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Object shows are a genre of web-animated cartoons starring a cast of living inanimate objects. Typically, it involves these objects participating in Total Drama-inspired competition game shows for a prize with the setting usually taking place in vast, open fields of unknown location. Cast-wise, it invokes all the stereotypes known in reality TV which includes, but not limited to, the Sadistic Gameshow Host, the Jerk Jock, the Nerdy Intellectual, the Casanova Wannabe, the Nice Guy, the Butt-Monkey (characters who constantly die or get unjustifiably hated on), and the Valley Girl. Also expect to encounter a lot of Death Is Cheap; either the host can revive anyone easily or there's some form of "recovery center" where everyone respawns after death.
The first object show was Battle for Dream Island (BFDI), created by The Huang Twins, Michael and Cary Huang, and released on the 1st of January 2010.note BFDI's first episode has garnered over 60 million views to date, signifying the popularity of the show. Later on 1st April 2011, Adam Katz released Inanimate Insanity (II), the second major object show,* which would find major success and a sizable fanbase although not as comparable to BFDI. From these two shows, it would spawn countless other similar object shows and form the backbone of many common tropes found on these shows as the norm.
However, some object shows deviate from the source material to form their own sub-genres, such as the Slice of Life comedy and the action-adventure instead of competition-based ones. Some are more mature than the usual kid-friendly fare like the gory bloodbath known as Object Terror, or the highly-acclaimed (even outside the OSC) ONE., a Genre Deconstruction of competition-based object shows as a whole. This also gives rise to a new Sub-Genre called "Joke Shows" — described as unconventional object shows with nonsensical plots, joke characters (aka non-objects), deliberately bad humor and Stylistic Suck that pokes fun at traditional but run-of-the-mill shows. There are also object show camps like The Race of Children (TROC), Ten Words of Wisdom or CRAPThatsCool, where people can participate as their own object characters and play against each other.