Michael Cusack may be best known for the unexpectedly successful series Smiling Friends, but his uniquely bawdy and slightly sweet Australian perspective and colorful Adobe animation style has spawned other comedy hits. His absurdist Aussie variation on Rick and Morty, titled Bushworld Adventures, was a very jarring and funny surprise, and his new series Koala Man has snagged Hugh Jackman and is a hit for Hulu. But his bizarre, fluid TV show YOLO has diverted expectations and traveled into new territory for its creator.

In its second season, now titled YOLO: Silver Destiny, Cusack’s surreal Adult Swim comedy about female friendship, toxic relationships, and growing older has only gotten better. It’s more serialized, incorporates more characters, and has fully embraced the fantasy elements it flirted with in season one, Yolo: Crystal Fantasy.
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The series follows Sarah, a genuinely decent and polite young woman who is stuck in a borderline codependent relationship with her close friend Rachel, an angry party monster. In many ways, the series accurately depicts what it’s like to be in your 20s, adrift between the irresponsible ragers of youth and the responsible doldrums of adulthood, and how we often cling to certain toxic friendships simply because we’re afraid of going through this period alone. Cusack, Sarah Bishop (who voices Sarah), and Todor Manojlovic (who voices Rachel) spoke to MovieWeb about the series, the characters’ growth, and the state of Australian comedy.

YOLO Silver Destiny Plants the Seeds for a Season Finale

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Just like the first season, which ended with a wonderful two-parter filled with character development, season two of YOLO has an epic three-part finale, which is apt considering the more consistent narrative threads throughout it. This season has found the party animals attempting to find a bit more meaning in their lives, sometimes going their separate ways. Sarah is developing a garden, a fitting metaphor for the patience and attention it takes to cultivate growth in a person’s life at that age. Rachel, meanwhile, is working to fulfill her hilariously incongruous destiny to become a dark empress.

The serialization works extremely well for YOLO. “We have a lot of fun doing it,” said Cusack, who has a blast creating epic finales. “We learn more about the characters doing it. It felt satisfying to do, and it got a good response. So when it came to doing this season, the whole season was more serialized in general, and we have two more episodes. So it felt kind of right to do another finale to pay off everything that we’d set up. It’s something to look forward to at the end of the season.”

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“It’s more believable this season than it was in the first season,” added Manojlovic. “I wouldn’t say there’s less chaos, but there’s at least more of a line that you can draw. I, like everybody else, kind of started a garden during the lockdown and the pandemic and everything like that. So, that is a really relatable thing for me, and the idea of having a toxic friend as well, who you still hold on to for some strange reason is also a very relatable thing. You think, why am I sticking around with this person? And then in the end, it’s their loyalty, I suppose.”

“I love the journey of the garden,” said Bishop. “It was a real surprise and delight when I read the scripts. And also because it’s so opposed to partying; YOLO is just like all this chaos, so I really loved that kind of flip. I think it’s also really fun to be involved in a show where these creators, and Adult Swim, kind of take these liberties. This is a show about partying, but now it’s suddenly all about diving into these characters and the smaller moments in their lives, and really kind of exploring those friendships and sitting in that and having the confidence to really go on these character journeys – and then still have chaos around it. It’s just a joy to be involved in a project where I am constantly surprised by the scripts when I see them. And I think that hopefully translates to audiences as well when they tune in, and they’re just as surprised by what’s going to happen.”

Sarah Bishop and a Chill Season of YOLO

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A “journey of the garden” is a good way to describe YOLO: Silver Destiny, which is still vibrantly colorful, imaginative, and comically wild, but has much more patience, growth, tangential characters, and even moments of calm. “The second season is almost the COVID season in a way,” said Cusack, “because a lot of it was written during it and inspired by what was going on at the time. I started a little garden. Partying didn’t seem to make sense during that time, so the inspiration definitely was going to more day to day, relatable stuff like that.”

Sarah, who usually embodies the calmer elements of the series, was thus a touchstone for the second season. “I was liking Sarah a lot more,” continued Cusack. “Initially, she was just supposed to be kind of like a blank vanilla type, a blank slate who will go along with everything. But I just thought, wouldn’t it be interesting to kind of explore her more, because it’s a little bit one note if she’s just like that. Essentially, this was a fun season to really explore the characters and make it a bit more chill, and if we are lucky enough to get another season, it could just go back to the chaos and the partying and probably even more of it, too. This was the more chill season.”

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Even before her character was explored more (and given some wonderfully weirder moments, like when she becomes a literal queen bee), Bishop enjoyed that “blank slate” aspect of Sarah. “I like playing straight characters. I do a lot of other comedy outside YOLO, and to be honest, I usually do default to playing a straight character,” said Bishop, whose comedy group Skit Box has been a viral sensation. “I actually get a real kick out of that, because I know that the more that I can lean into this, the truth of the straight character, the funnier it makes everybody else. So I really like playing that part. That said, I did love the bee episode, and my secret hope is that Sarah does get more chaotic in season three.”

“I agree with you,” added Cusack. “This is such a lame reference. I feel embarrassed even saying it, but a comedy is kind of like Dungeons and Dragons […] Having a straight character is almost like having the warrior, the tank. You couldn’t do a comedy without that. If it was just everyone being wacky and crazy, there’s no grounding point, and it doesn’t really make sense. So I think straight characters are actually as important as wacky characters in a comedy.”

