‘Smiling Friends’ Season 3: All The Info (March 2025 Update)

It’s a good time to be a fan of the adult animation. Old standards like The Simpsons, Bob’s Burgers, and South Park are still around, of course, and they’re joined by (relative) newcomers like Solar Opposites, Invincible, and Big Mouth, as well as Adult Swim favorites Rick and Morty and Common Side Effects. The Cartoon Network block is also the home of Smiling Friends, which is so odd, so funny, and, most of all, so good.

Here’s everything to know about Smiling Friends season 3.

Plot

Created by Zach Hadel and Michael Cusack, Smiling Friends follows the employees of a charitable company that is tasked with bringing joy to its clients by any means necessary. There’s pessimistic Charlie, cheerful Pim, deadpan Allan (meet his biggest fan), cutie Glep, and their boss, Mr. Boss.

There’s no plot details about season 3 yet, but Cusack (who also created YOLO) talked to The Wrap about his and Hadel’s creative process. “Me and Zach love to challenge ourselves for new mediums of animation,” he said. “In YOLO, I dip into it sometimes, but I never want to take that spirit away from Smiling Friends because that’s where it’s really been established.”

Hadel continued:

“If it gets too weird, you can find audiences getting a little lost. It is nice to be able to have a grounded, character-driven drama… Otherwise, it’s just strangeness for the sake of it, and you cannot really relate to anything.”

Previously, Hadel and Cusack made it clear that Smiling Friends will always be a jokes-first show. “A lot of comedy shows tend to get serious. I don’t think Charlie and Pim could cry and anybody would care. It would just be annoying. So it would probably end before it gets to that point,” Hadel said. “This show is hopefully kind of an escape. We always think about when we worked minimum-wage jobs, we would get home and just want to watch YouTube cartoons and South Park and Always Sunny. There’s something nice about being a little comedy thing, and that’s it.” Cusack added that they want to keep “a continuous tone with Smiling Friends, where you can tune in in any season.”

For now, enjoy some Smiling Friends “fan casting” (Chris Pratt jump scare!).

Cast

Much like South Park, most of the main characters on Smiling Friends are voiced by the show’s co-creators: Michael Cusack (Pim, Allan, Mr. Frog) and Zach Hadel (Charlie, Glep, Gwimbly). But there’s also Marc M. as The Boss.

Release Date

It was confirmed in June 2024 that Smiling Friends was renewed for season 3. A premiere date has not been announced yet, but Cusack told Comic Book that production on season 3 is going “really good. We’re in such a great stride right now. Seeing as we’ve had two seasons to work up to this, we know the characters so much more now. It’s going really well.” A 2025 debut is possible.