Mission Hill is an American animated sitcom created by Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein for the WB. It originally aired for five episodes from September 21, 1999, to July 16, 2000; unaired episodes were burnt off on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim from May 26 to August 11, 2002. The series follows Andy French, a retail worker who lives with roommates Jim and Posey as well as their dog, Stogie. Andy's lifestyle is taken for a turn when his younger brother Kevin moves in with him.
Stylistically, the series is recognizable for its bright, neon color palette, and features a peculiar mixture of modern animation and traditional "cartoonish" drawings (dashed lines coming from eyes to indicate line of vision, red bolts of lightning around a spot suffered). The style was made to be reminiscent of 1930s rubber hose cartoons such as Fleischer Studios, Walt Disney, Warner Bros., and MGM, as well as mid-century modern cartoons with the likes of Hanna-Barbera, UPA, Jay Ward, and The Pink Panther. The designs were done by Lauren MacMullan, who cites the comic series Eightball as her source of inspiration for her overall design.
Despite garnering poor ratings during its initial run, Mission Hill has since gained a cult following, and is also popular outside of North America, receiving broadcasts in Australia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, Spain and New Zealand.
The series centers on a group of young adults, primarily focusing on Andy French, whose sheltered suburban teenage brother, Kevin, moves in with him and his roommates in a metropolitan loft.
The show's narrative is set in the titular Mission Hill, which exists within the larger city of Cosmopolis. Cosmopolis is portrayed as a major modern urban metropolis, drawing visual and cultural parallels to cities such as New York City and Chicago. According to the seriesâ official website, Mission Hill is inspired by several real-world neighborhoods, including the Mission Hill in Boston (situated a few miles away from where creator Bill Oakley attended college), the Mission District in San Francisco, Silver Lake in Los Angeles, Wicker Park in Chicago, and Williamsburg in Brooklyn. The precise geographic location of Cosmopolis is deliberately ambiguous, combining characteristics of both East and West Coast cities. While most episodes are situated within Mission Hill, the skyline of Downtown Cosmopolis is occasionally visible in the background.
In the DVD commentaries, Josh Weinstein noted that considerable effort was dedicated to developing Mission Hill as a fully realized fictional city. Writers and animators collaborated to create original elements such as advertisements, musical acts, local foods, and public transit schedules. The Boston neighborhood of Mission Hill, located in the Roxbury area, shares several notable similarities with its fictional counterpart.
Mission Hill was conceived in 1997 by Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein, former executive producers/showrunners of The Simpsons, with the original artistic designer being Lauren MacMullan. Oakley has mentioned that one of the main inspirations for Mission Hill was the 1997 MTV series Austin Stories, which followed a group of 20-somethings in Austin, Texas. After failed pitches to Fox and NBC, the rights to Mission Hill were purchased by production company Castle Rock Entertainment and The WB Network in the fall of 1997, following a successful pitch to Garth Ancier, the then-head of programming at the WB. Both Castle Rock and The WB were part of media conglomerate Time Warner, later known as Warner Bros. Discovery. At the 1997 pitch, network executives from the WB were presented with three designs for Andy, Jim, Kevin and Posey. One depicted them in a drastically different, more cartoonish art style; the other two drew closer resemblance to the final designs, but one featured slightly more realistic designs for Andy and Kevin, with another featuring less realistic designs for Jim and Posey. When one of the WB executives saw the alternate designs for Jim and Posey, he thought that they were the parents of Andy and Kevin. MacMullan states that the final design chosen for Posey looked "much more attractive" when compared to the two alternate designs.
In mid-1998, the WB officially announced that a 13-episode first season would begin airing in the fall of 1999, with the project being known as The Downtowners at this point. MTV's production of the similarly titled adult animated series Downtown eventually forced a name change. It featured the voices of Wallace Langham, Scott Menville, Brian Posehn, Vicki Lewis, Nick Jameson, Tom Kenny, Herbert Sigüenza, Jane Wiedlin, Tress MacNeille and Lisa Kushell. The theme song is a faster, instrumental version of "Italian Leather Sofa" by Cake, who Oakley and Weinstein were fans of. This version was specifically recorded for the show.
