How Clone High Rose From the Dead

Way back in the early 2000s, prime-time animation was on an upswell. The Simpsons was long running, South Park was in its edgy infancy, and there were dozens more shows for viewers to choose from: Space Ghost Coast to Coast had launched a slew of spinoffs, including Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law; Mike Judge’s staccato rhythms were on display in King of the Hill; Daria was a countercultural icon; films like Spawn and Clerks were getting drawn adaptations. Two decades later, some of these series, like Futurama and Beavis and Butt-Head, are still hanging around as beneficiaries of a bountiful renewal era. Add Clone High to the list.

Phil Lord, Chris Miller, and Bill Lawrence’s series was set in a high school that was actually a government-run military experiment, attended by clones of “famous guys and ladies� (Abraham Lincoln, Joan of Arc, Cleopatra, JFK) in their “sexy teen� years. Episodes parodied aspects of how teen culture had been shown on TV to that point, presenting a highly competitive student body concerned as much with presidential elections and standardized testing as makeovers, school musicals, and celebrity on the level of Luke Perry and Mandy Moore (both of whom guest-starred). The love triangles evoked Dawson’s Creek; the parents-are-away house parties paid homage to Freaks and Geeks; a subplot about a teen-suicide hotline brought to mind Heathers.

The series was as much a feat of animation — prioritizing design over movement in the style of Rocky and Bullwinkle and later Dexter’s Laboratory and The Powerpuff Girls — as it was a storytelling workshop for an untested duo who would go on to write some of Hollywood’s biggest animated blockbusters. Miller and Lord, then 27, had Lawrence as their godfather, who let them work in the same abandoned hospital as his other series, Scrubs, and even permitted Zach Braff and Donald Faison to lend some voicework. When Clone High premiered, critics likened the humor to that of Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, calling it “enjoyably nervy�: not quite as crude as Beavis and Butt-Head, not as subversive as South Park. More than ten years later, Vulture described it as “a brilliantly funny, completely nuts, surprisingly heartfelt, tonally inventive masterpiece.�

But Clone High was, by most commercial measures, a failure. MTV pulled the series — which was already suffering from low ratings after it transferred from the Canadian cable network Teletoon to the U.S. in 2003 — a little over halfway through the first season after an international incident related to its depiction of Mahatma Gandhi. In Clone High, Gandhi (voiced by Michael McDonald) was a party animal and class clown who moonlighted as a rapper and used gateway drugs (in this show’s case, raisins). Protesters in India threatened to hunger-strike over the offensive portrayal of the anti-colonialist, and — poof! — Clone High was canceled. The remaining episodes could be viewed in the U.S. only by way of the torrent sphere, where the series attained cult status, leading MTV Classics to finally air the entire season in 2016 and eventually to DVD releases.

Twenty years and a scrapped live-action movie later, Lord and Miller have an Oscar for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Bill Lawrence has an Emmy for Ted Lasso, streaming platforms are nearing the end of a nostalgia-induced buying era, and Clone High is getting another chance: a second season is on Max, with a mix of new and returning collaborators (Will Forte included). The show, which picks up after the clones were cryogenically frozen on prom night, is premiering to a new generation of animation fans who are more likely to have found Clone High by way of TikTok, a dynamic not so subtly explored in the second-season storyline. “Our original idea was ‘It’d be so nice to represent a success story, of people being unfrozen and learning to navigate the current times,’� says Lord. “As opposed to crossing their arms and being like, ‘These young people don’t know what they’re talking about.’�

The team is confident they can pull it off, so much so that a third season is “almost done,� Miller says. Ask him or Lord or anyone else involved in the original how Clone High made such a comeback, and they will liken the process to raising the dead. All they could do is hope.

I.

They Were Young, Foolish, and Working in an Abandoned Psych Ward

In the early 2000s, prime-time animation geared toward adult viewers, as well as live-action series depicting the romantically dramatic lives of high schoolers, were surging in popularity. In that landscape, aspiring filmmakers and Dartmouth buddies Phil Lord and Chris Miller had an idea — one that was too risqué for Disney, where, at the time, they were tasked with creating more wholesome animated kids’ content. With nowhere near the clout or experience the Spider-Verse and Lego Movie creators have today, they managed to leverage their reputation as talented animators and secure the opportunity to pitch a show about horny teenage clones to Bill Lawrence.

