There’s nothing out there quite like Adult Swim, the channel-within-a-channel spawned from Cartoon Network that gives creatives a chance to really get weird with it, either in animation or live action. Many of the shows are quite short, designed to fit into 15-minute or 30-minute blocks with commercials, and they tend to have a very different style of comedy than anything else on TV. There are so many incredible Adult Swim shows that sometimes really good ones are lost in the shuffle a bit, and one such show actually starred “Barbie” and “Lady Bird” director Greta Gerwig, who’s now set to direct a “Narnia” adaptation for Netflix.
“China, IL” was a strange little show created by Brad Neely about the “Worst College in America,” in the fictional town of China, Illinois. The first season had 11-minute-long episodes that were designed to be bite-sized stories of weirdness in the Midwest, with later seasons doubling that time to 22-minute episodes, though the tone and format of the series stayed the same despite getting a longer runtime. The show ran for 30 bizarre, hilarious episodes, and Gerwig voiced her character, history teaching assistant Pony Merks, in most of them.
Gerwig voiced Pony, a senior student and occasional voice of reason
Pony is a complicated young woman, a senior at the University of China, Illinois who works as a teacher’s assistant, and she has to put up with a lot of ridiculous nonsense from the Professor Brothers, Steve and Frank Smith (both voiced by Neely) and the Dean (Hulk Hogan), and Gerwig’s super chill performance is a perfect antidote to Neely’s much more high-strung character antics. In an interview with Collider, Gerwig explained that she was approached by Neely to play Pony, though he told her not to tailor her performance in any way because he just liked the way she talked. She also spoke about how fun it was to play Pony because of the wildness of the series, saying:
“It’s so funny when we’re recording because I’ll do episodes, and then they’ll need me to do pick-ups and I’ll do pick-ups for a bunch of episodes. I’ll say something like, ‘Is this the one with the time machine where they go back and kill Ronald Reagan?’ It’s total absurdity. It’s great, but it’s crazy.”
Adult Swim shows can really go wild, and “China, IL” definitely went to some weird places. Gerwig may be a serious awards contender as a writer and director these days, but back in the mid-2010s, she was known mostly as an actor who worked repeatedly with director Noah Baumbach (who is now her husband). Heck, she even played a mermaid on an episode of “Portlandia.” Despite it being kind of weird that the very white Gerwig is playing the Mexican Pony, her performance is fun, and “China, IL” is pretty underrated. It’s just wild to think that the director of “Barbie” once voiced a cartoon character who dated God. Thanks, Adult Swim.
