Over the summer, Sony Pictures Animation announced that The Boondocks creator Aaron McGruder was working on a “modern-era” revival of the classic Adult Swim series. Three months later, WarnerMedia has greenlit a two-season order of the revitalized animated program for its upcoming Netflix competitor, HBO Max. This means, of course, that Granddad, Huey, and Riley Freeman will all be back, along with a new cast of characters and an entirely different setting.
Per The Hollywood Reporter, the “reimagined” two new seasons will consist of 24 episodes total and will begin with a 50-minute special set to premiere in the fall of 2020. Meanwhile, all 55 previous episodes of the series will be available to stream on HBO Max as soon as the streaming platform launches sometime next summer.
“There’s a unique opportunity to revisit the world of The Boondocks and do it over again for today,” McGruder said in a statement. “It’s crazy how different the times we live in are now — both politically and culturally — more than a decade past the original series and two decades past the original newspaper comic. There’s a lot to say and it should be fun.”
The Boondocks first started as a comic strip at the early music website Hitlist.com, after which it made its way to The Source. Soon after, McGruder began syndicating the comics while preparing the way for an animated television program. It took him many years to get it off the ground during the development stage, but Adult Swim finally said yes and, in 2005, McGruder’s comic strip became The Boondocks show on Adult Swim. Between then and 2014, when the last episode aired, the series aired new entries sporadically across four seasons.
These seasons saw Granddad, Huey, and Riley coming to terms with gentrification, racism, and other poignant social issues in the show’s loosely connected episodes. Many fans believe that its fictional setting of Woodcrest, a well-off and mostly white suburb, is based on the Chicago metroplex. With the two new seasons at HBO, however, McGruder’s characters are moving to a similarly fashioned suburban community in Maryland run by the Trump-like and “tyrannical Uncle Ruckus and his bizarre neofascist regime.”
(Via The Hollywood Reporter)