When the series was first sold to the WB, it was not yet synonymous with teen female-oriented drama programs such as Dawson's Creek, Felicity and Roswell, and its only popular show with that demographic was Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which premiered at the beginning of 1997. Prior to Buffy, the network had been focusing on live action comedy shows aimed at African-Americans, such as The Jamie Foxx Show, The Steve Harvey Show and The Parent 'Hood. The success of Buffy and similar programs led to The Baltimore Sun labelling it as the "teen girl network" in July 1999, two months before Mission Hill premiered. During the WB's 1999 upfront presentation to advertisers, the drama shows received applause from the advertisers in the audience, while Mission Hill was met with two minutes of silence. In 2017, Oakley claimed, "In the time they ordered the show and the time it had appeared on the air, the network had redefined itself." He adds, "they had this leftover programming, and by the time they figured out we shouldn't be lumped in together [we] were in danger of killing that entire network. We hugely damaged the ratings of those other shows." In another 2024 interview, Oakley said he initially thought that there might be some crossover between the audience of Mission Hill and shows such as Buffy, adding that "mostly at our urging, the show aired after an episode of Buffy, but all the Buffy viewers tuned out. They aired the next episode during their comedy block. We led off the night, and our ratings were so bad that we were murdering Jamie Foxx and Steve Harvey."
Although 18 episodes were planned, only 13 were produced. The series was put on hiatus by The WB after two episodes due to poor ratings. It returned in the summer of 2000 with smaller promotion, and was canceled on July 18, 2000, after four more episodes aired to poor ratings. The series went on to develop a cult following, thanks to repeated airings of all 13 episodes on the Time Warner-owned cable channels Cartoon Network and TBS. On Cartoon Network, it aired on the popular late-night programming block Adult Swim, while on TBS it aired on Too Funny to Sleep, a late-night programming block. In Australia, it aired on the local version of Cartoon Network/Adult Swim (via News Corporation's Australian pay-TV provider Foxtel), and in Canada it aired on Teletoon (part of its "Unleashed" block). Warner Home Video released all 13 completed episodes on DVD on November 29, 2005.
Bill Oakley has since voiced his dissatisfaction with the way Warner handled the series, and has said he does not mind if people pirate the series.
On June 30, 2020, Oakley announced plans for a spin-off tentatively titled Gus and Wally, which would center on the middle-aged gay couple who were supporting characters in Mission Hill and take place six months after the series' conclusion in the early 2000s. The series would be produced by Warner Bros. Animation for contractual reasons, as Warner still owned the rights to the IP through their subdivision Castle Rock Entertainment, who were the original copyright holders and who later became inactive. However, when the announcement was made, it was still unknown if the spin-off would be released on the Warner Bros. Discovery-owned streaming service HBO Max.
In June 2022, Oakley claimed that they were still in the process of pitching the project, and that if this version was picked up, then it would continue under the Mission Hill moniker, rather than being titled Gus and Wally. He also mentioned that it would include the unproduced episodes from the original incarnation of the show.
In March 2023, Oakley confirmed in a tweet a spin-off about Gus and Wally is "not gonna happen".
Note: Thirteen episodes of the series were produced while five more were written, but never completed. Animatics for some of these episodes were in production at the time of the series' cancellation. It was planned to put these animatics on the DVD for the series, but this never came to fruition. However, several of the animaticsâÂÂincluding a completed video animatic and synchronized audio read-through of the episode "Pretty in Pink (Crap Gets in Your Eyes)"âÂÂhave been released through various internet outlets.
Warner Home Video released all 13 completed episodes on DVD on November 29, 2005. The collection replaced some of the original soundtracks with stock music, most glaringly "Everybody Hurts" by R.E.M. in the episode "Andy Vs. The Real World". The DVD collection also dubbed over some of the original voice tracks to remove any references to the replaced music, for example changing Andy's voice track from saying "Gordon Lightfoot" to "Scott Joplin" in the episode "Unemployment Part 1".
Mission Hill received the 2000 Pulcinella Award for "Best Series for All Audiences"; the award cited the series' "stylized design and honest approach to sexual and moral issues."
The series won an award from GLAAD for its positive portrayal of a gay relationship. The series is the first instance of a gay kiss on American network television, predating the kiss between Kerr Smith and Andy Kaufman on Dawson's Creek by a year.