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December 15, 2025 
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You’re reading the Watching newsletter. Every week, our team will bring TV and movie recommendations right to your inbox. Enjoy the edition below, and look for future newsletters on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays.
‘The Elephant’ enters the room
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| “Adult Swim’s the Elephant” premieres on Friday. Adult Swim |
Dear Watchers,
This hasn’t been a great year for anyone hoping to tell original stories in Hollywood. Widespread job cuts, the looming threat of artificial intelligence and the consolidating effect of corporate mega-mergers collectively threaten to make it even tougher to get risky new projects off the ground.
That’s why it is heartening to watch “Adult Swim’s the Elephant,” a 23-minute animated special, and “Behind the Elephant,” a documentary about the making of that special that is almost as long as the special itself. They should be watched as a double feature in order to fully understand the audacity behind this existentially curious, trippy piece of work. (“The Elephant” debuts on Friday at 11 p.m., on Adult Swim, and then it and the documentary arrive the following day on HBO Max.)
The teams behind “The Elephant” have not only done something daring; they also did so via what sounds like the worst possible way to make an episode of television. As Vishnu Athreya, an executive producer, explains in “Behind the Elephant,” the concept came from Exquisite Corpse. In that parlor game, players create a story or picture together by contributing different portions without looking at one another’s work.
The same principles were applied to “The Elephant.” Producers hired three teams of animators to each handle separately a different act of the program. The teams were led by Pendleton Ward (the creator of the acclaimed Cartoon Network series “Adventure Time”); Rebecca Sugar (“Steven Universe”) and her husband, Ian Jones-Quartey (“OK K.O.! Let’s Be Heroes”); and Patrick McHale (“Over the Garden Wall”).
The result is a single TV episode that was clearly built by committee but still feels unified. The sections have contrasting animation styles and tonal choices, but they all focus on a character attempting to navigate a new world. Ward’s chapter is surreal and peppered with bright colors, not unlike “Adventure Time.” The Sugar/Jones-Quartey section is free-associative and steeped in an ’80s punk aesthetic. McHale’s is unexpectedly poignant, with a moody spirit and angular illustrations that evoke anime. The end of that portion, the third and final act, takes place during the holidays, which makes “The Elephant” feel almost like a Christmas special.
What holds the whole enterprise together is a curiosity about humanity and an understanding of how it feels to navigate a society that often seems broken and disjointed. That it is being put into the world by Adult Swim and HBO Max, Warner Bros. subsidiaries that could soon belong to Netflix or Paramount, is a detail both bitter and sweet.
Also this week
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| Johnny Pemberton, left, and Aaron Moten in the new season of “Fallout.” Lorenzo Sisti/Prime Video |
- “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction,” David Letterman’s intermittent interview series, returns for a three-episode sixth season on Tuesday, on Netflix.
- The second season of “Fallout,” based on the postapocalyptic video game of the same name, debuts on Tuesday at 9 p.m., on Amazon Prime Video.
- “What’s in the Box?,” a new game show hosted by Neil Patrick Harris that does indeed require contestants to guess what is inside various boxes, debuts on Wednesday, on Netflix.
- Couldn’t experience the “iHeartRadio Jingle Ball 2025” live? Watch it in edited form on Wednesday at 8 p.m., on ABC, and beginning the next day on Hulu.
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