A reboot of Adult Swim’s The Boondocks has scored two-season deal with upcoming streaming service HBO Max. The award-winning animated comedy, known for satirizing politics, black culture, and race relations in America, aired for four seasons over the course of nine years. The first three seasons were helmed by creator Aaron McGruder, who initially created The Boondocks as a comic strip in 1999. McGruder is attached as showrunner for the upcoming series.
The show is set to air in the fall of 2020, beginning with a 50-minute first episode. In total, the series order calls for two twelve-episode seasons. In addition to hosting the reboot, HBO Max will come pre-loaded with the first four seasons of the show when it launches in the spring of 2020. Speaking on the acquisition, HBO Max’s Chief Content Officer Kevin Reilly told Deadline, “Aaron [McGruder] is a gifted visionary whose unique style of storytelling is a welcome voice and we are elated The Freemans are making their thugnificent comeback on HBO Max.”
The Boondocks follows the Freeman family, consisting of Huey Freeman, a 10-year-old political activist in the vein of Huey Newton, his younger brother Riley Freeman, the often naïve embodiment of gangster-rap culture, and their “Granddad” Robert Freeman, a former civil rights fighter with a propensity to lust for young women. Together, they move to the fictional suburb of Woodcrest, where they seek to live their lives in a sprawling caricature of white suburbia. Throughout its run, the show famously took on R. Kelly, BET, Tyler Perry, and the Bush Administration. In tandem with a core cast that included Regina King (The Big Bang Theory), John Witherspoon (Black Jesus, Black-ish), and Cedric Yarbrough (Reno 911!), the show boasted an impressive array of guest voice actors like Samuel L. Jackson, Charlie Murphy, Mark Hamill, Adam West, Cat Williams, and Ed Asner.
McGruder said of the reboot, “There’s a unique opportunity to revisit the world of The Boondocks and do it over again for today. It’s crazy how different the times we live in are now – both politically and culturally – more than a decade past the original series and two decades past the original newspaper comic. There’s a lot to say and it should be fun.”
Like the first run of The Boondocks, the new iteration of the show is being produced by Sony, this time under the umbrella of Sony Pictures Animation. The studio is currently making a splash in the adult animation world with a number of projects including Netflix’s upcoming Elvis spy comedy Agent King and horror series Hungry Ghosts.
The Boondocks is scheduled for the fall of 2020 on HBO Max.