The Big Picture

A big hit since 2020, “Solar Opposites” tackles vengeful ex-boyfriends, time stops, favorite subplots like The Wall.
Creator Mike McMahan and writer Josh Bycel have considered spin-offs, but want audience surprises always.
No endgame in mind for “Solar Opposites,” with Disney legal giving minor script tweaks for network humor.

Solar Opposites has been a big hit for Hulu since it first debuted on the service back in 2020. Since then, the series has gone through a number of changes, including recasting Korvo, one of the series’ main characters, from Season 4 onwards. The animated sitcom recently launched its fifth season, with the new episodes having the makeshift alien family tackle new situations involving vengeful ex-boyfriends, stopping the flow of time for a honeymoon, as well as continuing fan-favorite subplots such as The Wall and Silver Cops.

I was fortunate enough to sit down with the series’ creator, Mike McMahan as well as Josh Bycel, one of the writers on the series. We talked about possible spin-offs, whether there’s an endgame in mind, and what would it be like if Terry and Korvo met the characters from McMahan’s other adult animated series: Star Trek Lower Decks.

Solar Opposites A family of aliens move to middle America, where they debate whether life is better there or on their home planet.Release Date May 8, 2020 Seasons 5

Why Don’t Korvo and Terry Wear Wedding Rings?
“…we definitely talked about it.”

COLLIDER: I wanted some clarification on something. Before watching the new season, I rewatched the Valentine’s Special, and I realized that Season 5 begins directly after Season 4.

MIKE MCMAHAN: The Valentine’s Special happens between Episodes 1 and 2. We wanted to have them get married in the Valentine’s Day Special because we wanted it to be a celebration, but we also wanted to air it near Valentine’s Day, so it put it out of order. But we’re hoping that people forgive us for the little bit of time dilation that happens because you can tell from Episode 2 on, these bad boys are married as fuck. [Laughs]

JOSH BYCEL: But Nate, we did talk about that and map it out. Technically, it happens in canon between Episodes 1 and 2, but you caught that. Not a lot of people caught it.

MCMAHAN: We even talked about, like, “Should we draw wedding rings on them?” And everybody was like, “Homer [from The Simpsons] doesn’t wear a wedding ring.” You know what I mean? And I was like, “I know. Okay, fine.” I was convinced not to make the artist keep track of a wedding ring, but we definitely talked about it.

I am also a big fan of your work on Lower Decks , and I kept thinking what would Terry and Korvo do if they met the crew of the Cerritos? Have you ever pictured that in your head?

MCMAHAN: Oh, man, I think they’d have to only have them talk to Dr. T’Ana because she understands swearing as much as the Solars do. It’s too bad none of the Solars met Tomblr in the SilverCops story this year because they’d be like, “Wow, you sound a lot like Boimler on Lower Decks,” because it was fun to have Jack Quaid jump over. They know Jerry O’Connell, though. They’d hear Jerry O’Connell’s voice coming out of Ransom, and they’d be like, “Wait a minute, we’ve hung out with you.” [Laughs]

But I think at the end of the day, the Lower Decks team would really like to meet them and get to know about them and respect their culture, and the Solar Opposites would probably, like, try to steal their stuff and fucking ruin the ship and then have sex on the bridge and stuff like that. I don’t know how the mix would work.

Will There Ever Be a ‘Solar Opposites’ Spin-Off?
We want the audience to always be surprised at all times.
Image via Hulu

Because you brought up the SilverCops, and it keeps going through my mind because it’s probably my favorite part of the show, one of my favorite parts is the Wall and the SilverCops. There’s been so much speculation, and I keep seeing people being like, “Oh, they’re leading to a spin-off.” Have you ever considered doing either of those as spin-offs or do you always want to keep those attached?

MCMAHAN: What’s funny is that there are two guiding lights on the show. [One] is we love TV, so we’re constantly pushing to be like, “Let’s do holiday specials, let’s do big finales, let’s do these serialized stories, let’s change genres…” There’s the whole episode where we do the Looney Tunes kind of Chuck Jones homage. This is a show that loves TV and spin-offs. I love spin-offs. I love backdoor pilots. I love that there’s a backdoor pilot, like, almost instantly in Star Trek: The Original Series. I’ve actually pitched a really funny spin-off of Solar Opposites.

The other guiding light is to never do anything you guys expect. We want the audience to always be surprised at all times. So, if we spun the Wall or SilverCops off, it wouldn’t be as weird and fun as they are now. You know what I mean? They would just become more expected. So, the spin-offs that we’ve talked about are things that you guys out there just can’t even imagine, like crazy, funny shit.

I want to go back to that Chuck Jones episode because it was probably my favorite episode of this season. The show has such a knack for pop culture, and I am very curious: Had it ever crossed your mind to do an episode like that before? Was that a new idea, or was it something you always wanted to do from the get-go?

BYCEL: I’m just gonna say this, in story-breaking, when we break episodes, we always try to start from a place of, “What would a sitcom do? What would Modern Family have done? What would a sitcom do?” And so this episode started with, “What if your kids came home and said they were being bullied?” It’s a standard story. What we always do, and Mike is great at this, is, “How can we twist that out the first four minutes into something else?” Obviously, Chuck Jones is a lodestar and a hero for animation and all that stuff, but ultimately, I think what it is is we always have these things in the back of our heads, and then when we’re breaking our stories, which is so fun to do these stories, it comes up in the moment. Mike was like, “This is the perfect time to do a Chuck Jones thing now.” Not many shows would do it for 10 minutes of the episode.