Chris Miller, co-creator, executive producer, writer, and voice actor: We were working at Disney Television Animation, trying to come up with TV shows, mostly for Saturday-morning kid stuff. But we kept thinking about things for prime-time adult audiences, and there was an idea that I had in a notebook of mine about clones of historical figures that went to college together.

Phil had the smart idea of making it about high school, because, at the time, there were a lot of these high-school dramas like Beverly Hills, 90210 and Dawson’s Creek. It was like, Oh, we could really lean into sort of the angstyness and the tropes of that genre. It made it seem a lot more clever and fun. We ended up pitching it to Fox, and they bought it, but then the head of Fox left, and so we took it out to MTV and crazily they wanted to make it.

Erica Rivinoja, writer (season one) and co-showrunner (seasons two and three): It was one of my first jobs. Chris and Phil were the reason that I signed with an agent and moved out here. They said, “We have the show that might go. We would love for you to work on it.� They introduced me to Matt Rice.

Will Forte, voice of Abe: I had met Chris and Phil at the Aspen Comedy Festival. We had the same agent, Matt Rice. I went to college with him. He used to always love to get all his clients together; all his clients just really get along. Along came Chris and Phil, these new, new guys who he had just taken on. We became friends and started watching Survivor in this big fun group. A couple of years later, they had come to a couple of Groundlings shows that I had done. Even though I had never had any kind of on- or off-camera job, besides writing, they asked me to do this voice. I would have done anything with them, because they were really funny.

Rivinoja: It was just so chaotic the whole time. It was super-duper fun and also very dramatic because it was a bunch of young people that didn’t really know what they were doing, that were given too much power. I was the only woman.

Lord; co-creator, executive producer, writer, and voice actor: That’s cute, that she thought that we had power.

Miller: The rest of that, pretty accurate, though. We were just young tots, and then we had to make a TV show. We really didn’t know what we were doing, but we convinced the people on TV that we did know what we were doing, and because it was animation they were like, “Well, these guys are experts in animation,� and we were 20-something years old. We were not experts in anything. We gathered a whole room of funny, interesting people, and we had Bill Lawrence as our sort of godfather helping us. He had just started working on the first season of Scrubs, which was shooting in an abandoned hospital on Coldwater Riverside that no longer exists.

Lord: We couldn’t really afford an office, so he was like, “You can have the Clone High offices here in the abandoned hospital where we shoot Scrubs. There’s a part of the hospital that no one’s using� — which we soon found out was because it was formerly the psych ward and it had an uncomfortable vibe, let’s say.

Miller: It’s quite possible it was haunted.

Lord: All the doors locked from the outside.

Rivinoja: They were disgusting and there was no air conditioning. One of the writers, Judah Miller, his office had a closet in it, and inside, the number four was scratched hundreds and hundreds of times. My office had this sink with no handles, it just had foot pedals. It was so, so weird. Everyone was always playing basketball and I’d get hit on the head with the ball because it was one of those Nerf things. It was terrible.

Miller: We were young and foolish. We did these things sometimes called Funny Fridays, where we would all go out to lunch. We would all be like, “We’ll all have a drink,� and then the afternoon was always very unproductive. We thought, “Oh, we’d come up with some fun ideas and be loose,� but no, it just meant people were tired and nothing actually happened.

Lord: We were inexperienced. But with Bill’s help, we had been on a couple of writing staffs, so we knew some things that we didn’t want to do, and we knew the kinds of people that we wanted in the room: creative, collaborative, and up for anything.

II.

‘I Don’t Get This. What’s Happening?’

