Christopher "Jackson Publick" McCulloch, co-creator of The Venture Bros. on Cartoon Network, has confirmed via Twitter that the show has been cancelled after seven seasons. The word reportedly came down a few months ago, while McCulloch and his partner Eric "Doc" Hammer were writing scripts for season 8.
The Venture Bros. had been renewed for an eighth season back in October of 2018, following its seventh-season finale. On September 5th, however, a tweet from Ken Plume, the author of the making-of art book Go Team Venture!, suggested the show had been canceled. This got the rumor mills spinning, up until McCulloch confirmed the news on the afternoon of September 7th.
This may not mean The Venture Bros. is gone for good, however, as the producers of the Adult Swim programming block on Cartoon Network have tweeted that they are "working with Jackson and Doc to find another way to continue the Venture Bros. story." This could mean anything, such as a special, a movie, or the eighth season airing on another network. A piece in Variety suggests that if Venture Bros. does survive, it may move to HBO Max, but nothing is final right now.
At time of writing, no one has disclosed what exactly led to The Venture Bros's cancellation. It does suffer from having one of the slowest production schedules in television history, with only seven seasons and 81 episodes in 17 years on the air. If there wasn't at least a two-year gap between each new season, Venture Brothers might be a multimedia juggernaut by now. As it is, it's a genuine hit among both audiences and critics, and is one of the tentpole shows that defined Adult Swim's trademark high weirdness.
The Venture Bros. began as a dark parody of the old Jonny Quest cartoons, following an appropriately dysfunctional family of scientific adventurers as they fight against an assortment of spies and supervillains. As the show developed, it broadened its focus to include superheroes and adventure fiction in general. In 2013, in an interview with the AV Club, Hammer described the comedy of The Venture Bros. as that its cast is "so terribly human in a world of comic book inhumanness, and that's kind of our long joke. These people are stuck in a world that could only exist in an inhuman Saturday morning show, and they're real."
While the titular brothers, Hank and Dean, are ostensibly the show's protagonists, it's overall an ensemble piece, particularly with a higher focus on the Ventures' archenemy the Monarch. The boys' bodyguard Brock Samson (Patrick Warburton) is easily Venture Bros's breakout character. In addition to showing up in memes and avatar images across the Internet, Brock makes an appearance in Telltale Games's delisted 2013 crossover game Poker Night 2. Weirdly, that still seems to be the only licensed Venture Bros. spin-off to date.
The Venture Bros. is currently streaming on Hulu.
Source: Jackson Publick/Twitter