What We Learned at Comic Con’s Comedy Panels: Bobs Burgers, Tuca & Birdie, Duncanville, Central Park & The Great North

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Animation Continues to Dominate Comic-Con at Home’s Comedy Offerings

For the second year in a row, the halls of the San Diego Convention Center fell silent as Comic-Con stayed at home. But despite putting off the in-person experience for another year, the conference slate was packed with panels and educational sessions – many of which focused on animation.

Last year’s digital edition of the festival was far enough into the pandemic that we already have a sense of what it was like to work in that fashion. So the insights from these animated shows were less logistical and more reflective about the form and what joy it could reliably bring as other forms of entertainment could be produced less reliably.

Read on for some highlights of the Comic-Con@Home panels of your favorite adult animated series.

Adult Swim’s Tuca and Bertie: Distance Made the Heart Grow Fonder…and the Writers’ Room Stronger

On day 1, moderator and guest voice Adam Conover guided a conversation with Tuca and Bertie creator Lisa Hanawalt, executive producer Raphael Bob-Waksberg, and guest voice talent Nicole Byer. To have Tuca and Bertie represented in the lineup at all represents the miraculous feat of bringing it back to the airwaves after its sudden cancellation by Netflix in 2019. Since being picked up by Adult Swim, Hanawalt has had some time to reflect on its loss and eventual return…and still seems to be overwhelmed by it:

It was just nice that people connected with it so hard, and then they kept up that drumbeat for almost a full year of ‘this show needs to come back, I will accept no other option!’ It was really cathartic and sweet and helpful for that to happen.

It must have felt awful for the show’s in-person’s operations get shut down on the second day of work for season 2, and yet there was a silver lining to the circumstances: the ability to add writer Samantha Irby (Hulu’s Shrill) safely to the writers’ room. Calling her “affable and funny,” Hanawalt was excited and grateful to have her join, while Bob-Waksberg noted, “she lives in Michigan, so Zoom actually made it possible for her to be on staff.”

Tuca and Bertie currently airs Sundays at 11:30pm ET on Adult Swim.

FOX’s Duncanville: Behind the Double Dose of Amy Poehler

Later that day, Variety’s Deputy TV editor Michael Snyder convened the cast of Duncanville (save Zach Cherry and Rashida Jones) for a conversation about the FOX hit’s second season. Premiering only a month before the pandemic, much of the world got to know the Harris family while spending a lot of time with their own family – so there’s little surprise to its renewals for seasons 2 and 3.

A highlight of this panel was getting to hear Poehler talk about the unique experience of voicing both sides of a mother-son relationship. Borrowing from a number of New England moms (including her own) for Annie, and the tortured indifference of her two sons for Duncan, she explained the process:

We’ve got a nice system down where I lay down Annie’s stuff first, because Annie’s stuff is always really driving story and it’s very energetic – and you need a good voice for that. And then Duncan, you need nothing. You could do it lying down. So when Duncan is talking, all he’s doing is thinking about when he can stop talking. The more trash my voice is at that point, the better.

While it’s clear how much Poehler loves working on the show, as well as how much fun the cast has with one another, she also brought up a great point about the freedom that has come with playing a teenage boy as apathetic as Duncan: “I rarely have gotten to play somebody so apathetic and so unconcerned with anyone else – and what freedom it is to play a teenaged boy, where you are truly in your own world and you’re not paying attention to anyone else’s stuff. It’s like going to the emotional spa.”

Duncanville currently airs Monday nights at 9:30pm ET on FOX.

AppleTV+’s Central Park: Developing “Musical Diversity” to Challenge the Form

In part one of the Loren Bouchard triple crown, he moderated a conversation about the Apple TV musical cartoon featuring creator and cast member Josh Gad, cast members Tituss Burgess and Leslie Odom, Jr., and supervising directors Steven Davis and Kelvin Yu. Bouchard, Davis, and Yu had worked well enough with the musical elements of Bob’s Burgers (more on them later) to feel confident pushing into a fully musical show, with 3-4 full numbers each episode.

“I frankly didn’t feel like there was a TV series, especially in an animated form, that did what I imagined, which was to embrace the musical form,” Gad shared when talking about his inspiration for the show. “There is now a real appreciation and love for musicals, and it’s starting to feel as culturally important as any other genre.”

To that end, its cultural importance has drawn a number of high-profile contributors to the musical catalog. Says Bouchard about the need for these infusions of additional talent, “as incredible as our in-house composers are, it was always going to be a richer experience to have the most musical diversity. Josh was very eloquent about this early on; it was like, no matter how much you love one composer […] you don’t want to burn out that one composer’s sound.” Keep that sustainability of composition in mind as you hear numbers from Tank and the Bangas, Ingrid Michaelson, Regina Spektor, Rufus Wainwright, They Might Be Giants, Shaggy, Michael Buble, Big Boi, and more over the course of the second season.

