An animated discussion with a showrunner who has worked with Stephen Colbert and Robert Smigel
Never you mind the serious face on R.J. Fried at a past TCA press event.
Fried is having fun and keeping busy, what with a brand-new topical animated series to whip up each week this winter into the spring for Comedy Central. Fairview isn’t Fried’s first dalliance into topical animation, nor his first go-around working with Stephen Colbert.
Before Fairview, Fried was showrunning and executive-producing Tooning Out the News for Paramount+, Washingtonia for Comedy Central, and Our Cartoon President for Showtime. Really covering those formerly-known-as-of-a-couple-of-days-ago ViacomCBS bases. ViacomCBS, now Paramount! CBS Cares (about you getting the branding correct).
Before all of that, he consulted with Sacha Baron Cohen on Showtime’s Who Is America?, wrote for Robert Smigel on Triumph’s Election Special 2016 for Hulu, wrote with a bunch of Saturday Night Live folks for the Maya & Marty summer variety hour on NBC. His earliest credits include writing for MTV’s Popzilla as well as Rob & Big, plus Comedy Central’s Onion SportsDome. He even worked as a segment producer for The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell (MSNBC), Popzilla (MTV), and Rob & Big (MTV). In among all of that, Fried also wrote and performed on Late Show with David Letterman!
You can find the audio through my previous post here:
This is an edited and condensed transcript of our chat!
ME: Last things first, R.J., congratulations on getting yet another animated series on TV with Fairview!
RJ: Yeah, I’m super excited and feel super blessed. It’s always a long haul to get a show up, so I feel so fortunate that this one is up and out there, and Comedy Central has always been a dream to work with. So this is my first one with them and that’s been a thrill.
Above: Fairview on Comedy Central
Now before I get into the weeds with animation analysis, let’s see if we can clear this up. The characterization of the characters for Fairview: Are they in any way influenced by egg heads or Weeble wobbles?
OK, so animation the hardest thing to animate are legs and hands. And so, we wanted to make a topical animated series here. These are written in a week, recorded animatic animation, all within about three or four weeks. And so if you add legs and hands into that, it can really slow things down. That’s the reason that South Park looks the way it does, their hands are circles and they have little circle thumbs. And so we thought let’s go with a design that works with the comedy, but also just works with the production pipeline of trying to turn around a topical show and then that’s we came up with.
Right. Because you’re not only following South Park in terms of a time slot with Comedy Central, you’re also kind of following the template they revolutionized in terms of having such a quick turnaround for stories.
For sure. Yeah, I mean, this show doesn’t exist without South Park. I would say this show is also, you know, Tooning Out the News — that pipeline, we kind of came up with this design that was two dimensional so we could turn around daily animation. We were turning around about 10-15, sometimes more, minutes of animation per day. And so that design, we came up with these heads that had a certain head look, a certain lip sync, three-quarter turns and all that. Part of the show came out of like, hey, let’s try using that pipeline only in more of a kind of a sitcom format. And so those are same kind of heads, they look similar to the ones on Tooning, and then the bodies I would say, you know, we just try to keep it nice and simple. Just like I said, to help sell the comedy and also keep production moving.
You mentioned Fairview is your first show with Comedy Central. It’s now your third show in — Are you creating a Colbert cartoon cinematic universe?
So how this came about was, I was hired — I’d worked with Robert Smigel for a bunch of years and Colbert was looking for a showrunner for Our Cartoon President. And so he asked Smigel and Smigel kindly recommended me to interview, and I got the job. And I had done animation early on in my career at an animation studio that was owned by Dave Thomas from SCTV. So I was vaguely familiar with how those pipelines work. And so I got the job, and then from there, you know, we created Tooning Out the News in between seasons of Our Cartoon President. We created Fairview in between seasons of Tooning Out the News. And so it’s just kind of snowballed.
And of course, you worked with Smigel on Triumph stuff. And Smigel worked with Colbert on SNL’s TV Funhouse. How inspirational or influential was TV Funhouse for you growing up?
