Dan HarmonandLisa Hanawaltare pretty different people with a few big things in common: namely, that they’re two of the most notable and creatively exciting voices working today in adult-skewing animation, and they’ve both found a home on Adult Swim.Tuca & Bertie, Hanawalt’s wildly acclaimed original series about two bird lady best friends living their best and most hilarious lives (despite coping with mental health issues and addiction), is about to debut its second season on the WarnerMedia-owned network after a surprising cancellation by Netflix. Meanwhile,Rick and Morty, which Harmon co-created withJustin Roiland, is about to return for its fifth season after Adult Swim really showed them the love with a 70-episode renewal, meaning that there will be seasons more of the show in the future.
Via Zoom, I was lucky enough to speak to the two creators together, and discover that while their shows might be pretty different in terms of voice and style, they were very in sync on a number of topics, including the experience of working with Adult Swim, their respective approaches to world-building, and the future of animation.
Collider: Thanks for doing this today — I’m very excited to see how you guys talk with each other, because I imagine you have a lot in common.
DAN HARMON: It gets pretty crazy.
LISA HANAWALT: It’s frankly profane.
HARMON: Yeah, not sure what to say about it. It’s certainly not on the right side of history, the way Lisa talks to me.
HANAWALT: It’s not technically English either.
HARMON: It’s kind of like a weird fairy language. It’s Gaelic-based, but yeah. Well, let’s get to it. What do you want me to talk to Lisa about?
Well, both of you have the experience now of coming to Adult Swim after working with other networks — what was that transition like, and what have you found to be the difference with Adult Swim?
HANAWALT: It’s nice to work with a network where really, animation is their thing. They understand the process of it, they want to support every aspect of what we want to do, they want us to be gross and funny and weird. Yeah, it’s just nice. It’s a nice place to be.
Dan, do you have thoughts on this?
HARMON: Well, I do. Yeah. I mean, they’re kind of the thoughts that I think any viewer would have if they watchedTucaand then heard that it was canceled, and then heard that it was going to Adult Swim. Just for all the reasons that you might think it’s like, “Oh, this is exactly what this thing needs,” and Adult Swim really knows how to nurture things. It’s the right place for that show. I don’t want to poop on any media corporations for any of their decisions, who knows why they make–
HANAWALT: We’re still trying to make other sales. We’re still trying to set up meetings with them.
HARMON: But it is easy enough to say, “Oh, what a relief.” I mean, I wish it had happened withBoJack. And I don’t even want to pick at that carpet unless Lisa wants to talk about the experience with that. But it was like, I mean, yeah, that show should have lasted forever maybe Raphael didn’t want it to, I don’t know.
HANAWALT: He could have kept going for sure. He had more stories to tell. Yeah. It’s nice to be at a network where it feels like, oh, this could have been the home in the first place, honestly. For this type of show, I think it fits what Adult Swim’s ethos is.
[Editor’s note: Raphael Bob-Waksberg createdBoJack Horseman, which Hanawalt production designed and produced.]
HARMON: It’s easy for people to forget exactly to what extentRick and Morty, the phenomenon that it became, how much of that was… I guess engineered sounds like there’s disingenuousness to it, but it was how much of that was performed by Adult Swim, that the faith that they put into the show before they had any data to suggest it was going to be met with profit, they had made this decision, like, “Let’s do this crazy promotion.” And the people that Adult Swim goes out to when they’re branding your show and stuff, they are unlike the kinds of teams that get assembled at other networks. For sure. There’s a love there.
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For you, Dan, what hasRick and Mortybeing renewed for 70 episodes meant to you, in terms of thinking about the future of the show?
HARMON: It was definitely… it felt like tenure. It felt like permission to, relax is probably the wrong word, but removing from the table the part of your job that is justifying your show’s existence is a really healthy thing for some creatives. I mean, one can tell from watchingTuca & Bertie, that that’s the case with that show. Let it go for a thousand episodes. It’s not going to get lazy because there’s nothing about that show that says, “Oh, well, we’d love to have a TV show because it’s easier than washing dishes.” It’s just like, let me connect with you. Let me show you my map of the universe. And so yeah, sorry, that’s a weird answer to your question, but that’s because it seems kind of obvious. Yeah. Getting a 70-episode order is cool. Now we can kind of relax a certain part of our brain.
