In The Know is one of the great comedies of 2024. The Peacock series from co-creators Zach Woods, Brandon Gardner, and Mike Judge takes place at an NPR studio. It makes fun of liberal personas, the classic caricature of NPR hosts and listeners, but also takes their lead in crafting jokes that punch up.
In The Know is a nice comedy, as well as a cinematic one, thanks to lovely stop-motion work from ShadowMachine (Pinocchio). The Emmy contender for this year’s Best Animated Series is a feel-good, consistent supply of laughs that, originally, Gardner and Woods (who voices Laurence Caspian) didn’t imagine as stop-motion. Judge suggested the idea, which shed a whole new light on the characters and jokes.
Recently, Brandon Gardner — a student and teacher at UCB — spoke with Immersive Media about making the delightful stop-motion comedy for adults.
Let’s begin with the ending. I really like the idea of [NPR Host] Lauren Caspian finally just shedding his persona and being a person. Was that a moment you were all always building towards?
Yeah, I don’t think we had anything we were building towards. It wasn’t the sort of show where we were thinking too much about season wide arcs. We did when we were talking about different story ideas, though. We were talking about a Thanksgiving one and hashing out what that episode would be, being so much about family and the family of the people at the studio.
Fabian and Lauren, who are at odds with each other through so much of the series, it did feel like it made sense in that episode for them to speak to each other, share flaws and hopefully, at least for that episode, be more real people and not weighed down by their insecurities.
I genuinely appreciate Lauren’s vocabulary, such as his use of the world “scintillating.” How’d the writer’s room get his voice just right on the page?
Yeah, it was interesting because Zach is obviously voicing Lauren and the interviews are all improvised. Zach I think has just naturally an incredible vocabulary and speaks so eloquently. I think that sort of sets the tone for who Lauren is, and then for writers, that’s sort of just the voice that’s been established is that’s how Lauren speaks.
Did you and the writers go back to old NPR interviews and talk about some greatest or worst hits?
Most of the room was very familiar with NPR. It definitely was in there in all of our DNA, but more than talking about NPR, I think we talked a lot about how we each felt. We were like the characters on the show, and so, it was a lot more borrowing from our own real lives than it was in the end. I think the show, as much as it’s at NPR, it’s less a satire of NPR than of the people who listen to NPR, which is who we know better.
This is something that didn’t end up in the show, but one of the writers told the story of they live in New York and there was some situation where there was a mentally ill person on the street who looked like they were sort of endangering people and maybe themselves. So, the woman called the police, but was very conflicted about it and was sort of telling the police, “Please help them, but please do it in a humane way.
I think they have mental health problems please.” That idea of calling the police with instructions of how I would like it to be handled was something that we all sort of laughed at but related to.
It’s funny, one of our writers noted, people who love or hate NPR can both like In The Know. Was that intentional?
When we were pitching it, we were sort of selling that as hopefully a strength of the show. It wouldn’t be limited only to people who already like NPR, that hopefully it would also appeal to people who, at least, have an idea of NPR they hate. It’s interesting, I will look on Twitter to see if anyone’s talking about the show and there are some people who love the show where I then go to their Twitter accounts and… It’s like, whoa, you are very different from me politically, but I’m glad you enjoy it.
[Laughs] It’s not a loud political comedy.
Hopefully. At the end of the day it’s making fun of a certain type of person, that sort of snobbish person who has a presentation of themselves publicly that they fall short of privately. Hopefully, people can relate to no matter where they are in the political spectrum.
During the pitches, how was it selling the idea of stop-motion?
So it was Mike Judge’s idea for it to be in stop motion. He was like, “I’m not dogmatic about it, but I think it would look cool, and I’ve always wanted to work in stop-motion.” It wasn’t something that Zach and I had originally thought about. The more Zach and I thought about how stop motion looks, and even how people perceive it, it was a good fit.
There’s a certain tweeness to how people see stop-motion sometimes that works with the world of NPR. The fact that our characters are these puppets with fragile bodies and big heads controlled by forces outside of their consciousness just fit. I think it was something that when we pitched it, some people did say, “Well, we don’t think people want to watch stop-motion for adults.” We were like, “Okay, it won’t be a fit for you.”
Even though anime and animation is huge with adults, right?
Yeah. People have such interesting biases towards different types of animation and one thing that I really hope out of this show, I don’t know whether or not we’ll do more seasons of it, but ShadowMachine who was the animation company beautiful work was so amazing, and part of me just hopes that other people who have ideas for adult comedies consider stop-motion, specifically consider using ShadowMachine.
I think people whose only familiarity is like the Rudolph specials from when they were a kid. I think ShadowMachine shows how specific the acting can be with stop-motion and how well they get comedic acting, which is hard.
In the Know does look beautiful, and you can’t say that about a lot of comedies these days.
