I think it’s more an issue of NYT readership skewing extremely old. Under-40 will have watched plenty of great animated shows in this century. But someone who was 30 in 2000 probably missed out on the 2005 Adult Swim broadcasting of Samurai Champloo.
I watched it a second time and it was a very different experience. On my first watch, the ending surprised me and I thought it was a weird twist. On the second watch, I had to stop watching because it was so obvious. All the signals were there. I’d clearly misinterpreted them the first time.
Insane list. Look at the IMDB Top 250 filtered by “after 2000” and you’ll notice the obvious omissions:
These are just a couple examples in different categories. Anime fans immediately noticed that no anime made the list at all, despite 10 being in the IMDB top 100. Western animation fans might have seen that Bojack Horseman made the list, but Avatar didn’t (or if the editor filtered for “adult animation”, Rick and Morty (#22) didn’t). There’s really no excuse for these, there is no consistent rule that would exclude any of these shows. NYT readers must live in the dark timeline where fun is outlawed and Taskmaster was cancelled after one series.
Unironically. I’m sure Parks&Rec was a fun show, but did it fill convention centers around the world with hundreds of thousands fans? Did it kickstart the careers of animators, illustrators and musicians?
There’s a couple more “children’s cartoons” that I’d put in the top 100 over some high-popularity-but-low-cultural-impact shows from this list. I think if you look at the current animation industry, all of them will name the same shows that inspired them as children and still influence their work to this day: Avatar: the Last Airbender (2005), Gravity Falls (2012), Adventure Time (2010), etc.
Have you ever tried a blue cheeseburger though?
Have you ever had a psychological evaluation, voluntary or otherwise?