The new adult animated parody, co-created by Woods with Mike Judge and Brandon Gardner and produced by Oscar-winning ShadowMachine, follows NPR’s third most popular host, a well-meaning puppet - and nimrod - interviewing real celebrity guests with no knowledge of what they’ll be asked, premieres January 25 on Peacock.
There’s some sort of voodoo puppet magic happening at the Oscar-winning ShadowMachine, and with the release of Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio in 2022, the animation studio’s artists have proven their ability to create one-of-a-kind, painted stop-motion characters with hauntingly human realism.
According to animation director Brian Hansen, the secret is getting to know the puppets like you would a person.
“When the puppets first come out on the floor, you pose them in a natural-looking pose, and then you let them start to tell you who they are a little bit,” he explains. “Separate from what you’ve planned, you’ll find certain puppets lend themselves to certain poses and expressions better than others. Then you start to walk with them and find the way they like to walk and move. You lean into the way of the puppet. Then, as you sort the good shots from the bad shots, the character starts growing. Sometimes we make adjustments to the design based on this, but hopefully we’ve already gotten that right.”
Like we said, voodoo magic. But there’s no denying it works, as Pinocchio’s exquisite animation caught the attention of Zach Woods, Mike Judge, and Brandon Gardner, who have since partnered with the studio to create In the Know, a stop-motion adult animated comedy releasing on Peacock Thursday, January 25. The series centers around Lauren Caspian (played by Woods), NPR’s third-most popular host. Lauren’s a well-meaning, hypocritical nimrod whose girlfriend is also named Lauren. Each episode follows the making of an episode of Lauren’s show In the Know, in which Lauren conducts in-depth interviews with real, live-action celebrity guests. The cast includes the voices of J. Smith-Cameron, Caitlin Reilly, Carl Tart, and Judge.
“Brian and his team of other-worldly animators are some of the most talented people I've ever encountered in my entire life,” says Woods, known for his acting work on shows like The Office and Silicon Valley. “They helped us a lot because they made the puppets beautiful and human and complicated. They don't feel like one-dimensional punching bags or archetypes. I remember walking onto the set in Portland and seeing the puppets and I had the feeling of being in a room with real people. And I think that comes through in the very delicate, sensitive performances that Brian and his team got out of these puppets, which I think were made in such a way that they convey a degree of kind of human vulnerability that we were not expecting but were more than happy to exploit.”
Slightly inspired by the Space Ghost interviews from the 90s, where the cartoon superhero would interview real, live-action celebrities, In the Know’s interview segments are unscripted, where writers help write questions and Woods scans an iPad displaying a live Google doc with questions that Gardner is updating. The celebrities – ranging from Mr. T to Jonathan Van Ness – have no advance knowledge of what the interview will be like.
And with the dry, sometimes underhanded, humor of The Office and Silicon Valley going out of style, asking guests agree to an off-the-cuff, no-holds-barred interview with no prompts where they’d have to respond to whatever Woods said, could have easily meant no takers. And Woods says he and his fellow creatives were well aware of this.
“Luckily, we had an incredible booker, Hillary Kun, who worked on The Daily Show,” notes Woods. “We were really punching above our weight in terms of guests, and I don't know what exactly she told them, but they were down to come on and do an improvised interview with a fake NPR host. So, she's obviously excellent at her job.”
He continues, “In terms of the content, we wanted to cover as many blind spots as we could. So, we tried to have a writers’ room of people who had a range of experiences and ideologies so that we could catch each other’s inadvertent, but unfortunate, missteps. The other thing I would say is we're interested in the careful culture of people who have a lot of moral vanity, and a lot of insecurity, and maybe not all that much in the way of sincerity when it comes to these causes. It was this idea of ideology as cosmetics, where your values are a kind of branding for yourself as opposed to something that you actually have to walk the walk on, which is something I'm guilty of all the time in my life. We wanted to explore that virtue signaling and public allyship that is actually more about yourself. We wanted to explore that from an unsparing but, hopefully, warm place.”
Woods came up with the character of Lauren Caspian when Judge, a friend from Woods’ time on Silicon Valley, approached with a proposition for more improvisation work. The series is also Woods’ debut as a television creator.
“When I would improvise on Silicon Valley, I think it often had an NPR-ish bent,” he remembers. “I’m also a generally curious person and ask people a lot of questions and have this coastal elite stink on me. And so, it was during lockdown when Mike called me and was like, ‘Would you ever want to do like an interview show that takes place at NPR?’ Then Brandon came on board and more characters began to be fleshed out and the idea slowly snowballed over the years.”
Then came ShadowMachine.
“When the guys gave me a call and told me about the project, I immediately said yes,” notes Hansen. “But I also told them, ‘I'm not very current. I stopped listening to new music in 1995. And I'm not American, so I’m not particularly up on the internal politics.’ That was my only caveat going into this contemporary space where I haven't really been before in my animation career.”
But having an animation artist come into the project without any pre-conceived notions about how characters should act worked in their favor because, as Hansen says, stop-motion is all about the characters revealing themselves to you. The artist just has to be willing to listen.
“It's a bit like making a live-action film where your actors are nine inches tall and static,” he says. “But they are still actors, and you have to work with them.”
Other stop-motion projects from ShadowMachine include Adult Swim’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenhole, Moral Orel, and Titan Maximum, along with commercials for Honda, Mac, and NBC Sports. But this is the first time ShadowMachine has had the chance to do a comedy project where the puppets are designed with so much detail over the course of a series. In total, ShadowMachine had a crew of about 135 people on the project, with 22 animators.