Thank you. I’m really glad. There was a production designer at ShadowMachine, Rob DeSue, and because we knew the show was going to take place primarily in this one studio, we talked about how people can’t hate how it looks because it’ll start to feel so claustrophobic and miserable to be there. Hopefully, he pulled off a space that’s both warm and beautiful, but also feels a little bit underfunded where it doesn’t feel like it’s a fancy radio station, but it’s still pleasing to look at.
How was working on facial comedy and physical comedy with ShadowMachine? Was there trial and error there in the beginning of figuring out how to nail a lot of those jokes or movements?
I think the big thing was Zach and I share a sort of philosophy that at some level… We got from our improv training at UCB, which is that the funniest way to play comedy is to not play the comedy of it, to act it as seriously as you would act drama. Just trust that the words or the situations will be funny or funnier if it doesn’t feel like the character knows it’s funny. I think we had that conversation with the animators really early on and it felt like they really understood that.
For the interviews with the live-action guests, were they prepped much about the story beats you wanted to hit?
I would come up on the Zoom and just say to our guests, “Imagine that this is a real NPR interview and just treat it like it’s real. The only thing we ask you not to do is comment on the fact that it’s a puppet you’re talking to.” We knew we weren’t always sure where the interviews would fall in the episodes, so for the most part, there wasn’t anything where we needed them to know about the mechanics of what was happening in the rest of the episode.
But we knew in the Tegan and Sara one as a plot point, we needed them to get sick. So at the end of that interview, I was like, “Would you mind really quickly to pretend to get sick so we can use that?” And they were very game for that. And I think with [writer] Roxane Gay, I may have warned her that Lauren would bring up a personal issue but didn’t tell her what it was, and she was very sweet to engage with him on something so silly.
Was it a happy accident Lauren spoke with pretty good interviewers like Norah Jones and Mike Tyson?
Just a happy accident. I think the main thing we wanted with all of our guests was to just have a diversity of types of guests where it’s like, “It’d be nice if we had an athlete. It would be nice if we had someone in music. It would be nice if we had someone who was an intellectual.” I think it just worked out that Mike Tyson and Norah Jones would be on the same one.
Out of all the interviewees, Mike Tyson probably connects the most with Lauren Caspian.
That was our favorite one to do. We loved all of them, but Zach is a big boxing fan and has always been really interested in Mike Tyson. Mike Tyson really did say things that we found to be really profound. We didn’t even get to use all of it in the interview.
I remember Lauren asked if it was possible for a professional boxer to come from a privileged background. And he said, “Well, the only one I can think of is Muhammad Ali.” And Lauren’s like, “Oh, I didn’t know he had a privileged background.” Tyson said, “Well, he had a mother and father and they both work. So, to me, that’s a privilege.”
Do you already have story ideas for potential future seasons?
Yeah, we definitely have story ideas. Sometimes they would come up just while we were in the edit, someone we’d just be talking with each other and things would come up. One day, I was in the library with my daughter. I saw a children’s book called “Goodnight Racism,” and I was like, “That’s pretty funny.” And so, we’d talk about maybe there’s an idea for Lauren writing a children’s book or something.
Regarding a second season, animation takes so long. Another season wouldn’t come out until the end of 2025 at the earliest. The characters are politically-minded, so it’s interesting to try to write the future for them. What the sort of vibe of the country will be?
Were there those questions in the writing room for season one?
We definitely worried about it. We pitched the plot of the pilot a few years before it came out and we were like, “I hope this doesn’t feel super dated by the time the show comes out.” I think in the writer’s room we did try to lean towards themes that felt a little evergreen as far as liberals like ourselves are concerned about, as opposed to something that would be extremely topical and wouldn’t be talking about in six months.
Are you still teaching at UCB?
I took a break for the show. I just got too busy with the show and other projects have come up, but I was just telling Zach the other day, I miss it. So I would like to come back to it.
Anything you think after making in the know that you’d bring with you and your teachings at UCB?
That’s a good question. I’m not sure. I think all my teaching at UCB definitely helped me. I think it gave me a good sense of what I find funny and how to communicate that with people. Maybe it would just be like a lot of UCB students are interested in writing and acting for comedy, and I would just be able to truthfully say everything you’re learning here will be helpful.
I mean, it was such a truly lucky process where working with Zach was amazing. Our writers were amazing, all the actors were great, the executives at Peacock, and I feel like at this point I could trash them if I wanted to, but they were also great to work with. You hear from people with dreams that get gradually polluted by the time it comes out. For Zach and I, it really came out in the dream version of it, which is I think probably rare.
It’s hard to imagine a lot of cooks in the kitchen for a stop-motion comedy about an NPR show.
That was the blessing of it.
In The Know is available to stream on Peacock.