Clone High was built on a sci-fi foundation: A Secret Board of Shadowy Figures had cloned various historical figures and was raising them for nefarious military purposes. Monitoring the clones were the zany Principal Scudworth (voiced by Lord) and his devoted robot butler Mr. B (voiced by Miller), who usually drove the series’s B-stories while the neuroses-addled teens were the primary narrative focus. Most central was whether slightly dopey good-guy Abe (voiced by Forte) would realize and reciprocate the feelings of his best friend, the riot grrl-esque Joan (voiced by Sullivan), or stay with his girlfriend, the more sexually free Cleo (voiced by Christa Miller, who is also Lawrence’s wife). The episodes were dense with winky jokes, conspiracy theories, and cheeky melodrama. But Clone High also had genuine affection for its characters, and that earnestness came through most clearly in the voice performances — even if those actors couldn’t quite grasp the series’s big swings at the time. 

Nicole Sullivan, voice of Joan: I’ve been friends with Christa Miller — we lived together in our mid 20s. She met Bill; she didn’t like Bill; I told her to like Bill more; then she liked Bill more, and then she married Bill. I’m not responsible for their love, but I kind of am.

Bill and Christa called and said, “We have this thing, it’s a show,� and at the time, I was at the height of my C-level success. I was like, “I don’t know if I have time for this shit. I got a C-level rating right now.� But I was like, “Let me see what’s going on.� I did, and I didn’t get it. We were reading it in the booth and I was like, “I don’t get this. What’s happening?� I was so, just, confused.

But I remember so specifically how focused and determined Phil and Chris were. I was like, “Those little kids are gonna do well for themselves.� I call them “The Boys,� which is so condescending, because they fucking run Hollywood.

Forte: I love that you call them The Boys.

Sullivan: I just thought, Alright, let me give this my all, because I want to impress these guys. And it worked out. I got to just relax into their jokes.

Lord: We picked folks who wrote scripts that really made us laugh. When people had weird ideas, we tried to make them work, and that’s how you got an episode that was entirely made from a drawing of Scudworth with a cravat. One of our writers, Eric Kentoff, had written for the Harlem Globetrotters as his first job, and he was like, “I really want to write a basketball episode.�

Miller: We also had the writing staff of Scrubs nearby, to show cuts of animatics to and have them give jokes and thoughts. It was kind of a weird summer camp.

Rivinoja: All that sci-fi, Board of Shadowy Figures, how they were created, the backstory — there was so much exposition.

Erik Durbin, co-showrunner (seasons two and three): Chris and Phil, Erica’s sensibility — the way that they’re funny, the way that they’re sweet — it all went together really well.

Forte: I’m just doing my own voice as Abraham Lincoln, and all the time was like, “Oh my God. This is so boring. Are you guys sure this is what you want?� But they claimed that that was what they wanted. It took a while to get used to that. Anytime I was able to do overwrought emotion, or big screams, or singing, I felt like, “That’s fun to do.� And there was plenty of that. You feel a real pressure for it to go well, ‘cause you know that this is probably the only chance these guys have, and they’ll wither away into obscurity after this.

Sullivan: Will, did you have any idea that they would become the kingmakers of the universe?

Forte: Oh no! They were just these little sweetie pies that I liked to watch Survivor with.

III.

No Money, No Sleep, No Show

The 13-episode first season of Clone High — made on a limited budget, pushing everyone involved to their physical limits — aired on Canada’s Teletoon network, premiering in November 2002, and then on MTV, beginning in late January 2003. Almost immediately, there was trouble: protests in India against the show’s depiction of Mahatma Gandhi’s clone, voiced by actor and Mad TV cast member Michael McDonald, as a lusty teen desperate to fit in. News reports covered the protests and threats of a hunger strike announced on January 30, 2003, the 55th anniversary of Gandhi’s assassination. President and CEO of MTV Networks Tom Freston was coincidentally in India at the time, and MTV quickly issued an apology — and a cancellation.

