It’s the End of the World… And It’s Way Funny in ‘Mulligan’
Showrunners Robert Carlock and Sam Means, and director Colin Heck, preview their and Tina Fey’s new animated series about learning – or not – from humanity’s past mistakes, premiering
‘Mulligan,’ premiering May 12 on Netflix. All images courtesy of Netflix © 2023.
It’s the end of the world as we know it. An alien attack has destroyed much of the planet. There are only 1,132 people left on Earth. In a demoralized and smoldering Washington, D.C., a rag-tag band of survivors must start society over from scratch. It’s an opportunity to learn from humanity’s past mistakes and get things right this time. Or make the same mistakes all over again.
When the creative talents exploring this apocalyptic scenario are the same people who brought you 30 Rock and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, you can pretty much assume it will be the latter. In fact, the mistakes will probably be even worse than before. And extremely funny.
Sprung from the fecund minds of Tina Fey, Robert Carlock, and Sam Means, Mulligan features Nat Faxon as the eponymous Matty Mulligan, a working-class everyman from Boston, who, after single-handedly saving the world, now finds himself in way over his head as the leader of what’s left of humanity. Or, as advisor Dr. Farrah Braun (Fey) concisely summarizes it, “You’re the president… because you’re good at throwing.” Joining Fey and Faxon in the stellar voice cast are Chrissy Teigen, Sam Richardson, Dana Carvey, Phil LaMarr, Daniel Radcliffe, Ayo Edebiri, Ronny Chieng, and Kevin Michael Richardson. The series debuts May 12 on Netflix.
In an interview at least as momentous as the end of the world, we spoke with executive producers Carlock and Means, who serve as co-showrunners, and director Colin Heck (Ben 10, Harley Quinn) about their new undertaking and all that it implies.
Check out the trailer, then learn more about the new series:
AWN: Let's talk a little more about the dynamic of working in animation as writers and creators. It’s different from live-action in that, if you can think it, there's the assumption you can create it. But there's a cost to everything, both budget-wise, as well as creatively. How do you figure out what’s doable and what isn’t?
RC: Colin can probably answer this question best. But, as someone told us very early, animation's great because you can draw anything; and it's terrible, because you have to draw everything.
CH: For starters, there are the producers, the line producers, and the people that are in charge of the budget; that's more their purview. I've always seen it as, I'll tell you how to do what you want to do, and these people will tell you whether we can actually do what you want to do. But my MO was like, "Look, this is Robert and Sam's vision. I'm going to do whatever I can to execute that vision and rely on somebody else to tell me when to stop." But there was one time where I read a script, and there was one flashback – one cutaway – that was the entire pre-apocalypse Senate dressed in barbershop quartet costumes, all singing together with Cartwright LaMarr. And I was like, "Guys, we cannot do caricatures of all 100 members of the Senate."
RC: I forgot that was your breaking point. And now I see how ridiculous that was. It was one joke about him having been in an all-Senate barbershop quartet.
SM: Now we know.
CH: I remember, early on, they were like, "Why do crowds look terrible? Why do these crowds look awful? Oh, it's because you draw one character and you repeat it 500 times and it's hard." So then, I was like, "We should limit the number of crowd scenes." But the crowd is important. They're a feature of this show. You can't have a show about governance without the governed. And so we struck a balance.
AWN: Before we finish, can you share a little bit about what we can expect in this inaugural season? Without giving anything away, of course.
SM: We try and explore all of these characters and their motivations. We have some guest stars coming up, which we're pretty excited about. And it's about everyone – much like us with animation – learning the restrictions of this new world and what is and isn't possible. As we talked about earlier, they’re all trying to do their best to build a new world together, and finding what they can and can't do. Over the course of the season, and in future seasons, these characters learn what it means to be people – including Axatrax, the alien general.
RC: When we were pitching it, we talked about it as The Office meets The Last of Us. It’s a world that is recognizable, but it has all kinds of potential for story and comedy because it's broken. And, at the center of that, people are trying to have relationships, and trying to raise children, and trying to reconcile different points of view and different worldviews. So we hope that there's a beating heart at the center of it, but, at the same time, sometimes they have to fight monsters – and sometimes the monsters are literal monsters and sometimes they’re each other.
SM: It’s about rebuilding on a grand scale and a small scale. For example, this couple gets together in the heat of the battle, but then they have to actually get to know each other. They kissed on the flagpole as the spaceship blew up around them, but now they have to find out who they are as people, and if there's actually any relationship there. So we like to explore those interpersonal elements, amidst the broken post-apocalyptic world with spaceships and explosions and all that.
RC: To go back to where we started, we write jokes, we write comedy, and we're hoping this framework gives the comedy a grounding, as big as the premise is. But there's a lot to laugh at. There's high silliness and jokes. Not enough comedies have jokes.