Yeah, I mean, the whole like Smigel-Conan genre of comedy and I would say even like The Simpsons, that’s what I grew up on. There was just kind of a sense of an underlining, I would say weirdness with them that always just spoke to me. It spoke in lay whispers in your ear and language I would say, I’m sure a lot of comedy people and comedy fans can relate to. It feels like you’re in some kind of secret club, and they always had that whisper in their comedy. And yeah, hugely influential, and to get to work with Robert and also learn his processes and how he gets to these amazing products was really great. And I think part of the reason the Colbert connection worked out was because he knew I had been through it with Smigel, seen that production process, writing process, up close, and knew how intense it was and knew how to make things of that, or at least try to make things of that quality.
What turned you onto animation though, at the very beginning?
I don’t even know if it was something that was a conscious decision. I think I found more and more that like most people will say, ‘Oh your writing is weird,’ or whatever. It didn’t occur to me as weird but to other people. You know, I think the ideas I tend to are more animated ideas, and you know, in that format you can get away with so much more. Something that a human face says can be really offensive, but if an animated character does it, it’s OK and it washes over you. And so I think it’s just where the action was in terms of my comedy and the kind of people that were responding to it. But I loved writing on Late Show in live-action and Night Of Too Many Stars and all that stuff. But yeah, I think it does seem like people have been naturally pushing me toward toward this format.
Was there something about about comedy or animation that has always had a bigger pull on you than say, hockey? Because you could have been a hockey player. I mean, you played hockey throughout high school and college, and you were drafted by the NHL.
Yeah, a lot less concussions in animation, for sure. I will say, well, hockey, first of all is like, even like, if you’re really successful, it’s like a five-year career. And so, at least in animation you can make a living. You can eventually retire on some time in your 50s. You’re not gonna play hockey, once you’re in your low 30s, you’re already an old man.
Unless you’re Gordie Howe!
Exactly, yeah, he went through his 50s, like the only one ever to do it. But I will say, being in hockey teams is not dissimilar to being in a production environment where you’re trying to get everyone into a coherent vision of what we’re doing. Trying to inspire people to work hard and do their best work. There are certainly principles that I learned as a hockey player that still apply to what we do.
So you went to Harvard, but you didn’t do the like, the “traditional” Harvard to The Simpsons or Harvard Lampoon to the SNL pipeline, right?
I was in Collin Jost’s class at Harvard, and I didn’t, I was playing sports. So I played hockey. I also played lacrosse, and I never did the Lampoon, which I almost feel was worse, because then after I got out, everyone’s always like, why weren’t you on The Lampoon? Why didn’t you? I was a jock. I was writing for a magazine called Satire Five, which was kind of The Onion of Harvard, and I know like Dan Mintz wrote for it way back when, and that was something I could do on the bus ride to games and you know, scratch that itch. But yeah, once I moved to LA, I immediately had to try to shed 40 pounds of muscle, because I looked ridiculous going into entertainment meetings. I was 220 and 5% body fat, so luckily I shed a lot of muscle and at least looked somewhat more like a writer.
You didn’t have to do that. One of my college classmates was Matt Iseman who was a baseball player at Princeton then, and now he’s the host of the long-running American Ninja Warrior.
Wow! See but that was in front of the camera, so I could see that working. But yeah, no, I remember thinking this is just not gonna work in a writer’s room, walking in all jacked and stuff.
Although when you’re like working for Onion SportsDome, that’s sports, so they would’ve encouraged you to be a meathead, right?
Yeah, I vividly remember working with that crew, which was such a super smart crew and all those writers have ended up gone on to great things. Jack Kukoda works on Murderville and Seth Reiss is one of the head writers at (Late Night with) Seth Meyers, and Jeff Loveness, I think is now running like Marvel movies and stuff.
(Loveness wrote the screenplay to the upcoming 2023 Marvel film, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania)
It was such a cool crew of writers. But yeah, I mean, they were sports fans. At the end of the day, all your comedy has to be accessible. So it can’t be like, ‘I know you guys don’t get this but I’m telling you, in the Manitoba locker rooms, it’s gonna kill!’ is not really good enough.
Looking at your resume, the thing that really pops out for me is that you spent a couple of years working for Lawrence O’Donnell in cable news and I wonder, especially now that you’ve been showrunning Tooning Out the News and doing topical humor animation. How did your comedy inform your time with MSNBC and Lawrence O’Donnell, and how did your time with Lawrence O’Donnell inform your comedy?
