If you think about it, episode 1 straight up confirms that they're brain scans and not real people.
Let me remind you how episode 1 has ended:
As you can see, there is a computer with a headset, but there's no person in front of the computer wearing the headset. When Pomni had entered the circus, she talked about putting a headset on, which would be her last memory before her brain was scanned.
So basically, TADC is a 9-episode-long therapy session padded with wacky adventures. Technically, such a show could work if it had complex characters and not one-dimensional ones like in TADC. Only Jax has any form of character development; everyone else basically remains the same throughout these 9 episodes.
Episode 1 establishes that the story is about escaping the circus and not about these characters overcoming their insecurities, which is what this cartoon is actually supposed to be about. Subverting expectations can be done masterfully, but what TADC did is anything but masterful. This idea of escaping the circus comes up in the first episode, then we get 5 episodes in a row that don't even acknowledge it, and then it finally returns for the last 3. This is just poor pacing.
Therapy talks, another staple of the show, are not present in the pilot episode. Every single episode has several minutes of characters venting, except the first one. It's not even a gradual shift from having just a small amount of venting to a complete therapy session; it's just complete therapy sessions in every episode since the second one. What makes this even worse is that basically none of the characters have any depth to them.
Murder Drones, despite its numerous flaws, actually manages to have a story with real progression. MD's pilot establishes that the show is "robots violently killing each other + cringey millennial dialogue," and guess what? Every episode stays true to this premise. The only addition other episodes had to the core concept was a mystery-solving element, which would drive the story forward. If I remember correctly, Liam originally wanted MD to be episodic, with this mystery element being added in later on for season 2, but this idea got abandoned for reasons unexplained. This would also explain why MD's story has such terrible pacing. In the end, having a story with such a rushed progression is still better than a story with basically no progression.
While there's an excuse for MD having a bad story, TADC doesn't have any. Cooper had a lot of control over his cartoon, and there is no indication of there being any change in the story midway through TADC's production. We got a bad story because Cooper just couldn't write complex characters for his character-driven story.
Also, this idea of a show being comedy on the outside and character-driven drama on the inside reminds me of Kevin Can F**k Himself. KCFH is basically a parody of your average sitcom that breaks up the typical sitcom comedy format by inserting serious drama into it. The show itself is okay, I think. The reason why I'm mentioning this is because it proves that what TADC was trying to do can be done, but you're going to need someone who can actually write and not someone who wants to transform into a car and then get fucked in the exhaust pipe.
Just like The Matrix.
