Peak TV may be coming to an end, but even with the decline in new programming, it’s still possible for a new show to evade your radar. One program that might have slipped by you is the Peacock stop-motion animated series “In The Know,” created by Zach Woods, Brandon Gardner, and Mike Judge. And if you’re an Emmy Award voter, it’s certainly a series that deserves to be on your ballot for the always competitive Outstanding Animated Program category.
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Set in the offices of a venerable NPR interview program, “In the Know” finds Woods voicing Lauren Capsian, the radio service’s “3rd most popular host,” who interviews “real” guest stars such as Mike Tyson, Ken Burns, Tegan and Sara, and Jonathan Van Ness, among others. Other vocal performances include Caitlin Reilly as Fabian, Carl Tart as Carl, and J Smith-Cameron as Barb. Oh, and Judge’s can be heard as Sandy.
Last month, Woods and Gardner jumped on a Zoom to discuss their inspiration for the series (basically Woods’ adoration for NPR), what NPR talent thinks of the program, how MMA fighter Jorge Masvidal went above and beyond, the benefits of stop-motion animation and much, much more.
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The Playlist: So where did the idea for the show come from?
Zack Woods: I’ve worked on “Silicon Valley” with Mike Judge, where he noticed that the stink of NPR hung heavy on my every move and word. And he also noticed I asked a lot of questions, so he was like, “Would you ever want to do a show where you play an NPR host?” Mike liked “Space Ghost Coast to Coast” so he was like, “Maybe it’s a live-action mixed with stop motion” because he loves stop motion. And then Brandon and I who worked together all the time, the three of us started talking about it and flushing out the world and the characters and all that stuff.
The Playlist: How long did it go from just an idea in the ether to something where you were in production for Peacock on it?
Brandon Gardner: There were various stages. So, Mike comes to Zach, Zach brings me in, and the first stage would be Zach, Mike, and I over Zoom sort of early pandemic fall of 2020, talking about Zach’s character and the characters that would make sense for him to work with and what that world would be like. And then we sort of put together a pitch and went out with it in the springtime of 2021 and Peacock liked it. And then it was with lawyers being figured out for a year in a process I did not know took so long. We rewrote the pilot the following year and then that got picked up. So we started with the writers in the writer’s room fall of 2022, and then the actors came in to record at the very beginning of 2023. And then the puppet production started in March of 2023 and ended in October.
The Playlist: When you came up with the show, what was the hardest sort of nut to crack? Was it the characters? Was it finding the animators?
Brandon Gardner: One thing that I thought was sort of a fun challenge figuring out…because the structure of the show is there are real interviews and then there is sort of sitcom, workplace comedy, having those feel like they’re balancing each other out and one is not pulling from the other. So, in the beginning, we were like, “Well, how do we have the interviews feel like they’re at least somewhat to what’s happening with the characters outside and vice versa?” And that was an interesting challenge and we had great writers, but none of us have ever worked on a show with this sort of structure. So, it was sort of coming up with how to do that, whether it’s sometimes Lauren’s got a personal problem that takes over an interview and becomes part of it. Sometimes the things that are happening in the office, the characters outside are just sort of commenting on what’s happening in the interview. But that was something I remember being an interesting challenge.
The Playlist: How hard was it to get people to do the interviews?
Zach Woods: We had an incredible [casting director]. The woman who was booking the guests was from “The Daily Show,” and she allowed us to sort of punch above our weight in terms of guests and got us really wonderful people. And it was actually surprisingly easy. There were areas in which people were especially reticent, models and athletes. The cool kids from high school didn’t want to do the show, [so] props to Kaia Gerber and Jorge Masvidal for not taking themselves seriously and being down to clown. But yeah, the models and athletes didn’t want any [of it]. But aside from that, people were very, very game and that was really delightful. And not just game to agree to it, but then once they had agreed to it to do it in a way like I never thought Ken Burns would be making jokes about a jazz musician having a big penis. I didn’t know that that was in Ken Burns’ vocabulary, but he was very willing to, or Roxanne Gay, talking to Lauren about his passive sperm, this very respected and public intellectual just talking about how Lauren’s sperm can only cuddle eggs and not penetrate it. I’m realizing now that through these examples, just how utterly dumb our show is, but they were willing in every respect and that was really nice.