New episodes of Central Park arrive each Friday on AppleTV+.

FOX’s The Great North: Representation Matters – And Continues to Grow

Loren Bouchard’s second of three panels brought him together with The Great North’s co-creators Wendy Molyneux and Lizzie Molyneux-Logelin, as well as the full cast (save Aparna Nancherla and Megan Mullaly) for a conversation about how their show developed over the course of its first season.

Representation became a minor theme as the cast talked about the reception to their characters. For Paul Rust, scenes of his character Ham (who has been lifted up in a number of conversations about LGBTQ+ representation) brought him to tears, while Dulce Sloan was heartened to learn that a scene in bed with her character Honeybee would feature a headwrap without her having to advocate for it. Wendy Molyneux also addressed a frequently posed question about more Native Alaskan representation on the show. While the pandemic slowed down some of the efforts in place to add Indigenous voices to the writers room and a greater percentage of the cast, they are coming:

We’re glad that people are interested in this! We’re glad that people are talking about it! Right after the show started, our casting department reached out to some people in casting in Alaska to find Alaska Native actors on the show […] Our plan was […] we were also going to add Alaskan and Alaska Native writers to the writers’ room, and to hire an Alaska Native consultant who had a really broad understanding of Alaska Native issues. But we’re really excited because we felt that once those pieces are in place from a production point of view, we can tell those stories.

While we will see a greater representation of Native and Indigenous voices in the upcoming seasons, Bouchard chose this channel to adamantly express who would not be making an appearance on the show: characters from other Bouchard shows like Bob’s Burgers or Central Park. Why? In his mind, he likens it to too much of a good thing ultimately becoming dangerous. “It’s like, if you’re a doctor and a patient wants more and more morphine, at a certain point even though morphine feels really good, you have to say no – and you have to explain it. They still look at you like, ‘give me the morphine!’” In a less hyperbolic way, he added, “we try so hard, for so many days of our year [and] our working lives, trying to believe that these characters are real and these worlds are real. Somehow, when you cross a show with another show, for me it just screams, ‘oh, it’s just a TV show!’ It’s not good for you, it could destroy the whole enterprise.”

The Great North airs Sundays at 8:30pm ET on FOX, with new episodes returning Sunday, September 26th.

FOX’s Bob’s Burgers: Coming Sooner Rather than Later to a Theater Near You

And speaking of the whole enterprise, Loren Bouchard’s Comic-Con triple crown ended, for him, where his foray into animation domination began – with the cast of Bob’s Burgers, plus his co-showrunner Nora Smith. This cast has worked together the longest, and therefore had the most catching up to do in light of their time away from the office. Even as they’ve been in production, most recording ended up being isolated, and Bouchard very clearly felt the difference:

You guys recorded as an ensemble from the beginning, and I still firmly believe that it is a magic ingredient that gives a life and energy to the track. It brings out your A game. When we can connect and figure out how to record you simultaneously is when we’ll have the final Bob’s ingredients back in the sauce.

In addition to a forthcoming twelfth season and a new album on SubPop Records showcasing the musical stylings of seasons seven through nine, Bouchard was also excited to talk about the long-awaited theatrical film: “It’s coming! They have to put it out! We’re gonna be in theaters, that is my pledge.” In the genre-bending trend of so much of the show, he describes it as a “musical comedy mystery adventure, and sort of a coming of age story.” He also promises the highest application of the cast and crew’s talents. “The movie is where we’re gonna leave it all out on the field,” he said. “It’s the best possible thing we could make.”

But while we wait, Bouchard and Smith teased a season twelve finale that will eventually settle a longtime debate: should long sequences exist on the show without dialogue? Taking place within the world of Tina’s erotic friend fiction, the team is torn on whether there should be long sequences without dialogue, or should it follow the current writers’ room ethos of the show playing well as a podcast. We’ll find out who won the debate when Bob’s Burgers returns to FOX in the fall!

Bob’s Burgers airs Sundays at 9pm ET on FOX, with new episodes returning Sunday, September 26th.

The entire slate of Comic-Con at Home panels, roundtables, and educational sessions is available for free on Comic-Con International’s YouTube channel.

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Amma Marfo

Amma Marfo is a writer, speaker, and podcaster based in Boston, MA. Her writing has appeared in Femsplain, The Good Men Project, Pacific Standard, and Talking Points Memo. Chances are good that as you're reading this, she's somewhere laughing.
Amma Marfo

Amma Marfo

Amma Marfo is a writer, speaker, and podcaster based in Boston, MA. Her writing has appeared in Femsplain, The Good Men Project, Pacific Standard, and Talking Points Memo. Chances are good that as you're reading this, she's somewhere laughing.