Adult Swim’s new live-action sketch series does not technically premiere until midnight tonight, except that Adult Swim went and posted the entire first episode to YouTube this morning, so the premiere is sort of already over. Eleven minutes. Go ahead, we will be here. Although, personally check below for personal advice… Eleven minutes. Go ahead, we will be here. Although if you want my personal advice on how to watch this thing, it is a little further down.
So there are two ways in today, which is itself a little strange for a 2026 premiere. You can watch it right now, up there, free, and be done before your food goes cold. Or you can wait for midnight and take it on Adult Swim proper, which means cable, satellite, or one of the live TV services that carries Cartoon Network (Sling, YouTube TV, Hulu + Live TV, DirecTV Stream, and most cable providers’ own apps will all get you there).
The part that’s missing… there is no “next day on HBO Max” anywhere in the promotion. That is not automatically strange (Rick and Morty does not always carry the line either) but on a brand new series it stands out. The answer is probably sitting in Adult Swim’s own release, which says the series “will air on Adult Swim in the U.S., while Avalon will distribute the show globally,” and Avalon’s sales catalogue lists Adult Swim as the commissioning broadcaster rather than the owner. Commissioning a show and owning it are two different things, and streaming rights are a separate deal somebody still has to go make. Whether that is also why the first episode turned up free on YouTube this morning is a question we would very much like the answer to. If Max happens, or if more episodes show up on YouTube, we will update this post.
My advice, for whatever it is worth from people who have been doing this a while: take the midnight option at least once. It is a show about a man having nightmares, it runs at night time on purpose, and Adult Swim has been using that hour as a weapon since before some of you were born.
The shape of it: eight episodes, about eleven minutes each, one a week. Jordan Mendoza created the show, stars in it, directed it, and executive produced it, which is an unusual amount of control for a first series and usually means whatever ends up on screen is actually what somebody intended. If the name has not landed with you, the credits will: Dave, Chad Powers, Overcompensating, Big Mouth, and Ziwe.
The premise, in his own words from the press materials, is about as direct as these things get. It is a sketch show about his nightmares. Some sketches come from dreams he actually had. Others are ideas he liked.
Each episode is framed by Steve Buscemi, in a suit, standing over a sleeping Mendoza like Rod Serling with somewhere else to be. “Don’t wake him,” he says. “He’ll be having his Night Terrors soon.” He does not stay in the wraparound either, which is part of the fun, and he plays the whole thing completely straight.
If you did not watch the embed and want a sense of the humor anyway, the teaser Adult Swim put out a few weeks back (we wrote it up at the time) is a sketch called “One of Us,” in which Mendoza is minding his own business in a library when a middle-aged man peers through the shelves to let him know that his wife is Korean. Then another man turns up for Vietnamese. Then a third. None of them are hostile, exactly… they are friendly, and they are deeply weird about being friendly, and every one of them is certain he is paying Mendoza a compliment. That is the joke. Mendoza plays it as a man being buried alive under other people’s good intentions.
And that is the part that stays with you afterward, because Mendoza has said some of these are dreams he actually had. Which means the library sketch is not a random premise, it is a nightmare, and the thing making it one is a succession of older white men who take one look at an Asian-American man and decide the useful thing to tell him is that their wives are Korean, or Vietnamese, or Chinese. None of them are talking to Mendoza. They are talking to a face they think they recognize, and each one arrives certain he is handing over a gift. Nobody raises a voice and nobody has to, and that is exactly why it plays like a bad dream instead of a bit. Mendoza does not leave you to work this out on your own, either… he says it out loud to Buscemi in the opening minutes of episode one, where he directly mentions the series as “the first Asian sketch show ever”, which is about as clear a statement of intent as a sketch show ever gives you.
The guest list across the season is worth the ticket on its own: Buscemi, Thomas Lennon, Marc Maron, Fred Melamed, Haley Joel Osment, Randall Park, Wanda Sykes, and Eva Victor, with more besides. That is a lot of people saying yes to a first-time showrunner, and around here we tend to read that as a signal.
Behind the camera it comes from Avalon (Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Workaholics, Starstruck, Taskmaster), executive produced by Mendoza alongside Aaron Brown, David Martin, and Jonathan Stern, with Jim Fagan and David Machajewski as co-executive producers and Emma Ferreira producing.
The original music is by Christopher Bear, and that one made us sit up. Bear drums for Grizzly Bear, plays with Dirty Projectors, scored Past Lives with Daniel Rossen, and handled the music on High Maintenance. Hiring him to score an eleven-minute sketch show is not a normal line item, and it says something about what everyone involved thinks this is.
“There’s nothing more exciting than finding a creator with a voice that feels completely their own, and Jordan is exactly that,” said Cameron Tang, SVP and Head of Development and Current Series for Adult Swim. “He’s funny, brutally honest, and impossible to mistake for anyone else.”
One last thing, because we read a lot of press releases around here and this one was different. Adult Swim published Mendoza’s own quote rather than the polished version. It reads like a text message. “Wowee! I can’t believe this is finally happening,” it opens, before he mentions that he dreamed the last few years of making the show had all been an elaborate prank, and that he cried that morning, and that they should feel free to run the template quote instead if they need something that sounds like a quote. Networks do not usually let that out of the building.
The Terrors of Jordan Mendoza premieres tonight, Sunday September 13, at midnight ET/PT on Adult Swim, with new episodes weekly. Episode one is on YouTube now, which means you can watch it twice (or more, if you think it’s THAT entertaining) before it technically airs.
We are covering every episode here, with the first recap going up tomorrow, and we are doing it as a crew rather than as one guy talking to himself. So once you have watched it, tell us what you thought. The comments are open down below, we are in the Discord all night, and we are on Bluesky, Threads, Facebook and Tumblr if that is more your speed. A few of you are going to end up quoted on the site, and it does not matter which door you come through.
Updated: we will add HBO Max, digital purchase, or adultswim.com options here if and when any of them are announced.
