Beyond the Animated TV Grave: Clerks: The Animated Series

The Ratings Junkie

Beyond The Animated TV Grave is a sub-series of Beyond The TV Grave, and takes a look at short-lived prime time adult animated series that aired on ABC, CBS, or NBC. This seventh edition focuses on ABC's summer 2000 series Clerks: The Animated Series, which was pulled from the schedule after two airings.

Background & Synopsis

Clerks: The Animated Series was based on the 1994 comedy movie Clerks. The movie was written, directed, co-produced by, and co-starred Kevin Smith, a real-life video store clerk who filmed the movie overnight at his real-life workplace. Disney's Miramax Films got ahold of Smith's movie and distributed it to theaters nationwide, where it grossed over $4 million on a $230,000 budget.

Clerks: The Animated Series was roughly five years' in the making when it premiered in 2000 on ABC. The plans for a television adaptation of Clerks originated in 1995 with Clerks: The TV Show, a pilot involving an entire new cast and characters from the film, with zero involvement or initial awareness of the project from Kevin Smith. The animated adaptation was conceived not long after the live-action version failed in the pilot stage, and landed at Disney's ABC after Smith and co-producer Scott Mosier rejected an offer from UPN. (Side note: Disney had acquired ABC in 1996, in between the production of Clerks and Clerks: The Animated Series).

Ratings & Cancelation

ABC would seemingly come to regret giving the green light to Clerks: The Animated Series. Scripts would allegedly be delivered to the network late, and the show was quickly deprioritized. The show premiered on Wednesday, May 31, 2000 at 9:30 pm after a repeat of The Drew Carey Show. It notched a 5.2 Household rating, a 43% drop from its lead-in. It went even lower the following week, with just a 4.1 Household rating after a repeat of The Drew Carey Show received a 7.3 rating. In both instances, Clerks: The Animated Series was also significantly lower-rated than its 20/20 lead-out. Clerks: The Animated Series was pulled from the schedule after that. It would be ABC's final attempt at adult animation for nearly a decade.

Granted, ABC did Clerks: The Animated Series no favors when they chose to air the episodes out of order. The series premiere was actually the fourth episode produced, and while the second episode to air was the second episode produced, the episode was formatted in a clip show format heavily referencing the unaired pilot. Clerks: The Animated Series also did no worse than the 8 pm comedy reruns that replaced Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? the same week.

Aftermath

Four unaired episodes of Clerks: The Animated Series had been produced upon its cancelation at ABC, all of which aired on a single day in December 2002 on Comedy Central. The Clerks IP eventually bounced back from the cartoon's failure. Clerks II, a sequel to the original film, crossed nearly $27 million off a $5 million budget in 2006, far outpacing that of the original. The idea for an animated film eventually turned into 2022's Clerks III, which grossed slightly more than the original film ($4.7 million), but was a box office bomb considering the $7 million budget. Clerks was added to the Library of Congress' National Film Registry in 2019, cementing its fate as a cult classic that had mixed success with franchise attempts.

All six episodes of Clerks: The Animated Series are available for digital purchase uncensored on Apple TV and Amazon. They can also be viewed on Internet Archive, and have been over 80,000 times.