HANAWALT: It’s nice to have that stability for your team as well, for your crew, I must say.
HARMON: Yeah. Well, I hadn’t even thought about that, the industrial aspect. If you have storyboard artists that are destined to become directors, now the new thing is those people are five minutes from Netflix just dumping a bucket of money on their heads, and it is a great help if you may say to them, it’s clinically proven that there’s job security here. There’s a 70-episode order, so please stick with us.
I’m really glad to hear that it’s a relaxing thing, because I could also personally imagine being just completely overwhelmed by that.
HARMON: Nah. Too big to fail, baby.
HANAWALT: It’s what you do well, so it’s nice to know that you can continue to do it year after year.
Of course. And one lovely aspect of it is that with that kind of runway, you get to keep experimenting with the show. For both of you, how have you approached just the basic concept of the show’s status quo? The idea that, similar toThe Simpsons, everything resets with them back on the couch eventually. Because I feel like you have different approaches.
HARMON: Yeah. I guess there’s an inherent sort of, we want to hit the reset button for our own purposes, because we don’t want the Enterprise’s bridge to be refurnished every episode ofStar Trek, we want to see the family back at the breakfast table. We want things to have a kind of baseline Huck Finn and Jim need a raft. I mean, at Adult Swim, if you really wanted to, I mean, we could just say, “Well, their house exploded, so they live in space now,” and maybe we would do that in a kind of experimental way. But yeah, I guess that’s the thing that you just carry with you when you love TV, you’re kind of like, “Actually I want there to be a sense of home and family.”
For you, Lisa, I feel like the status quo question is an interesting one becauseTuca & Bertieis so rich in terms of its character growth and the journeys of its characters, and you may’t necessarily have that if you are constantly resetting.
HANAWALT: I know. It’s the problem showing them going through all this stuff and changing while having them remain the same as well, so they’re still returning to the characters we love, and they have their built-in flaws that don’t change. But it’s really just a matter of putting them in new environments and seeing how they interact with that and having them go through something, but then come back to their baseline. Yeah. Destroying things, and then having them reset.
In terms of world-building, to what degree do you feel like you have your worlds built, with the rules set up for what’s possible?
HANAWALT: I’m making it up as I go along.
HARMON: Yeah. I mean, we have, from a sci-fi perspective, there’s no limitation, almost to a frustrating degree, but then when your show’s on for long enough, it’s almost beyond your control, this sense of, well, Rick wouldn’t say that, Beth wouldn’t do that, Morty wouldn’t believe that. It’s fascinating how the answers come before you even are allowed to tamper with them. So on a character level, that cement dries pretty quickly, and it’s pretty hard. Hard in both senses of the word, because sometimes that can really box you in and you have to find a way to tell a story about, well, why would Morty be selfish in this particular way? But yeah, the world that we’ve built is literally infinite, period.
HANAWALT: This season, we start to explain a little bit, like why can some birds fly and some can’t, but I don’t know. I don’t want to ever explain too much of the world.
To wrap up, looking at the world of animation right now, what really excites you? What are you seeing happening that you think is changing the game?
HARMON: I mean, it seems like an answer that maybe Adult Swim would be cattle-prodding me to say or whatever, but I do get excited about whatTuca & Bertierepresents, which is animation as more than just… It’s not just for kids anymore, now grownups can enjoy it. Now this is a second threshold to cross where it’s really just a medium. There’s absolutely no expectation or association with it. It is a much more facile way to hear Lisa’s thoughts about relationships between young adult women, for instance, than a single camera show set on these fake-looking sets in a soundstage.
HANAWALT: I’m excited to see different kinds of people creating shows. I think we all kind of have a picture in mind what adult animation is and what kind of audience it is, and I feel like more different kinds of folks are getting chances to create shows and get them greenlit, hopefully. I don’t know. I think it’s an exciting time.
Tuca & BertieSeason 2 premieres Sunday, June 13 at 11:30 p.m. ET.Rick and Mortyreturns for Season 5 on Sunday, June 20.
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