Todor Manojlovic on Voicing YOLO’s Rachel with Love

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The character of Rachel, on the other hand, exists in a state of heightened, hedonistic lunacy which is balanced out by Sarah. Rachel provides a lot of the humor in YOLO; she’s a seemingly indestructible force of party monster nature. Manojlovic plays Rachel like a drunken, gruff rugby player, but he’s aware of how tricky this is, and how easily the character could become misogynistic.

“It’s important to draw the difference there, explained Manojlovic. “I’m never trying to take the piss directly. You know what I mean? Like, we take the piss a lot, everybody does, we love taking the piss in Australia, but it’s never in a mean spirit. I think that’s the most important thing about the characters in this show, and especially Rachel. It’s not like I put myself into a headspace where I have to feel disgusting or anything like that. I just sort of put on a voice and read these lines or whatever lines that come into my head at the time.” He continued:

I love Rachel, in a sense, like myself, myself, you know, and I think we all love our own characters, and I have to keep that sense of that relationship with the character just to make sure that it stays sort of friendly. But there’s no point at which I go, maybe we should be mean about the character. I think it has to be relatable, and I think that’s maybe what the fans like about Rachel as well. It’s that it is relatable. It’s like there’s a certain side of that femininity that isn’t really shown much in entertainment in general, really, and especially in cartoons, and I think we explore it with Rachel a lot, and I think that’s really refreshing.

“Rachel is one of a kind,” added Cusack. “She’s not the worst person of all time, but the most extreme. There’s no other Rachel. And Tod [Manojlovic] said it really well — when you do this kind of stuff, like satire or exaggeration or whatever, you have to love the character. Even if it seems on the surface like a stereotype or like making fun, it’s not really. Otherwise, it just comes off as mean-spirited, and it doesn’t work. It never works. And you can tell in cartoons when someone’s lampooning someone, and it’s just hate. It’s pure hate and no love. I feel like, personally, it just doesn’t work.”

The Australian Comedy of Taking the Piss

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When Manojlovic says “taking the piss,” he uses a phrase which perhaps distills the finer points of Australian humor. Instead of saying “making fun,” the phrase “taking the piss” connotes something dirtier, a bit more aggressive or crude, and clever in its mockery (this colloquial slang also has a fascinating and hilarious etymology). Cusack, Bishop, and Manojlovic are at the forefront of defining Australian comedy in the 2020s, and what it really means to take the piss. “I think [Australian humor] is dirty,” said Bishop. “I think there’s something unpolished about it. I think we own that about ourselves. We’re not trying to be polished at all.”

“That’s a good way of putting it,” interjected Manojlovic. “Unpolished is a great word for it, I reckon.”

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“We’re also in a pretty interesting spot,” added Cusack, “where we’re almost confused about what we want to represent, which kind of adds to the comedy in a way. We’ve been this way for the last few decades. We’ve been split between US comedy and UK comedy, which are two very distinct forms of comedy. And, at first, that would frustrate me because I was like — what is our identity?” It’s true. After Peter Jackson’s gory ’80s and ’90s comedies, in the 2000s, New Zealand developed a comedic identity largely based off the films of Taika Waititi, Rhys Darby, and the work of Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie (Flight of the Conchords). But what of Australia? It’s a diverse mix, perhaps best represented by the complete polar opposites of Jim Jefferies and Hannah Gadsby. Between something so weird as The Cars That Ate Paris and something so tame as Crocodile Dundee, there’s a vast chasm of possible identities.

YOLO and an Australian Identity

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For Cusack, the identity of Australian comedy is still a work in progress. “As I’ve gotten lucky enough to be able to write comedy and for TV and things like that, it made me realize that it’s actually a great opportunity, because we’re still making it, we’re still kind of creating it. The fact that we are confused actually adds to the comedy,” said Cusack. “I think our culture has got a lot of nuances to it, because it’s still trying to find itself, and we’ve got a complicated history as well, too. So, there are a lot of things we’re trying to figure out, which I think adds to it, and makes it interesting to kind of see what our identity is becoming.

“Australians, we have the tall poppy syndrome,” added Bishop, and we have cultural clench, where we actually don’t often like to see ourselves on screen. We’re sometimes a bit embarrassed by it traditionally. And what I’ve loved about Cusack’s work, is that it dives into that nuance of regional and rural Australia, which to be honest, a lot of our major networks and previous shows have just ignored. They really haven’t given voice to these people, to these characters. They’ve been kind of, I think, embarrassed about it. It’s either shows that are set in Sydney and Melbourne, or shows that are set in the Outback, and there’s no nuance. [YOLO] really touches on that nuance and celebrates it, and as someone who didn’t grow up in a city in Australia, that has been so exciting to be a part of.”

“Like Sarah said, this is close to our heart and how we grew up. I don’t know any better. So writing from that relatable kind of way, from how we grew up and the things that we saw, is, I think, the best way to do comedy in general, and hopefully make something authentic.”

Authentic, relatable, and very funny, you can join this Aussie party at midnight tonight, March 5, when the three-part finale episode, “This Is LITERALLY the Finale,” airs on Adult Swim. It will be available the next day on HBO Max, along with the rest of YOLO: Silver Destiny and YOLO: Crystal Fantasy.