Super Deluxe

» see superdeluxe.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

super deluxe sat downstream of a television block that never had a turkish home. cartoon network was on the cable here and it went to bed at a reasonable hour. adult swim, the thing that took over the same channel late at night in america and filled it with cheap animation and deliberately bad video, was not part of that deal, and neither was the sensibility it built. so this grave is written from the outside, which is fine, because so was most of the audience for the second half of the story.

turner broadcasting announced it on 30 october 2006 and launched it on 17 january 2007 as a free comedy site, in the window when every american media company was standing up a web video property in a hurry. what made this one credible was who it had. bob odenkirk and maria bamford were on it. so were tim heidecker and eric wareheim, a year before awesome show great job made them the reference point for a whole decade of american comedy.

it was well funded and reasonably good and it lasted sixteen months. on 7 may 2008 turner folded the whole thing into adultswim.com and laid off a large part of the staff. this was not a surprise to anybody watching 2008 happen. the entire class of studio-backed web video from 2006 and 2007 died in that eighteen-month stretch, and the ones that survived did it by becoming something other than a website.

~ the dossier ~

~ the seven months nobody counts ~

the date everybody records for the first death is 7 may 2008, and the site was still there afterward. the internet archive has superdeluxe.com serving its own full front page as late as 17 december 2008, with its own navigation across shows and artists, running under its own brand seven months after it was supposedly absorbed. the first capture that redirects is 29 december 2008, pointing at adultswim.com/superdeluxe.

so the fold announced in may was editorial and the machine kept running until the end of the year, which is the usual shape. a media company announces the merger on the day the layoffs happen, because that is the news, and then somebody keeps the servers alive until a quarter boundary makes it convenient to stop.

~ the second super deluxe ~

turner brought the name back on 6 october 2015 and gave it a different job. this one was not a website you visited, it was a studio that put video where people already were, and it was set up to run at arm's length from both turner and adult swim. what it produced was of its exact moment. vic berger cut american political footage into loops that made the 2016 primaries look like a nervous breakdown, and joanne the scammer, the character played by branden miller, made videos with them on the way to two million instagram followers.

the numbers were real. a million and a half subscribers on youtube and past three hundred million views, which is not a rounding error for a company that was also selling shows to tbs and to facebook watch. it produced a netflix thriller with uma thurman in it. by 2018 super deluxe was doing better than most things turner owned that had a channel number.

~ the day it died ~

on 19 october 2018 turner announced it was shutting super deluxe down. at&t had closed its purchase of time warner four months earlier and was cutting anything that looked like a copy of anything else, and the reason given said so plainly: massive changes in the social and mobile-first ecosystem, and duplication with other business units in the new warnermedia portfolio. dramafever had gone the week before.

duplication is an honest word for it. warnermedia already owned adult swim, which had absorbed the first super deluxe in 2008, and it now had a second super deluxe making short video for the internet in the same building group. nobody argued the work was bad. the brand was sold to fullscreen on 9 august 2019 and renamed tatered, which is the sound a name makes after the people who earned it have all gone.

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