September 16, 2014 (2014-09-16) – November 25, 2020 (2020-11-25)
FishCenter Live (also shortened to FishCenter or FC Live[1] or just FCL) is a discontinued American talk show created by Mike Lazzo and hosted by Dave Bonawits, Andrew Choe, Matt Harrigan, Christina Loranger, and Max Simonet. It premiered on the official website of Adult Swim in September 2014 and started airing on television in February 2015. The series ended on November 25, 2020, following the shutdown of Adult Swim's livestream division.
Summary and production
FishCenter Live was presented as a weekday call-in talk show narrating over footage of tropical fish swimming around in a fish tank.[2][1][3][4][5][6] The fish are ranked according to their points, which are awarded when the fish complete a number of challenges.[5][7] These challenges include "Coin Quest," floating over coins that are superimposed on the video feed.[8][9]
The show was hosted by Dave Bonawits,[1][10] Andrew Choe,[1][10]Matt Harrigan,[1][a][10] Christina Loranger (since 2019),[12] and Max Simonet,[1][13][10] employees from the digital department room of Adult Swim. An original incarnation of the show involved a straight video feed of the fish tank, without narration. Commentary and a phone number for call-in segments were later added. Initially, callers were mostly other Adult Swim employees; when the competition portion was added, the hosts saw an increase of outside callers.[14]
Starting in 2015, both Dave Bonawits and Max Simonet began hosting another show for the streams, a New York Times crossword solving show initially called Crossword. The series was re-titled Bloodfeast in 2016, and later received two television spin-offs: Tender Touches[15] and Gēmusetto Machu Picchu.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the show was done remotely starting in March 2020, with the hosts talking through Zoom. During this time, two hosts left for extended hiatuses: Dave Bonawits left from late April to early June for parental leave, while Andrew Choe left in late July after feeling burnt out,[16] returning for the show's final two weeks in November. The show was reduced to just three days a week in September, running two hours every Tuesday through Thursday, while also being simulcasted to YouTube and Twitch.
On November 10, 2020, parent company WarnerMedia announced a large round of layoffs, with Adult Swim being affected.[17] Among the laid off staff were all of the FishCenter Live hosts, except for Max Simonet, and the layoffs ultimately resulted in the cancellation of the Adult Swim streams. Following two more weeks of programming, FishCenter Live, and the Adult Swim streams as a whole, ended on November 25, 2020, with a two-part finale declaring TZ2 as the last Galaxy King. The live stream then became a silent feed of the fish tank until its eventual removal in January 2021.
^* Sir Squirt was represented by Hamburger in the 2016 Galaxy series. Due to Sir Squirt's death the second place fish for the Winter season, being Hamburger, was declared the Super King representative. ^† Ale was represented by TX Cupper in the 2018 Galaxy series due to Ale's untimely death earlier in the year.
Games
The callers, fish, and guests compete for points in various games:
More-Bid-Angel: someone had to choose the highest-priced angel figurine.[2]
Truth or Se-Dare-Is: Truth or dare? with author David Sedaris. The caller dared Sedaris to wear socks on his hands for the rest of the show.[2]
What's Your Fetus?: made for death metal band Dying Fetus, someone had to guess what was hidden in a person's pelvic region based on a X-ray photograph.[2]
In the episode broadcast Thursday, 13 December 2018, a parody of the original Star Trek's USS Enterprise was featured called the "USS FishCenterprise NCC-1065." 1065 is a reference to the street number for Williams Street, which produces content for Adult Swim.[37]
Broadcast and reception
What is our version of a sports show? What is our version of a relationship Q&A show? You can test these things out, just as we did with FishCenter, in an office with a couple microphones.
FishCenter Live was originally released in September 2014 on Adult Swim's official website.[38] The show came about when staff decided to film the tropical fish swimming around their aquarium as an idea for developing content for the website's online streaming channels. New episodes were presented on weekdays. The show was added to the network proper in February 2015, broadcast at 4 a.m. These airings are condensed versions of the live version, consisting of 11-minute highlights from each day.[14][b]
In the first week of its televised broadcast, the show garnered 2.6 million viewers in total.[14] In a press release, the network ranked the program first place across all targeted demographics in its time slot during the second week of March 2015.[39] The network observed some of these viewers as confused Twitter users, wondering if the show was a prank. After these airings, live viewership rose from 120 to 5,000. The success led to the creation of a separate live stream dedicated to the network's Toonami block.[14]
In August 2017, a premiere of a Rick and Morty episode was delayed due to an episode of FishCenter Live on the same live stream.[22]
Critical reception has been positive. Adweek's Jason Lynch called FishCenter Live "its flagship livestreaming show."[9]The Comedy Bureau received the series favorably with "you'll find, while giggling the whole way through, that you do get sort of invested in the individual fish."[40]Decider's Kayla Cobb said "[i]t's weird, but it works."[20] Ranked sixth in their list of best "unknown" television series of 2015, Newsday's Verne Gay reviewed ""FC Live" is insane — as such, a perfect distillation of all that is Adult Swim."[1]The Outline's Samuel Argyle said "FishCenter border[s] on the avant-garde.[2]JamBase's Andy Kahn called it "wacky."[27]The Guardian's Mark Lawson critiqued "Ambitiously, this is a phone-in show, although disappointingly, the fish don't take the calls, but swim in tanks that surround the presenters."[41]The A.V. Club's Erik Lindvall said FishCenter "the latest weird thing" to come from the network "in a streak of really weird things", describing it as a "wonderful, web-based world of piscine sports".[5]
Live for Live Music's Ming Lee Newcomb described FishCenter Live as "eccentric" and "bizarre."[6] Ranked fourth in their list of "[t]he 26 Weirdest Adult Swim Shows Ever," Deadspin's Sheldon Pearce commented "Adult Swim employees came up with this one, which means it's definitely on-brand if nothing else."[42] In reviewing Tender Touches, Geek's Jose Rodriguez said the pilot had "more in common with Xavier: Renegade Angel or FishCenter."[43] Reviewing their Alvvays performance, Uproxx's Derrick Rossignol declared "every band should be on it, because at the very least, it's one of the most bizarre live internet shows you can possibly watch."[23] Later, while reviewing the Post Malone episode, Rossignol followed-up with "a totally bizarre, daytime, aquatic, call-in web show that doesn't make much sense, and that's what makes it great."[18] In an interview with host Max Simonet, Sonoma Index-Tribune's David Templeton remarked "[it's] a bizarrely simple cult-hit web-and-television show."[13]
Australian channel 9Go! promoted their Australian adaption of FishCenter (known as FishCentre) airing at 12:00 on the channel, along with the Adult Swim block they have on the channel.[citation needed] Unlike the American version of FishCenter, FishCentre was not live and consisted of scripted shorts no longer than 2 minutes in length, with voices super-imposed onto the fish. It ran for 12 episodes.[47]
Notes
^Harrigan, a creative director at the network, was first hired at Turner Broadcasting System in 1994. The Wall Street Journal observed this relationship as a rule of management to not "get hung up on hierarchy and protocol" at the studio.[11]
^These broadcast versions have also been uploaded to the network's YouTube channel.[5]
^Jurgensen, John (March 12, 2015). "Shop Rules at Adult Swim". The Wall Street Journal. Dow Jones & Company. Archived from the original on March 13, 2015. Retrieved March 14, 2015.
For "September", see: Jurgensen, John (March 12, 2015). "Shop Rules at Adult Swim". The Wall Street Journal. Dow Jones & Company. Archived from the original on March 13, 2015. Retrieved March 14, 2015.