A lot. You know, I think first of all, like, Lawrence is one of the smartest people if not the smartest, I’ve ever worked with. And I think what he taught me was basically how to think about politics and the questions to ask. That’s kind of the most important thing at all, is how do I approach a story and try to understand the shape of the issue. Who wrote the story? What angle were they coming from? Who might have been paying them to write that story? Who are the people in it? What are the pressures on them? He taught me certainly to kind of think three-dimensionally about politics in a way that I did not before. Also there’s just the fundamentals of just writing fast. Those news shows are written very quickly. I would argue too quickly. So when you go to Tooning Out the News, where we’re writing scripts over the course of like, two, two and a half hours in the morning. It’s not long. If I remember before, when I found out like, when I was coming up as a writer and found out how quickly The Colbert Report wrote scripts, I was like, I can’t imagine writing comedy that quickly. But then you go to these news shows, and it’s like, there’s no choice. The show is coming on at 10pm or whatever it is, and your copy has to be good. It’s gotta be buttoned up. It’s gotta be fact-checked. It’s got to be entertaining. All those skills definitely translated when eventually I did Tooning Out the News.
What about before Tooning Out? You were working with Robert Smigel on a couple of different shows involving Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. How did your time in cable news help you in terms of feeding Robert lines when he’s in the field. Not just when he’s working in a studio with Jack McBrayer. But then also out on the presidential election campaign?
I think to do comedy in the political space, you have to know what you’re talking about. And if I can’t think of a joke, I kind of feel like it’s like, I haven’t done enough research to understand what is the angle here? What is the point of view? That you have to have. And so I would say honestly, it’s just having an index or at least knowing like, you can’t have an opinion on something unless you’ve really, you’ve read up on it. And so I think that’s the biggest thing that helps you in that setting, is if someone says something, knowing where the contradiction is, knowing what the bad logic is. You can only know if you if you’ve done your homework. And out in the field, certainly, that certainly helps.
So how did that change your reading habits from when you were maybe just scanning headlines for Letterman? How did your actual news diet change over the years?
I would say, I mean, it sounds so stupid, but just read to the end of the article. There’s so many times where you’ll see an article online, and they’ll say this is the headline and this is the story, and then you read it and you realize that that’s not the headline. That’s not the story. The real point was down here in this bottom paragraph. And honestly, my news diet is very diverse. I still think like New York Times, Washington Posts are still the best out there, and some great reporting. But you know, it’s coming from all these interesting places. Whether it’s The Intercept or you know, there’s tons of great places out there, but I think it’s approaching itwith a critical eye and reading a lot and challenging our opinions and doing your own research. Tooning Out the News, we have this amazing research team that broke news frequently, when we’d just go digging on something that just didn’t look quite right. And we’d often break news that we’d be ahead of the actual, the “Real News” in finding something.
How has it changed your view of social media in terms of an information source?
I mean, look, yeah. Twitter is a tough one. These issues are really complicated that we’re dealing with on whether it’s Fairview or Tooning or whatever we do. Immigration or COVID, they’re all very complicated, nuanced issues. And the shape of them is just so much bigger than, you know, 280 characters or whatever it is now. And so yeah, I guess I’m much less ready to take a headline at face value. It terrifies me. We’d always be careful on Tooning. Where do we want to plant our flag? Where do we feel good about this? What is the point of view we want to put out there? What do we think of this? And also try to make sure it’s not conventional thinking. I think there’s definitely, there’s very much of an echo chamber that can happen on Twitter with conventional thinking, that this is the take and everyone has their variation on it. And trying to challenge that is I think, super important and Tooning was very important to us. The thing I always admired about The Daily Show or The Colbert Report is there was always a sense of surprise that might come. Even though there was always a familiar format. There was always like, oh, I never thought about it that way. I never had that perspective on it. And certainly with Tooning, it’s always something we strive for. Let’s challenge our audience in some way every night and offer something original.
Well, that show also challenged the guests because you had to have the real-life politicians or experts interact with cartoons, asking Colbert-style questions.
Yeah, and our guests were always wonderful. I mean, some had a good time. Some did not have a good time. Some seemed to like, even though they didn’t have a bad time, they still said they had a good time. They would be looking at like, they would be on a Zoom with us and they’d be looking at a picture of the characters, so they knew it was coming out of a cartoon’s mouth, but maybe, you know, I think that kind of would soften the blow. But the thing that would delight us always is whenever someone did get upset, it was always just like, you’d see them arguing with the cartoon and it was just absurd. I mean, it’s like arguing with Triumph, or with a Sacha Baron Cohen character. There’s some absurdity to it that was always just wonderful.
