The showrunners and co-creators discuss how, for now, they’ve concluded their hilarious Hulu animated comedy, wrapping up key arcs, keeping others hanging, and always pushing for what great adult animation can deliver for audiences.
It’s been a long, sometimes raucous, usually chaotic, and always funny run for the family of Shlorpians in Hulu’s original animated comedy, .But all good things must eventually come to an end.
Produced by 20th Television Animation and executive produced by Mike McMahan, Josh Bycel and Sydney Ryan, the NSFW series centers around a crew of four aliens evenly split on whether Earth is awful or awesome: Korvo (Dan Stevens) and Yumyulack (Sean Giambrone) only see the pollution, crass consumerism, and human frailty while Terry (Thomas Middleditch) and Jesse (Mary Mack) love TV, junk food and fun stuff.Though they began their accidental Earthly existence as a team, these four aliens have become an unconventional family.And… in Season 6, the series’ final season, when the Solar Opposites’ diamond making machine gets destroyed, they must face their greatest challenge yet: living their expensive lives on a budget! When their consumerist habits and expensive hobbies are gone, only their true selves will remain...
but will they like who they find? In addition, the epic story of the people of The Wall has all built to this thrilling and shocking conclusion… Check out the trailer: In a recent conversation with McMahan and Bycel, who also co-created the series, the pair described how they approached the show’s conclusion, including a few teases without spoilers, and how they tried to give fans closure without shutting every door.The discussion also touched on budgets, creative choices, Disney lawyers, and how much of the show’s high production value stems from “hardly any reuse ever.” “I guess I just want to… it’s been a great run on a great show,” I said as we began.“Each season, you guys have delivered a substantial, great looking, funny-ass show.
The production value, the humor… there’s no trivial pixels ever on any episode.But’s there’s a lot of funny ones.” McMahan laughed when I asked what they could share about the season.“Josh, do you want to lightly tease without giving anything away? What do we got coming?” “Yes,” Bycel said.
“Well, it’s in the trailer, so I think we can give away the fact that the Solars lose all their money this year.And we love that because it allows us to go in different directions.You know, they need to get jobs.
All of a sudden, the replicants go from being shitty, terrible students to try-hard smart kids, you know? Terry has to get a job for the first time ever.And if we hadn’t done that, we wouldn’t have found out that Terry is about to become a famous, amazing romantic novelist, you know?” McMahan interjected, “Well, he did work at Ookie Cookie in Season 2.But just for a minute.” Bycel continued, “I love that we’re able to set them off in a different direction.
That also makes them a little more human.They actually have issues.They actually have real world problems.
Right now, Terry has to give up his amazing collection of celebrity fart jars because, you know, they’re tightening the belt.” “Too many spoilers.Come on, come on,” McMahan joked.Bycel added, “And on the Wall side, it’s in the trailer so I can give it away.
The Duke comes back, which we teased a little bit.And this season is really sort of like a or adventure series.You know, every season we’ve hit a different genre, and this one is like a great adventure for our people.
And the only other thing I can say is that we’ve built up to this over six seasons of the Wall, and the little people finally get what they want.They finally can have…” “Bup bup bup bup.Careful,” McMahan reminded.
“Maybe there are ramifications, that is all I was going to say,” Bycel finished.McMahan circled back to the larger design of the season.“I’d say that my favorite thing that we got to do this season is we got to make a final season where we really did wrap some stuff up, but we also didn’t.
It’s not just business as usual, right? Like you get a full, funny, unexpected season of television that finishes some stuff, and it opens doors to others.It’s a big celebration not only of and all these things that we do, but in how much we love to make animated comedies.What you can do in an animated comedy that, as an audience, when you’re watching, is like, ‘Okay, I’ll allow that because it’s animated.’ And the team making this show, from the artists to the writers to the voice actors to the composers to the editors, everybody, everybody, everybody is laughing the entire time.
We’re all having a blast.” McMahan and Bycel rarely, if ever, had to dial back or abandon places they wanted to take the show.But there was that time… “There have been a couple times where we've gotten a call from Disney IP lawyers being like, ‘Guys, we love you.But this thing you're making fun of right here in this disgusting way, that does make the company a lot of money,” McMahan reveals.
