On Newer Shows and Blandness

I've been trying to watch shows like Gravity Falls and Steven Universe and Adventure Time, but something about them isn't doing anything for me. I'm not feeling that click I have with older cartoons that I liked. I'm not feeling that "I would watch this show multiple times in the future" feeling I have for shows like Rocko's Modern Life or Catdog or whatever. At best, the first shows I mentioned had a few nice moments, but the episodes they'd come from would on the whole be bland and at best inoffensive.

I think the problem might be the age of the characters. Rocko's Modern Life had their main cast in prolly their 20s. That didn't mean much as a kid, but their insanity was grounded and eventually relatable. Catdog was outrageously ballsy for having its entire world basically populated by scumbags (or at best spiteful morons). Home Movies, which might be a bad example since it's aimed at older viewers, has young characters but with mostly mature situations. I'd say "bad example" but people watched Simpsons when they were younger. Hell, Ren and Stimpy are prolly even older, in their 40s or someshit. It wasn't a blatant or explicit element, but it was there in a way; a subtle, underplayed gravitas that all the "big character establishing moments" of these new shows don't actually have.

Another problem is I don't think there's much mileage to be had from the extremely shallow "school-age kid doing fantastic things" character age group. There's only so many ways it can be used. I don't think I'm just dulled to new cartoons, I think there's something fundamentally flawed about these new shows, something that's missing. Maybe cartoons and writers are playing things deliberately too safe so they don't get canceled. Maybe networks have a vicegrip on everyone's balls so that they can't do that maturity tailored to get by the censors that made a lot of older shows so memorable. Maybe people are so self-aware of tricks people use cuz of the internet and focus groups on the cartoons they all love that risks don't exist and everyone's talking in the safest way they can so no one is offended. Maybe we've gotten too self-aware to make actual jokes anymore, where everything anyone says is just a droning ironic static.

Hell, maybe the camaraderie that spawned a lot of ideas in Rocko has been indefinitely snuffed and doesn't exist between the teams behind the shows anymore, so it's just people who don't know each other making things to throw on the air and entertain people who will overthink things and make them seem better than they are because they're bored and have a bland open canvas to vomit their conjecture onto.