But what are they interacting with in real-time when they’re doing the interview?
You’re hearing all the characters in real-time and they know what they look like. They actually are animating it live. What that show was, we’d have the actors in a zoom, and there would be animators simultaneously who were doing motion-capture animation. So it was being animated live, but they wouldn’t necessarily see that live.
Is that how the occasional animated bits work on Colbert?
Some of them they did do live. I think there was the Hillary Clinton one, I believe, at a convention one year was actually like live-live animation. It’s still like that’s, I think, ultimately, the dream of that format is to do a news show that is animated live. We’ve definitely experimented with it. I would say probably the biggest hurdle is lip flap, is the lip flap technology is not quite refined enough that it’s not distracting.
I wish we can have a separate half hour episode just on lip flap technology.
Oh my god. I don’t know. Do you really want to jump the shark like that? Go that broad!
You know earlier I mentioned half-jokingly a Colbert Cartoon Cinematic Universe. But in the 2021 finale of Tooning Out the News into the series debut of Fairview, the football robot character appears in both.
Oh my God, does it?! Footbot? Oh, no! It was so for those listening who don’t know the first episode of Fairview features, I guess our take on the football robot character. His name is Footbot. He has most certainly has CTE but he’s still proud and wants to help the gang, particularly our character Glenn, start to listen to his doctor. But I didn’t realize that connection.
Well, yeah, because the most recent — I don’t know if it is the finale — is Tooning Out coming back for more.
News to come.
The most recent episode that you can watch on Paramount+ leads in with Aaron Rodgers because it was November of 2021 and Aaron Rodgers was taking his medical advice from Joe Rogan, who, Joe Rogan just said (last week) that it’s ludicrous for anyone to be taking their medical advice from him. So joke’s on you Aaron Rodgers. Again. I don’t know if it’s the same FootBot.
It might be! I have to check the files. You know, there’s all that legal stuff that we have to go through make sure it’s not close to the real thing. And so yeah, I’m not sure if it’s the same one. I did not notice the continuity, and I swear to God it was unintentional unless you think it’s brilliant.
I mean, it seems obvious, you know to be topical, that the series debut for Fairview would take on the Super Bowl, or as anyone who’s not affiliated with the NFL has to call it, The Big Game.
Exactly. I wonder how many people are in on that joke. You can’t say Super Bowl on TV. So I feel like every TV show goes with The Big Game, but everyone knows what you’re talking about.
But that’s an easy way to lead in, to have a big event like that as a topical hook to hang on. Moving forward, how are you deciding what piece of the news really fits the worldview that you’re creating for Fairview?
Yeah, I mean, we’ve tried to go with, I would say kind of like a South Park-ian strategy of let’s try to hit things that are Zeitgeist-y. That are in the air without being overly — we don’t want the show to, especially in the day and age of streaming libraries and stuff, you don’t want the show to feel like it’s expired after it airs. When the references are too specific for it to have any longevity. So we try to go with, you know, more universal themes and not get too bogged down in references. Something that you could watch in five years and still understand it. That said we want it to feel like it is part of the conversation. And so we’ll choose topics I mean, we’re doing, we obviously did COVID the first episode. We’re doing cancel culture. Turns out, we started to write that a few weeks ago before the whole Joe Rogan thing started to really blow up and more relevant than ever. We’re doing something on just worker struggles and the gig economy. We’re gonna do crime spike, which is a big thing, especially in Fox News World where they’re, obviously, they take these pieces of tape and they’ll rerun them and make it seem like the world is falling apart. Critical Race Theory. Crypto. You know, these themes that are kind of are gonna be around for months.
Because you’ve had a variety of bosses, what are the things you’ve learned from each of them that have stuck with you?