The Playlist: In that context, I’m assuming that when those scenes are happening, there’s some room for improv, or did you really want them to just do what was sort of on the page playing themselves?
Zach Woods: So, all those interviews are completely improvised except the Jorge Masvidal one with Fabian, which was a story arc. So, we scripted that, although he still improvised, I would say at least 50% of it. But all the other ones were just regular interviews. The only other thing we asked was at one point we asked Tegan and Sara to be like, “Oh, can you pretend you’re getting sick and get up and leave?” That was it. But other than that, they were all just improvised, and then we would edit them down, but we’d do real interviews.
The Playlist: How long did you actually book them for?
Brandon Gardner: So, Zach would talk to them for an hour and we prepared for it as well as we could. We wanted to be sort of respectful of the guests and not make them feel like we were just being like, “So what do you do? What’s your thing?” We tried to think of questions that we thought might be funny questions, but also just questions that we were interested in learning more about them. And we also were choosing guests that we were all fascinated by. So, that was easy, but the interview was not scripted anymore than a regular “Fresh Air with Terry Gross” would be in the sense that she comes prepared with questions, and then after that hour, Kelly Lyon, who’s one of our editors, would take all of that audio and sort of find her favorite spots and be like, these are the ones I want to use. “What do you guys think?” And then she was the one who gives us the illusion that it was one three-minute conversation, even though she’s taking parts that could have been 20 minutes apart from each other.
The Playlist: You guys make the show, it goes on air, and correct me if I’m wrong, but your character is the third most popular NPR host. What did the people at NPR think about the show?
Zach Woods: Mostly, I mean, the ones who didn’t like it didn’t talk to us, and the ones who liked it did. [Laughs.] So, we have a totally skewed view, which is that they love it. But yeah, people were really nice. I mean, something that we’ve talked about before is that it’s more of a satire of NPR listeners than NPR. We don’t know actually that much about how NPR functions. We did a little research, but it’s not meant to be an expose of NPR as much as an expose of our own unfortunate inner workings. And I think so hopefully it was received that way. But there was one thing that really made me laugh. There was a guy who used to work at NPR and he was doing this interview. He’d watched it and he didn’t like it. He felt that it misrepresented NPR, which is fair, and he was saying this would never happen. The adults in the room, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Then this is my favorite. He goes in a kind of self-congratulatory way. He says, “I mean, it made me question myself. I thought, ‘Have I ever cut a woman off? Have I ever done this or that?’” He’s giving his examples right Later in that same panel, there was one woman on the panel and he bull the shit out of her. He’s like, “Of course, I have even a moment where I wondered, “Have I ever done that?’” But anyway, and as he went on, he just f**king talking right over this woman. And it was so funny.
The Playlist: When did you guys decide to do stop motion versus the variety of other styles you could have jumped into? And it is stop-motion animation, correct?
Zack Woods: I think one thing is that the people we are portraying, NPR, the puppets are delicate and a little twee and their head is, Brandon was just pointing out their head is bigger. They have a big head and a fragile body, and they’re being controlled by forces that they are not aware of. And that all felt very much like an NPR listener or a host. And so it felt like aesthetically and spiritually delicate puppets were well aligned with the world. Mike Judge was also just interested in it. He gets fascinated by stuff. We went and toured, a lot of our directing was remote, but we went to Shadow Machine. Those are the people who did the stop machine. There’s so much to look at there that’s incredible that a child would register as being very beautiful and exciting. But Mike just went straight for the armatures, which is just the metal underpinnings of the…
Brandon Gardner: Skeletons. Yeah, yeah.
Zack Woods: It’s just like the least sexy. He’s very wonkish in that way where it’s like, “Oh, so this is what kind he likes. He’s a nerd for that stuff. So he also is part of why we do it.”
The Playlist: But in that context, when you decide to do a stop motion show, it’s much different than CG or even, and I don’t even really know if there is real hand-drawn anymore. But you could do the episode in hand drawn and then send it to the network or studio and they could say, “Eh, we don’t like this scene. Change it.” And there might be time to go back and change it. It’s like this is it.
