From one part to the other, the city seems to continue, in perspective, multiplying its repertory of images: but instead it has no thickness, it consists only of a face and an obverse, like a sheet of paper, with a figure on each side, which can neither be separated nor look at each other.

Italo Calvino

In this chapter I study the ways in which two animated sitcoms – the popular FOX show The Simpsons, and Mike Judge's critically acclaimed King of the Hill – make use of the qualities particular to their medium, genre, and especially their material, or texture, in order to signify their setting. I concentrate on three textural qualities in particular: what is often called plasticity or elasticity, that is, the extent to which animation can render its environment, objects and characters elastic; what I will come to call ‘in-betweenness’: the sense in which animation is an effect of the intervals between images rather than the images themselves; and, constituting the central part of my argument, flatness, pertaining to the fundamental two-dimensionality of drawn images. My argument is that these shows problematise each of these qualities by, first, contrasting these qualities with the conventions of the sitcom, and second, by reflecting upon these qualities in the tradition of what is often called ‘flat animation’, thereby – whether purposefully or unintentionally – problematising the spatiality of the suburb as well. Taking my cue from the philosopher David Kolb, who has suggested that seemingly simple places might too be structurally complex, I argue that The Simpsons and King of the Hill's so called ‘flat animation’ need not necessarily be synonymous with superficiality and monotony but might very well indicate another kind of complexity.