Miller: We had really killed ourselves to get this thing done. It was very low budget, and Phil and I were wearing a lot of hats on that show; learning how to edit, learning how to do all sorts of things. We were exhausted. After we finished, I went to Costa Rica on vacation, where I had no phone or Internet access. I made it to this eco-lodge that had a dial-up, and I had thousands of emails. Something was going on, and it was very confusing. My first thought was, “Hey, any publicity is good publicity. Look at that, we were on the CNN ticker. Look at that! The show’s getting awareness.� And then, “Oh, the show has also been taken off the air.�

Lord: That’s how we informed the cast and crew, by CNN ticker. I was home in Miami and obsessively looking on messaging boards for compliments about the show, and then we got a call from MTV folks saying that there was a little trouble in India. It unwound quickly, and I went pretty crazy. Because as Chris said, we had put our whole bodies — hadn’t really slept for a year — into finishing it. Literally turned in the last episode and fell to bits. To get that news was shocking. It was starting to catch on. We were about to go on Kevin and Bean, which was the biggest thing you could do at the time: go on local Los Angeles morning radio. They had done a lot to help South Park catch traction early on. We had to cancel because the MTV publicists were done doing press.

Miller: “You can’t talk about this at all.� We had lots of interview requests coming in, and we wanted to talk about it, but they did not want us to say anything about it.

Lord: And still, I’m not sure if we did the right thing by listening to them.

Rivinoja: I was working on South Park; I kept going back and forth between South Park and Clone High during that time. I remember the amount of press and excitement around Clone High. They had this big party, and I was like, “Chris and Phil are gonna be the next Matt and Trey.� I was expecting all this fanfare, and then when it got canceled, it was just so perplexing. Most of me thought, I can’t believe people care that much about anything. There’s nothing that I would hunger strike over, and maybe it’s just because I’m dead inside and have no passion, but I was just amazed at how much impact that had.

Sullivan: Bill Lawrence called me. I was bummed. To have that, and to have that balloon also deflate, was super sad. But I thought, “Well, it’s maybe too smart for what’s happening now. Maybe they’re too good.�

Rivinoja: It just was this blip on my resume for a very long time. Nobody had ever heard of it, and if they looked on my IMDb, they were like “What was Clone High?� Nobody cared about it at all, until very recently. It started to get popular on TikTok, and people had heard of it and were excited about it. Now we’re starting to look back on it fondly, but before it was, “Oh yeah, that happened, I guess.�

Forte: I wasn’t as worried because Chris and Phil swore to keep this a secret, but they told me in about 20 years, we’re gonna do a second season.

Sullivan: Are you serious?

Forte: Yes.

Sullivan: What the fuck!

IV.

‘Any Truth to These Rumors?’

After Clone High ended, cast and crew went their separate ways. Lord and Miller wrote and directed (often together) a number of blockbuster hits and TV series, some animated (including Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, The Lego Movie, and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse) and some high school-focused (21 Jump Street and 22 Jump Street, The Afterparty). Forte, Rivinoja, and Durbin worked together on The Last Man on Earth; Lawrence and Miller on Cougar Town and Shrinking; and Sullivan remained a robust voice actor, with roles on Kim Possible, The Penguins of Madagascar, and DC Super Hero Girls. But about 15 years after the cancellation, an opportunity for a grander reunion arose. 

Miller: Whenever we got together with Bill, which we do every year or two for dinner or drinks or just to chat, we always go, “It would be great to revive this thing, but you’re on a deal here, and I’m on a deal there, and it’s hard to get the lawyers and and get the rights all squared away.� We were saying it for years and years and years and finally we’re like, “On our next TV deals, we’ll all carve out Clone High so that we can do it together, sort of outside of our deals, and we can get the rights and we can then actually do it.� We finally got our acts together enough to figure out how to do it, but it’s something we’ve been talking about for 15 —

Lord: 20 years.

Rivinoja: Someone had brought up, “What if we do a live-action feature of Clone High?�, which seemed like a terrible idea, but they were like, “I think we’re gonna put together a pitch for this. Would you like to write it?� And I was like, “Yeah, yeah.� Then it became, “Well, actually, there’s a chance that we could do a series out of it,� which made a lot more sense to me.