Brandon Gardner: Yeah, exactly. And mostly I think to our benefit, I think it was a little scary to find out we’d only be doing one take of a scene in the very beginning, but then we saw how good the animators were at Shadow Machine. We’re like, now we trust you. And the executives at Peacock who were truly very supportive of the creative vision of the show, I do think there was something that was nice about for all of us of being, “There’s no going back.” There was no way to note this to death. The train was moving. So, you kind of just had to be like, “That’s what we’re going with.” And then the other thing that I think I didn’t know when we decided on stop motion, but in retrospect, I’m so glad we did, is because this show is located in a little radio studio, I think the way the puppets are crafted and the way it’s lit and shot, to me it’s just visually pleasing that it sort of allows you to be in one location without wanting to tear your hair out in a way that I think if it was sort of CGI flat animation, it would’ve been harder visually to keep an audience’s attention.
Zack Woods: I actually have a different answer, which is I very badly wanted it to be CG, but I’d had a terrible night with the guys who did “Polar Express” where I’d really done some bad shit…
Brandon Gardner: I know those guys. It’s not surprising
Zack Woods: I’m blacklisted in that community. Of course, they wouldn’t work with me, but none of their compatriots would either.
The Playlist: Reddit animation boards are badmouthing you. They don’t want to hear from you. They don’t want you to show up at the Annie Awards.
Zack Woods: Oh, I get within a hundred feet of the Annies, someone’s going to pepper spray me. That’s just facts. [Laughs.]
The Playlist: It’s my ignorance to not know this, but did you guys pick the more expensive way to go? Was this actually somewhat more economical to do it this way if you had done CG?
Brandon Gardner: To a certain extent that kind of decision that was beyond our pay grade, I would say probably some things, yes, and some things, no. I think it’s the main thing with I guess all animation, but maybe stop motion in particular is just the time involved. It really takes a long time to animate a few seconds of our show. And because of that, that’s like paying everybody who works on it a little bit longer. think they worked on it for about eight or nine months of physical production, which in the world of stop motion I think is blazingly fast. Oh yeah. But for live-action, that’s a long time to make six episodes.
The Playlist: Understatement. And you must’ve been worried that nothing would happen to your guests in the meantime that you couldn’t run an episode…
Brandon Gardner: Was a thought.
The Playlist: Out of all the characters, who was your favorite?
Zack Woods: I for Barb. I love Barb so much. I just love her. I love her.
The Playlist: What about you, Brandon?
Brandon Gardner: I think for me it might be because of how I looked at her changed so much through the process is the Fabian character. She’s someone, when we were first writing her, I think it was influenced a lot by the types of people we knew. But then as we got with the writers and started to flesh her out, and then especially once she started being animated and voiced by Caitlyn Riley, I think she acquired so much depth and so much heart. And I think it influenced, part of why I love her is I think she’s influenced how I see people in the real world now where you might see someone on Twitter who seems so angry and be like, “Oh, that person must be so hard to be around them.” But the thing with Fabian is just she really cares about things and she really is trying to make the world a better place, even if she’s not doing it in the most elegant way. And so a lot of times when I see people in the world who seem a little abrasive, I think Fabian’s sort of a reminder that there’s a real heart underneath that.
Zack Woods: Someone told me this thing once, which is like if someone’s annoying you at a party or someplace, try to love them more because just look at them with as much love as you can muster. Because it’ll do two things. It’ll their behavior and the way that Brandon’s talking and about where it’s like, rather than seeing grating behavior as just grating behavior, you see it as a coping strategy or a sign of nerves or whatever. And then also the quality of your attention on them will become softer and warmer, and then they will feel more relaxed and less frantic often. And I think that was the, yeah, it’s funny. That was so well put, Brandon. I think the gift of the show for us is taking things that annoy us and then in the process of trying to turn them into stories and characters, discovering the loneliness underneath a lot of those things, the feelings of inadequacy, the desire to be in some way special or worthy, and how that can translate into all of these maladaptive ticks that these characters have. So, yeah, I really relate to what you’re saying, Brandon, feeling like, “Oh yeah, there’s a freaked out little kid in the center of every dickhead presenting adult.”
“In The Know” is available on Peacock.