The long running era of the Saturday morning cartoon has officially ended, but no one can stop you from fulfilling your true weekend calling. Cartoons and Saturday mornings were made for each other and no one can tell us otherwise. It is to that end that we maintain vigil, bringing you animated selections each Saturday morning until the internet dies, or until we run out, good thing there’s always reruns.
“Mission Hill” Created by Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein; Written by Bill Oakley, Josh Weinstein, Michael Panes, Andrew Kreisberg, Ben Kull, J. David Stem, David N. Weiss, Aaron Ehasz, Dan McGrath, Robin Stein, Rob Schwartz, Rich Siegel, and Rachel Pulido; Starring Brian Posehn, Nick Jameson, Wallace Langham, Scott Menville, Vicki Lewis, Tom Kenny, Herbert Siguenza, and Tress MacNille; Run time 22 minutes; Originally aired September 24, 1999.
“Mission Hill” premiered September of 1999 on The WB. The series was originally titled “The Downtowners” but a name change was necessitated by MTV’s similarly titled “Downtown.”
The series follows a group of roommates living in Mission Hill, a fictionalized big city. Mission Hill has no analogous location in real life but is said to be an amalgamation of Mission District, Silver Lake, Wicker Park, and Williamsburg in Brooklyn. The four primary protagonists are Andy French an aspiring cartoonist employed at an ad agency, his best friend Jim Kuback (Posehn), his socially awkward little brother Kevin French, and Posey Tyler a blonde holdover from the hippy generation.
“Mission Hill” is irreverent at times but underneath the shock humor is a foundation of friendship and self affirmation. I was struck with how the series handles questions of sexuality and orientation. In the series’ third episode “Kevin’s Problem (or Porno for Pyro)” Kevin encounters a pornographic magazine while filling in at the local grocery store for a friend. When he thinks the store is slow he takes the magazine into the bathroom to masturbate. The episode makes it clear that this is not normal behavior for Kevin and he feels a certain amount of shame in his sexuality. While he’s in the bathroom the store is robbed by two of Kevin’s class mates, when the alarm goes off and the police begin to arrive, Kevin finds himself locked in the bathroom and accidentally burns the building down trying to hide the evidence of his immoral behavior.
When Kevin’s classmates are charged with attempted murder for trapping him in the bathroom and setting the building on fire, Kevin has to come clean on the witness stand admitting that he was in the bathroom looking at pornography and that he started the fire trying to hide it.
Andy then rises to confront the laughing court room crowd giving a speech about normal sexuality and that none of this would have happened if Kevin didn’t have an unjustified sexual shame. While the entire sequence of events is played out for laughs the message rings true.
“Mission Hill” also had the support of GLAAD (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation” and, according to the show’s creator, “We actually had network television’s first gay male kiss in the first episode. That was the first gay male kiss ever broadcast on television and nobody cares because they didn’t see the show.”
Despite the show’s quality and progressive attitudes the shows was almost immediately put on hiatus by The WB after only two episodes. “Mission Hill” did have a second life, though almost equally brief, on Adult Swim from July to August of 2002. Only thirteen episodes were completed, of a planned eighteen. The complete series can be purchased on DVD and episode three “Kevin’s Problem (or Porno for Pyro)” has been embedded for you below.