless later seasons run on institutional momentum, a longevity debate the rating prices in, and the monument stands regardless. Embiggened, cromulently, forever.
5. King of the Hill (1997)
Fifth, the quietest masterpiece in the genre. Our King of the Hill BuzzVerdict, rated 4.0, names one of television’s finest comedies about ordinary American life, extraordinary material mined from a Texas propane salesman’s modest lawn. The genre’s usual license, surrealism, gets declined entirely, Hank Hill’s world running on lawn care, alley beers, and the gentle friction between decency and a changing world, and the show’s patience produced animation’s most humane comedy, satire without contempt, small-c conservatism observed rather than prosecuted, neighbors rendered with documentary affection. Its revival decades on confirmed the appetite. The genre’s best argument that animation’s superpower was never the impossible. Sometimes it’s a man, a fence, and propane, done perfectly.
6. Rick and Morty (2013)
Sixth, the multiverse at maximum throughput. Our Rick and Morty BuzzVerdict, rated 3.8, credits the show at its best with inventive, emotionally complex science fiction comedy, infinite universes deployed to examine one broken family, a portal-gunning grandfather’s nihilism priced in his grandson’s therapy bills. The concept engine remains the genre’s most fertile, single episodes burning premises other franchises would milk for seasons, and the show’s best hours, a parasite-riddled memory episode, a toxic-purge two-hander, run science fiction’s sharpest recent writing. Fandom weather and behind-the-scenes turbulence complicate the institution, later seasons cycle in quality, and the peak material holds its seat regardless. Infinite universes, one damaged family, and the genre’s densest idea-per-minute economy.
7. Archer (2009)
The list closes at the world’s most dysfunctional spy agency. Our Archer BuzzVerdict, rated 3.8, credits some of the sharpest dialogue and most inventive comedy in adult animation during its peak years, a Bond-parody workplace where the espionage is incidental and the HR violations are constant. The show’s engine is verbal, callbacks nested across seasons, phrasing debates mid-firefight, an ensemble of monsters whose overlapping vanities produce the genre’s fastest crosstalk, and its genre-hopping era, noir seasons, jungle seasons, coma dreamscapes, kept the machine inventive past most shows’ expiration. Peak seasons rank with comedy’s tightest scripts anywhere. The office’s famous one-word objection to every double entendre remains, fittingly, the entire product.
Why the Cartoons Got the Best Scripts
Seven shows, one structural confession. Notice what every entry exploits, animation’s exemption from physical economics, casts frozen at their perfect age, settings rebuilt weekly for the cost of ink, ideas staged that no live-action budget approves, and notice the guard-down effect running the genre’s emotional economy, the form’s childhood associations lowering defenses that its best episodes then walk straight through, a horse’s spiral and a dog’s wait landing harder than prestige drama’s engineered devastations. Notice the density dividend too, joke-per-minute rates live action physically cannot block and shoot, and the longevity ledger, half this list running past two decades because drawn casts neither age nor renegotiate. The genre spent decades filed as kids’ stuff. The filing error, the seven above prove, was television’s luckiest mistake.
Queuing the Animation Block
Route by appetite. Emotional-ambition viewers start at BoJack with tissues staged from season two onward, comfort-and-cleverness appetites board Futurama, and satire constitutions take South Park by era with the turnaround respected. The Simpsons golden seasons remain the genre’s required foundation course, King of the Hill serves the quiet evenings nothing else on this list understands, and Rick and Morty and Archer split the concept-density and dialogue-density constituencies at full speed. Seven shows, four decades, one form that got the medium’s best scripts by looking like it couldn’t possibly. The horse is sad, the propane is sold, the timelines are infinite, and the writing, wall to wall, is the sharpest in television. Press play and don’t brace. Bracing, the genre proved long ago, never helps.