How Dare They Cancel ‘Close Enough,’ a Perfect TV Show

Warner Bros. Discovery is on a killing spree of late. The mega-company is putting to pasture several scripted shows across its zillion networks, from the last-minute axing of TBS’ Chad, to the cliffhanger-inducing murder of HBO Max’s Made For Love, to nixing an entire streaming service. (Rest in peace, CNN+. We hardly knew ye.)

Two of my favorite shows, heartbreakingly, have also been caught in the crosshairs. Adult Swim canceled the life-affirming comedy Joe Pera Talks With You earlier this month, after three seasons. And as of last week, Close Enough, the HBO Max animated comedy from the creator of Cartoon Network’s Regular Show, is over too, also after a three-season run.

I mourned Talks With You, and now it’s Close Enough’s turn. There are few contemporary animated shows that came out the gate with such a strongly defined sense of humor, aesthetic, and cast of characters as this one. Every 11-minute episode managed to escalate from the mundane to the absolutely surreal, the animation following suit with surprising visual references and gags.

If there’s any consolation to be had, it’s that one of the series’ very last episodes featured a scene that was the perfect showcase of exactly what made Close Enough so brilliant—and why I’ll miss it so much.

The slice-of-life comedy followed a chosen family of dummies — husband-and-wife Josh and Emily; their daughter Candice; their landlord Pearle and her adopted son Randy; and their besties/roommates/ex-spouses Bridgette and Alex — and threw them into increasingly absurd situations.

Josh ghosts Alex in favor of hanging out with a genetically modified, anthropomorphic dog. Emily uses a magical pendant to de-age herself so she can bond with Candice, who proceeds to bully her. (The same pendant forces Josh to listen to “Pretty Fly for a White Guy” on repeat.) Bridgette takes experimental pills to make herself smarter than her genius sister, which leads the two of them to face off in an Akira-style battle when the pill turns them into fleshy, giant-headed mutants. And after going to a club where anyone over 30 must be chopped to death by a giant fan, Alex basically kills a guy to save his friends.

These aren’t all happening the same episode, but they plausibly could in a show like this one. Close Enough pushes the limits of how much one is willing to suspend their disbelief. By setting us up to be taken along on some nearly indescribable ride, it got to go wherever it wanted.

Anyone who watched Regular Show—and you should, if you somehow failed to catch the eight-season gem—knows what’s up. Creator JG Quintel traffics exclusively in deeply referential comedy that mines the fantastically strange from the seemingly banal. But that show and this one were made of more than just episodic wackiness: They were heartfelt and so good at making us care about characters so mired in inane circumstances.

Close Enough’s “heroes” are very stupid, yes, but also intrinsically human, and they’re lovable for it. As weird as it sounds that Alex accepts his loneliness only after falling in love with an alien disguised as a spin instructor who depletes his life force to fuel her own aims—an actual plot—it proves a potent journey all the same. Emily and Josh just want the best for their daughter. They also want to keep the spark alive in their marriage, even if that means going on a honeymoon that involves fending off blood-thirsty bison. And Bridgette is reckoning with the fact that she’s growing older but no more successful or satisfied. It’s why she almost dates an influencer who’s a literal baby.

Which brings me to that one perfect scene. You can, and should, watch it here:

One of the show’s now-final episodes, a half-hour Halloween special, feels like an encapsulation of what Close Enough did so well, and so differently from everything else on TV. The family tells scary stories on Halloween night, a familiar frame. But each one is dressed up as something that makes a certain kind of person—me!—smile: Josh is Mordecai, the six-foot-tall blue jay from Regular Show, both of whom were voiced by Quintel. Randy is Solid Snake of Metal Gear Solid, armed with Snake’s iconic cardboard box and sound effect.

The joke I keep thinking about, though, is the most meta scene the show ever produced.

Toward the end of the Halloween special, Candice falls asleep on the couch and has a nightmare about discovering she’s a cartoon. She meets her own voice actor. She runs into the animators, stressing and sleepless while revising storyboards. She meets Quintel himself, who quotes Regular Show, because he assumes Close Enough isn’t kid-friendly enough for kindergartner Candice to watch. She manages to escape, only to discover she was stuck inside of Cartoon Network Studios, the company that makes the show. Then she’s besieged by a ton of fans, who recognize her from Close Enough.

Candice screams herself awake, and of course everyone brushes off her nightmare as completely implausible. How else do you put a button on something as baldly self-referential as that three-minute spell was? We, the viewers, are still transfixed by how deep that joke ran, how the writers decided to throw caution to the wind and ridiculously peel back the ridiculous curtain.

I wish that weren’t the last time they could take us behind the scenes of Close Enough. I wish I could have been in that imaginary crowd of fans begging Candice for selfies. And I wish that the show could have gotten even just one more chance to up the ante of illogical goodness.