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I couldn't be prouder of @lisadraws. When you watch Tuca & Bertie, you are getting her gorgeously warped mind and heart blasted directly into your retina. The show IS Lisa, animated. No wonder it resonated so deeply with so many people.
A few more thoughts, though.
A few more thoughts, though.
Tuca and Bertie had a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Nearly every critic working in TV called it either one of the best or THE best new show of the year. T&B got the best press it's possible for a freshman show to have. 
But more importantly, people come up to me daily and ask me to tell Lisa what the show means to them; that it makes them cry, laugh, and feel seen. Look for yourself: Search "tuca bertie" on Twitter; check out the birdsonas and art fans have made. People LOVE this show.
We used to think that streaming would be the savior of good television. That network and cable's attention span was too short to give great work the time and space it needed to grow and find an audience, but that new media companies were different. We were wrong.
At least in the days when ratings ruled, we had objective, public numbers. Now execs base decisions on the whims of a secret algorithm. Forget that their own eyes tell them they have a hit on their hands - human judgment is subordinate to a piece of code we don't even understand.
The truth is that rampant consolidation and an over-reliance on reductive tech is seriously damaging the ability of TV to sustain great art like Tuca & Bertie. That’s why we’re back in an era when great shows are getting cancelled after just a season or 2. mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-slow-dea…
And that's a shame, because while the same old shit works right away, anything truly NEW needs time to grow. It’s nice when platforms publicly say they support diverse creators, but unless they put their money where their mouth is and give them that time, it's not really true.
The good news: If you loved T&B, then you loved Lisa’s art. And she’s not going anywhere. Suggestion: Start with her hilarious book HOTDOG TASTE TEST, mosey on to COYOTE DOGGIRL, rewatch TUCA, and then get ultra excited for whatever this weird and wonderful woman does next.
(Addendum: None of this is to say that commercial art is impossible on TV, or that no platforms support great shows. They do! But less great shows would die if the people making decisions used their human judgment, and if massive industry monopolization were curtailed.)
