According to Friedman, eight episodes are on tap, beginning at the end of the month and paired with the returning South Park. The episodes lead up to a season-ending cliffhanger that won’t be resolved until October 2005 — assuming the show is renewed. “By the time we find out whether this is as big a hit as we hope it’s going to be, it’ll take us a year to get more on the air. We’ll leave them wanting more and hopefully we can deliver next October.”

Jump Cuts is the mostly animated show mentioned above, a compilation of edgy comedy shorts that premieres November 7 for a four-week run. Tricia Sherrer, Comedy Central’s manager of acquisitions and the show’s guiding force estimates that at least 70% of each episode consists of animation.

“Doing a shorts show isn’t an original idea here. Every few years it came back up again, but it was hard to agree on a format or scheduling for it. It’s also very time consuming, but I was very passionate about it, so I was willing to put in extra time to watch lots and lots of shorts. When I pitched the idea to Karen Mitchell, our senior vp of programming, I reminded her that South Park started as a short film. When you say South Park around here, the reaction’s sort of South Park, oh yeah.’”

Thomas Vitale of Sci Fi Channel is nurturing Tripping the Rift for its second year by expanding the writing staff and the characters. © Sci Fi Channel, DPS Film Roman and CinéGroupe.

In her search for comedy shorts, animated or otherwise, Sherrer spread a wide net. “I didn’t go to sites like Atom Films because I wanted to avoid the same collection you could find somewhere else.” Word of mouth, tapes from comedy festivals, input from comedy clubs and peer-to-peer animation site links helped her round up enough material to eventually fill the initial four half hours. Sherrer is particularly proud of acquiring work from people like Don Hertzfeld, Bill Plympton or the Strindberg and Helium shorts from San Francisco artist Eun-Ha Paek. “I was shocked at how many pieces it takes to fill a half-hour show. They’re not uniform in length, and it’s really a jigsaw puzzle figuring out how to arrange them thematically or timewise to hit the broadcast clock.

“One thing that helped us was licensing the Angry Kid shorts from Aardman Animation. They’re really fantastic, gorgeous clay animation, and they’re close to the one-minute mark if we needed fill-ins; we have them bookending each episode.”

According to Sherrer, the hardest part of putting Jump Cuts together was getting legal clearances for performances, music or story adaptations. “It was just really tricky. People had to go back and track down talent they’d worked with years before to sign releases. A few filmmakers just eliminated their music track — it was easier than getting clearance to use it.

“Bill Robinson, who works under the name Billy Blobinson did a film called Bumblebeeing. He submitted his talent releases, his copyright form and his music clearance, but he was missing one actress’s release. When I called him, he said, `Oh I married her, I forgot all about that.’ I asked him if he thought he could get her to sign a release he said, `Well, maybe’.”

It’s a lot harder to make an impact with an adult-oriented animated series if you only have one of them on your schedule. Showtime’s Free for All vanished, more a victim of management changes at the channel than the show’s merit (or lack of same). At Sci-Fi Channel, vp Thomas Vitale is nurturing their CGI series Tripping the Rift into its sophomore year. “Any show must evolve in its second season. You learn what you did right and wrong the first time around. We held focus groups and looked at the online feedback to figure out what worked and what didn’t. We’ve expanded the writing staff, and the characters will be evolving this season.”

Kevin Corcoran launched Anime Network this past summer to satisfy anime fans’ appetite.

While he’s looking at other animated pitches, Vitale feels under no pressure to add a second cartoon show as a companion piece to Rift. “The goal is to find great TV, regardless of what technique it uses. You can’t make creative issues secondary to scheduling issues.” However, Vitale admits the channel does have “some” animated stuff in development that has moved beyond the pitch stage, so a second show is “definitely possible.”

Anime fans who need a bigger fix than a few late-night Adult Swim hours can provide now have their own channel. This past July, home video distributor ADV Films launched the Anime Network. While currently carried only by Insight Communication’s Columbus Ohio cable system, Channel president Kevin Corcoran anticipates that Insight will add Anime Network to the rest of its systems by year’s end, and notes that the channel is already available in over 10 million homes as a video-on-demand service.