MCMAHAN: That’s the surprise.

BYCEL: Yes, that’s the surprise, and that’s what makes Solar so much fun. And Hulu and 20th and Disney have been amazing about us running with our passions. I think that most shows would do it for a scene; we decided to do it for the bulk of the episode.

MCMAHAN: That really is like, “Wait, are they really gonna do this?” That moment where the audience is starting to be like, “They’re still doing it,” I love that the Wall is like we took Itchy & Scratchy and made it half of the show. The big inspiration for the Looney Tunes episode this season was the invisibility episode the previous season, where we basically were like, “Let’s do an episode in which the characters become invisible, and because they’re invisible, they can’t see because the light isn’t hitting anything in their eyes and basically tell a story like a stage play in a cartoon with nobody on screen.” That episode came out so fucking well that my brain was cooking on, “What are other things we can do with these characters that really test the limits of the kind of fun we can have with animation that nobody else can do?” That’s where the “what if” episode comes from, too, of like, “Let’s do a what if where they never get to do a what if.” That kind of stuff is really special to Solar. Because we’ve created a show where you can expect the unexpected, then we never get punished when we do that, when we have fun with it.

Is There an Endgame in Sight for ‘Solar Opposites’?
Image via Hulu

One of my favorite parts of the show is that it’s built up like a family sitcom, and it feels like something like The Simpsons or Family Gu y, where it could keep going and going. But I know so many shows always have to have an endgame. Do you guys have an endgame or is the plan just to keep this going until Hulu is like, “No?”

MCMAHAN: We haven’t talked about an endgame right now. Animation is so deciduous, anytime something goes away, it seems like, “Take a couple of years off and then regrow,” like mint in a garden where you’re like, “I can’t get rid of this fucking thing.” But no, we are not telling a big serialized story. We’re telling stories about a group, like a family, that is living their lives, and you could just keep telling stories forever. There are elements of it that could resolve, you know what I mean? Like, I have a final SilverCops episode that’ll hit, and then you won’t see SilverCops after that. That story will resolve. There’s some stuff with the Wall, too, that we have in mind, but then something else could grow in those places.

Solar Opposites is a show, but it’s also almost a network where movies or other shows can happen within it, and you’re always getting these family stories. That’s the real joy of it. We don’t want to feel like there’s a final episode of an animated sitcom about a family because the family is gonna keep going.

I noticed in one of the episodes that Korvo says, “We have a note from Hulu for us to stick together,” and it makes me very curious: Do they give you a lot of freedom, or did they ever say, “Oh, no, you can’t say that about Disney,” or things like that?

MCMAHAN: Well, they give us an immense amount of freedom. Disney legal gives us a little less freedom because they’re very good at their jobs, but there’s never been something on the show that we couldn’t do because of a note. We’ve edged something to be less vulgar but still vulgar. Josh, I don’t know about you, but even when we’re dealing with legal and stuff, they love the show, too, and they’re trying to figure out ways for us to get to do whatever we want without triggering a lawsuit. [Laughs]

BYCEL: This show is the way it is because Hulu very early on, and 20th, gave great notes, but also knew we were trying to do something a little different. They have been great supporters of us the whole time. The Disney legal people are doing their job, and yeah, we probably shouldn’t say that about Chewbacca or R2-D2, some of the most popular things in the history of the world. But most of the time, when we’re goofing on Hulu, it’s just because we like goofing on Hulu. They’re great, great partners.

MCMAHAN: Nate, you know what the weird thing is? One thing they let us do — which in hindsight, I’m like, “Why do we do that?” but now it’s part of the show — is because we love TV, and we always see product placement, we put tons of product placement in the show, but we don’t talk to those companies or make any money to do it. We’re just doing it to, like, make it look like there’s product placement because it makes us laugh. But then I see folks online being like, “These guys are such shills. They must make so much money on product placement.” And I’m like, “Oh no, we don’t make shit.” We literally are just doing that because we thought it would be funny for aliens to be eating Taco Bell. That was one of the things they let us get away with because, usually, you can’t do that. Usually, they’re like, “No, no, no, no, instead of Taco Bell, it’s gotta be called Zappo Schmell.” But pulling in real-world brands and real-world properties into a show this ridiculous was funny to me. But now people don’t realize that was a joke, and they just think I’m a shill, so maybe I could have pumped the brakes on that. [Laughs] I don’t know.

I am a huge fan of the show and cannot wait for the Halloween Special. The Holiday Specials are incredible.

MCMAHAN: Look forward to the Halloween Special. It’s a direct sequel of the last one and we kind of play with the structure of The Santa Clause for it, but in the Halloween Special, the Tim Allen movie. Then in Season 6, which we’re working on right now, it’s fucking bonkers. It’s great. And the way the Wall ends in Season 5 leads to an insane Wall story in Season 6, so I’m really excited for people to see it.

Solar Opposites Season 5 is now streaming on Hulu.

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