How do you develop characters who don’t age? ™ & © 2002 The Simpsons and TTCFFC all rights reserved. ™ © 2002 FOX Broadcasting Credit: FOX.

Emotional reality can turn up in the most unlikely places. Like on primetime TV, where a handful of animated series are delivering surprisingly sophisticated characters who not only entertain, but stand up emotionally, year in and year out, with admirable consistency.

In fact, in a particularly bleak TV landscape dominated by shows, which promise reality but deliver bad amateur acting, animation has oddly become one of the more reliable oases of emotional reality. I don’t know exactly what that says about the world we live in but it does say something nice about the growth of animation. Especially when you consider that animated series like South Park and The Simpsons don’t have the luxury of characters who grow older and therefore shift naturally into new story territory. Nor can they easily add on or change major components like a marriage, a new baby or a career shift.

No, the characters in an animated series are really rooted in their situations, committed essentially to living one year of their lives over and over again, making it all the more remarkable that the best of the shows manage to keep it fresh.

There are compensating factors, of course. With a bit of discipline, animated shows can break their boundaries, giving characters temporary outlandish changes or shifts of location to places real and invented.

But more importantly, these shows work because they have characters we not only are attached to, but can believe in. Only characters with this level of psychological believability (placed in the right context, of course) can keep generating stories without falling back on the Big Book of Sitcom Plotlines: high school reunions, the sudden reappearance of incredibly attractive former lovers, etc. In fact, it’s to their credit that animated shows almost never rely on the old standbys and if they do, more likely use them as fodder for satire. They do borrow occasionally from each other but even this is often openly acknowledged. Self-awareness is a hallmark of these programs and is another key to their success.

So what are some of the specifics that make these shows tick? Looking at three of the strongest examples, South Park, The Simpsons and Family Guy, it becomes obvious that there isn’t just one working formula.

First, let’s look at the world of Stan, Kyle and Cartman, a Peanuts gang (or maybe it’s Leave It to Beaver) for the 21st century.

After an initial period of overdependence on fart jokes and the shock value of hearing eight-year-olds swear (a bit too much like reality for the show’s own good), South Park has found a way to use its unvarnished view of childhood as a means to throw new light on an adult world gone crazy. Some episodes go over the top or lose focus, but generally, the show’s take on celebrity loonies, world politics, big business and real taboos (not just the obvious stuff like leather fetishes and bondage either) offer some of the boldest commentary around.

Even with its 21st Century edginess, South Park plays on the same dynamics that the Peanuts gang used. © Comedy Central.

The first rung of commentary comes from the feeling that this is a kids’ show made in direct rebellion against the idealized world so typical of standard children’s programming. You know- that simple world adults wish they could give their kids, one where there are no really bad or weird people; where bullies can be subdued with an admonishing word and turn out to be Just Like You, only bigger; and where parents actually know what they are doing.

Instead, South Park offers us a more complicated, more unhinged, more real world where bullies just get more twisted when the adults try to step in, even the nice kids are mean and self-centered a good deal of the time and parents, though well-meaning, are mostly (though not always) clueless. This, of course, is a key to how the show works because it throws the kids back on their own resources. How they solve the various problems the writers devise for them then forms the main spine of the series.