“I think our animators, puppet makers, and everybody on sets and camera and was on such a high level after finishing Pinocchio, that the team just continued on in that way, working at this really high level of performance, but with a slightly quicker speed,” says Hansen. “Of course, there are constant problems that you have to solve. But it’s amazingly fun. The show is very funny, and it’s easy to love it. And when you love something, you find you can do anything for it.”
Including an elaborate chair montage.
“The dream sequence when Barb goes to the chair store was so important to us,” shares Woods. “Obviously, it's ridiculous. And it's silly. But the truth is that Barb is someone who shrinks herself all the time and amputates big parts of herself to make the people around her comfortable, or because they amputate parts of her, and she lets it happen. It’s so heartbreaking because Barb has this big, beautiful life. She's so intelligent, she's so competent, she has such history, such wisdom, such insight to offer and everyone treats her like the kind of spittoon of the office. So, to have this moment where she gets to connect with her sensuality, her anger, her smoky, colorful, scary, sexy inner her life, it felt important. It’s also a very ambitious thing because she's spinning and her hair changes and the lighting changes and there are shots where she's corkscrewing up and the camera is on a crane. There are so many production hurdles. And these guys just figured it out.”
He continues, “I remember one of these inspirational posters that said, ‘Aim for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.’ With this, I figured, we'll aim for the moon. And if we're lucky, we'll end up 20,000 feet above the earth. But we landed on the fucking moon! We could not ask for a more faithful embodiment of what we dreamed up for Barb.”
Not every piece of the show’s artistic success was so complex. Some seemed simple and childish on the surface, like the Mona Lisa face penis, which gets drawn on one of the puppets in the show as their character sleeps. But even details like this are carefully planned and designed over and over until the look is just right.
“There's so much peripheral malarkey in making something,” shares Woods. “And I assume this is true of everyone's job everywhere, that the part of the job that drew you to a particular field can sometimes shrink to a very small percentage of what you're actually spending your day on. And that's okay. You're still getting to make something you care about in this case, or do a job that is meaningful to you, but there's just a lot of housekeeping and logistics and all that stuff. And in the case of Hollywood, as I imagine with other industries, that stuff can start to feel very distant from what is creative. It can start to feel like there’s one side for the business part of things and another, polar opposite side, for the creative. At that other end of the spectrum are people like Brian and Rob DeSue, who was our production designer, and Georgina Hayns, who designed the puppets, and Michel Amado, who was our DP.”
For Woods, creating In the Know felt like coming home to the creative side of the entertainment industry, as he became indoctrinated into a world of toys with very little thought of profitability.
“These people at ShadowMachine live in Oregon and they go to this workshop, this kind of like Willy Wonka factory, where they make beautiful, tiny beanbag chairs and sweaters and glasses and wigs, and they make them move in a way that captures and expresses delicate, strange, idiotic, funny parts of the human spirit,” says Woods. “And, as far as I can tell, no one is getting filthy rich doing it. But it's a community of people who support each other, who educate each other, who love each other, and who are devoted to making something that is not always even that viable commercially. As I get older and as I have more and more experience of the peripheral malarkey, I develop ever greater feelings of gratitude for people like Brian and the squad at ShadowMachine because they are these beacons of artistic sincerity and care. And that can sound very serious. But there's a scene where a guy draws a penis that looks like the Mona Lisa on an unconscious man's head. That's as dumb as can be. But I can't tell you how many mock-ups we saw of the penis Mona Lisa.”
It’s also not a very popular decision to create a fast-paced, quick-witted comedy series, which takes place primarily inside an office, in stop-motion animation. There are times where the show bounces between flavors of Archer and Tooning Out the News, both of which found a home in the slick transitions and easy facial expressions that come with 2D animation. But In the Know’s humor is coupled with puppets who don’t hide the tired bags under the eyes, the wrinkles of age and stress, or the forehead indentations that have permanently left a mark after so many interviews filled with inquisitive furrowed eyebrows.
“I think why it's not traditionally a way that shows like this are made is because it's prohibitive in terms of time, cost, etc.,” notes Woods. “If you were to make a show like this at a speed that was tenable for television production, it would cost unimaginable money or look like shit. That’s the assumption. And what ShadowMachine has done is, what to me seems like, an act of warfare against all other stop-motion animators because they somehow, with a fairly modest budget and a ludicrously short calendar, delivered on performances that are so dynamic and alive and human. So, they've set an impossible precedent for their peers in the space. And I just hope no one comes up with a pillowcase full of quarters and we meet in a dark alley.”
The sheer volume of animators working on these puppets also played a role in the believably human aspects of their acting.
“The process of stop-motion is so beautiful because each character is inhabited by 20 different animators, so the dimensionality of each of their quirks, each of their preoccupations, each of their own instincts, in terms of animation, come through,” says Woods. “There's a kind of effortless multi-dimensionality. There's a magic in their dimensionality that I find incredibly captivating and kind of witchy and spooky.”
ShadowMachine’s wicked creativity combined with Woods, Judge, and Gardner’s innate sense of all things funny appears to be a winning combination. Woods certainly hopes the audience sees it that way and gives this lovingly crafted series a chance.
“It's a very weird show,” Woods admits. “It would not be hard for me to imagine a situation in which the show was successful, and it would also not be hard for me to imagine a situation in which people don't know what to do with it or don't like it. But in either situation, I will live very happy in the knowledge that I got to work with these people. And we got to make something that reflected our tastes and values.”
Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime. She's reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment. Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.
