‘Smiling Friends’ Creators Say They’re “Allergic To Messages,” Will Never Do “Serialized, Serious Moments”
Despite the latest season of Smiling Friends joking about heavier topics than its predecessors, series creators Zach Hadel and Michael Cusack have made it clear that they have no interest in turning the beloved Adult Swim comedy series into a platform for heavy-handed ‘lessons of the day’.
The pair spoke to their shared creative vision for Charlie and Pim’s workplace future during a recent interview with Variety‘s Jack Dunn, as conducted prior to Smiling Friends‘ Season 3 premiere and eventually published on October 20th.
Met with the observation from their host as to how “I’ve heard you both say that Smiling Friends is made exclusively for laughs, but in this season, I feel the show waded into stronger thematic territory”, Hadel took the lead and admitted that despite episodes like the Mr. Frog-centric Le Voyage Incroyable de Monsieur Grenouille delving into responsibility and self-fulfillment, neither he nor Cusack were looking to abandon the series’ comedy roots in favor of such drama:
“I feel like we’re averse to serious episodes. I obviously know that we have the Mr. Frog episode [the aforementioned Le Voyage Incroyable, in which the amphibian terror is forced to face the fact that his aggressively psychotic behavior was him avoiding his own self-failure], but I don’t view that as our serious episode. I view that as like, I know the word subversive is kind of over said, but I think it’s a subversion.
“When you have the dinner scene with Mr. Frog and the dad, it’s done very straight. It’s done like a proper, prestige TV kind of thing. But the undertone is still comedy. It’s still a real man painted green in shorts, pouring his heart out. Those sorts of moments are played for, number one, the story, but also, just to be shocking. We want people to go, ‘Holy shit!’ That’s the goal of that. It was just to say, ‘Hey, let’s play with a genre and be shocking and subversive and still bring it back to comedy.’ [I don’t see that as] form breaking. We’re not gonna do serialized, serious moments.”
Adding to his partner’s thoughts, Cusack agreed, “We’re kind of allergic to messages.”
“We never want to be at the end of an episode saying, ‘I learned something today and blah, blah, blah.’ What we try to do is thematic questions. So in the first episode [of Season 3, Silly Samuel] the thematic question is, ‘Should I kill myself, or should I not?’ Obviously, it’s answered in the right way.
“We’re lucky enough that the show was born out of optimism, and we always were anti-nihilist shows. So, oftentimes the thematic question is hovering around those kinds of themes, and then hopefully answering the right thing. Like the Mole Man episode [aptly titled Mole Man, which centers on the eponymous creature’s parasocial fanboy obsession with Charlie and Pim] is like, ‘Should I be addicted to fandom or do something positive with my life?’
From there pressed by Dunn for their insights into the Mole Man episode, Hadel asserted, “We obviously are aware that we’re a growing show. We’re not like The Simpsons” so we don’t want to make a meta episode where it’s like, ‘Yeah, we’re cool and everyone’s in on it.’ That was more broadly about the relationship between fandoms and shows, and like, what is that?
“The realistic dialogue thing [at one point, the Mole Man demands Charlie and Pim act like they normally do when he’s not around, but proceeds to try and interject himself with completely off-the-mark jokes and comments], that’s probably the most meta it gets, honestly. Some people, not a lot, but some people I saw said, ‘Oh, Season 2 had too much of that stuff.’ We actually pulled back. There were times when he said, ‘The Smiling Friends.’
Likewise, Cusack asserted, “The most important thing is we’re commenting on fandom isolated. And obviously, we’re a show too, so it’s going to have crossover. But it’s not commenting on fans. It’s more commenting on, ‘In a fantasy world, what could the worst fan in the world be like?’
“We’re all fans of something. So it’s commenting on a part of your psyche, and if you get too obsessed with something, here are the downsides. So, no specific show we’re commenting on, and not us at all. When we say the realistic dialogue, maybe it’s getting a little bit unconsciously meta there? But we really want to avoid that.”
New episodes of Smiling Friends are currently headed out on assignment every Sunday night through November 23rd on Adult Swim.