“So maybe figure something else out.And usually, what’s nice is that I'll talk with the lawyers at length and find a thing where they're like, ‘You can do that.’ And it's equally ridiculous.So, whenever we're making fun of IP and stuff, we've never not gotten to do what we wanted.
It's just taken more conversations with lawyers than I thought.But they're usually the first fans of the show that want it to be funny.” He chuckled and continued, “And then occasionally, there's something that's literally so graphic or ridiculous that I end up undoing something I did.Like an extremely graphic sex scene in ‘The Wall’ first season, where I was like, ‘Guys, this is wrong.
We need to do this in silhouette.People are going to turn this show off.Sherry giving birth in the Pez dispenser was originally going to be super fucked up and graphic.
And I was like, ‘You know, this kind of feels male gazey.I'm not sure we should do this.’ So, we've always gotten full support and trust to execute the show.” While discussing how they approached the new season, they said there were never shortages of ideas on where to finish up the series.Of the show’s various challenges, finding new storylines was never on the list.
“It’s not hard to break stories for this show,” Bycel shared.“We have lots of places these characters can go.And there were episodes that we’ve talked about for years.
We finally got in an episode where they all think they’re the dads… because they’re of the family.We talked about doing that episode for years.So, I think a challenge was knowing that this was our last season — for now — so we get in some of the things that we had up on our mental corkboard for five years or six years.
And then the other challenge, obviously, was trying to wrap up both the Wall and the story in a way that felt like we were giving our fans an ending while also keeping ourselves open for more.We didn’t know 100% for sure this was the final season.But obviously we hope that in a world where things come back, there’s more to go to.
So that was the big challenge: really give it a definitive end but also open us up and the audience up for many more seasons to come.” This balance — finish what matters and leave room for more — shaped how the team thought about character movement as well as the scale of the Wall arc.It also shaped the day-to-day work, which, by their account, was still about making choices inside constraints.McMahan noted, “Well, you watch a lot of animation, so I think you understand that with the budget we’re working with, and with how much we’re doing… not only the backgrounds, but the characters, the storylines, how good it looks, and how we’re always on time, you know, rain or shine or pandemic… we get our job done, we have our fun, and hopefully it feels pretty effortless.
But, you know, animation is all about finding reuse, right? Like, how often can they be standing in the living room? How many times can we get to Homer at his workstation, at the power plant? And then you have where it’s like hardly any reuse ever.And it’s still doing things that are always pushing what you can do in adult animation.But you’re always having a blast while that’s happening.
It never feels like schoolwork.Hopefully.” As we wrapped up, I asked about what comes next.“Well, we’d love to do more if anybody’s open for it,” McMahan said.
“I’ve got that’s going to be airing somewhere in the Paramount ecosystem next year, which I’m really proud of, based on the old Sega game.And then Josh and I are both, you know, cooking away on new projects and with new concepts, both animated and live-action.But we’re in contact with the entire team constantly, like we are working with the writers.
We’re talking to our friends in production.So, you know, hopefully everything seems to be cyclical, and maybe some good things could come back instead of only bad things all the time.So hopefully someday we will brighten your doorstep with more .
But if not, we’re working on a lot of other options to bring you guys some laughs in other ways too.” They both concluded with their feelings of genuine joy at the opportunity to produce the show.“I just feel like we're lucky to get to do this,” McMahan said.“The freedom to create has been insane.” Bycel concurred.
“That's what I was going to say.We're so lucky and incredibly blessed to be able to have made one season, let alone six.Hulu has been such a great partner and allowed us to go crazy and make the show we wanted to make.
I've been in this business a long time.I've never gotten to do that at this level.” McMahan then offered up, “I think our audience is smart, unlike everybody else.Every executive thinks audiences are dumb, and you need to reiterate everything all the time.
Or they might not think they're dumb, just distracted.Right? But to me, I think we live in an era where when you turn a show on, you're probably paying attention and you're probably the smartest person in the room.So, let's do a show for those people, that's weird and dumb and funny and thoughtful and unabashedly queer and unabashedly excited for its own characters to be doing crazy things.
Doing everything I love about animated shows, and then everything those shows weren't allowed to do altogether has just been awesome.I've loved it.I'm really sad it's ending, but I'm really proud of what we've done.”
Dan Sarto is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network.
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