With The Onion officially all moved to Chicago from NYC, a bunch of writers who had no interest in moving to the midwest were left without an outlet. Enter Adult Swim, who I hear has teamed up with The Onion to put some of their editorial staff who stayed put hired a slew of former Onion writers to work on videos for a new site. Many chose to stay behind in NYC because of this very opportunity, in fact. It’s supposedly set to launch this fall on a new, to-be-named site, but there may be some trouble that pushes the launch back or even kills the project entirely.
A source tells me that “The Onion writers had nothing else going on, and AdultSwim.com wanted to take advantage of that. But only because they smelled a business opportunity. Adult Swim is just looking at it from a business standpoint.†So with that shaky foundation, things aren’t progressing very smoothly.
All that being said, a combo of former Onion writers with Adult Swim’s resources and branding does sound promising. If the Onion folks in charge of the creative are able to work freely, it may end up being a pretty cool thing. Or it could never see the light of day. We’ll see!
I’ve reached out to Adult Swim for comment. I’ll update this post if they respond.
Update: The Onion actually isn’t involved in this officially, it’s just comprised of ex-Onion editorial staffers who didn’t want to move to Chicago.