Oh, so much. I can start with Stephen Colbert. The number one thing I’ve learned from him is just kindness and dignity. Steven is everything he’s cracked up to be. Like he is in front of the cameras is like he is behind the camera. And I think that’s something that especially you know, these shows are very hard to produce. I’ve stupidly picked this genre, topical comedy, that’s like just so production intensive. And it’s very stressful. And I think what Stephen has certainly taught me is, you always have that perspective, and never lose your sense of just kindness and dignity with the people you work with. At the end of the day, it’s just cartoons. And, on top of that, I would say, you know, he’s also the best satirical mind of our generation, and certainly in being very deliberate with your satirical perspective. What are you trying to say here? Where do you want to plant your flag? Yeah, and I could go through, you know, David Letterman, learning all about just tone, and the role of someone sitting at the desk versus what’s happening around them. Robert Smigel, just work ethic and just relentless pursuit of the best joke. You know, you pick up a little something from from everyone.
What about from Maya and Marty?
Maya and Marty! Yeah, that was such a cool, like, I never worked in Lorne Michaels world before. And got the opportunity to do it. It was super great. I just had never worked in that kind of environment, and it was great. That probably skews more towards, it’s network primetime which is, I would say much more of a broader audience and you have to kind of tweak the muscle to do that. But it was great to work with Bryan Tucker, such a lovely person, Mikey Day, really brilliant. And Streeter Seidell, Sudi Green, there’s so many wonderful people over there, who were just such a pleasure.
Well, that wasn’t that wasn’t just network primetime TV, it was also very much a throwback variety series which may have been why it didn’t go more than a summer.
I’m not gonna dare cross Lorne Michaels. That’s like tossing my chair will just go out from under me. I will disappear.
Fair enough. Are there any live-action ideas, or people who could lure you back to do a live-action project?
Yeah. For sure. I mean, you know. Yeah, absolutely. I think animation is fun, because you do get a fair amount of control over all aspects. I think that’s what probably, I would say animation producers/writers really enjoy is, there’s not much left to chance. I mean, you can really, whether it’s when the characters blink, and which of the 30 takes of the line you want to use. There’s just a lot of control. That said, there’s something wonderful about live-action and the spontaneity of that, I mean, the going on the road with Smigel during those election campaigns was just such a thrill. The spontaneity and what’s gonna happen next. And also the inherent danger of it was always wonderful. You know, I got a chance to sit in on the writers room for Sacha Baron Cohen show, Who Is America? on Showtime. To see his process. He’s so daring. And there’s something in that level of tension and danger in comedy that I think Tooning tried to capture certainly with some guests that is such a thrill. I think the audience can feel that that level of tension, how raw it is. That’s so fun. I would definitely go back.
One of the things that changed just in our lifetime is the idea that an animated show can last for a generation.
Yeah. The Simpsons, what year they are now it’s like 30 years or something like that. Yeah, things are certainly much more erratic. I mean, that’s why you kind of can’t get caught up in any one series. Honestly. You can’t think that this is my ticket. You just never know what’s going to happen and have to be ready with your next idea.
But it seems like when those things hit now, maybe it’s just FOX because they’ve done it with The Simpsons and Family Guy and Bob’s Burgers. Seems like networks might be if an animated show works, they’re more willing to stick with it. Because animation doesn’t get old.
It doesn’t get old. It also travels well internationally is my understanding. And it’s also I would say, probably just to control costs. You know? It’s a little less sensitive. You know, in a live-action show, the talent’s in front of the camera, and the audience has fallen in love with their face, and so they have a lot of leverage in those situations. You’re not gonna find someone with their exact face. Whereas in animation, I think probably my guess is they’re able to control costs over the long-term a little a little better, because it’s not necessarily star-driven and probably helps the longevity.
Also when you’re skipping out on legs and hands, it’s even that much simpler.
Oh, buddy. Yeah, we save a lot of money on them.
Well, R.J., how would you feel if I talked to you in another 25 years about season 26 of Fairview?
Awesome. I mean, it’s a super fun show to produce. Because it has a topical element, it’s always going to evolve. And so I also have to say the cast. James Austin Johnson from SNL, Aparna Nancherla, Lisa Gilroy. Marina Cockenberg plays the mayor. They’re just some lovely, wonderful people. And we have these Zoom records on Mondays now and they’re just so fun. And, you know, we cast it’s not just, Hey, you’re super funny. It’s Hey, you’re super funny and we want to hang out with you every week and make the show so I’de very blessed to do it for years.
Well, R.J., thank you for hanging out with me. I really appreciate it.
Of course. Thank you so much for having me.
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