Miller: Paramount, which is a Viacom company, was like, “We’d be interested in doing a movie version.� As we were working on it, we were like, “It really is better as an animated thing, because you can just be more insane.� In live action, it gets really broad really quickly, and it’s hard to get the tone right. You need teenagers to be super funny, and it’s really hard to find people for that. We were struggling a little bit, and then the timing worked out for us to be like, “Why don’t we just pitch it as an animated show?� There were a couple of streamers that said, “If you bring this to us, we want to do it.� That was motivation enough for us to talk to Bill and say, “Let’s actually do this.� The email we sent to Erica about how there was interest from streamers was in late 2019.

Rivinoja: Chris brought up the idea of, “Would you want to be the showrunner on it? We’re gonna go pitch it to a bunch of places and there’s interest.� I wrote the pitch and came up with all the new characters. We did our first pitch in March 2020 to HBO Max over Zoom. They bought it in the room. There were a few other places, but they seemed most excited about it, so we went with them. Chris and Phil and Erik and Will and I — we’ve been friends this entire time, and hung out this entire time. It’s not like we just reunited to do this. We’ve continued to work on projects together.

Forte: Every once in a while you’d hear some little rumor that the series was coming back, but it all seemed like just more wishful thinking than anything else.

Sullivan: I obviously thought it was dead, but then streamers started doing reboots of other stuff. Of all the shows I’ve been on, Clone High is the first one I thought, “It’s the one they should bring back.�

Forte: I think I heard something at a party? I don’t think it was from Chris and Phil. I called them and said, “I heard this. Any truth to these rumors?� And they said, “Yeah, it’s looking like it’s happening.�

Sullivan: Bill called me, and he’s like, “Listen, are you still up for this?� And I was like, “Fuck, yeah.�

Lord: Things happen in due time. It had to feel right. It felt right when we were coming up with the pitch with Erica, it felt right when we were out there in the marketplace selling it, and it felt right writing and producing it.
You’re in an era where everything is getting revived, where because we have newly unfettered access to all the content we’ve ever made, we’re pulling it out and chopping and screwing it. JFK had a TikTok moment! That’s truly one of the most unexpected things that’s ever happened in our career. In that environment, it seemed to make a lot of sense.

Rivinoja: It did feel like a good time to do the same idea, but updated. Take what we loved about it, and then fix what we did poorly, I hope. There was a lot of stuff that we were just so naive and uneducated about: a lot of the voice casting, casting people of color with white people. Some of it was just mean jokes, little celebrity digs. Some of it just doesn’t hold up.

Durbin: The idea of being into your feelings and in touch with your feelings has only become more. To send that up, make fun of it but also honor it and respect it and love it and realize that it’s everything that everyone’s going through at the same time, it’s only magnified. It had that spirit then, and we’re trying to keep it now.

V.

Clone High Thaws Out

HBO Max ordered two 10-episode seasons of Clone High and announced its renewal in winter 2021. Lord, Miller, and Lawrence would serve as executive producers (with Lord and Miller also returning to write and voice Scudworth and Mr. B, respectively). Rivinoja and Durbin, who joined the series in spring 2022, were tapped as co-showrunners. New staff was needed for the writers’ room, the expanded voice cast (including Ayo Edibiri as Harriet Tubman and Vicci Martinez as Frida Kahlo), and the animation work, all of which would have to simultaneously capture what made the first season so beloved and reflect the updated comedic sensibilities and visual style of the two subsequent decades. 

The first season of Clone High ended on a number of cliffhangers: Scudworth refuses to let the Secret Board of Shadowy Figures have the teens, insisting that they’re “not ready� before cryogenically freezing them all on prom night. Abe declares that he’s ready to choose between Joan and Cleo — but his admission is cut off mid-icing — and Joan sleeps with JFK. When the second season starts, it’s 20 years later, and the Secret Board orders Scudworth to melt the clones and start a new mission, Operation Spread Eagle. What they don’t realize is that Scudworth has been secretly cloning more historical figures. A notable absence: Gandhi and McDonald, who Lord says “absolutely understood and gave his blessing� for the series to continue without him. “We love the guy, and I think we’re still trying to find ways to have him do a voice,� Lord says. 

Miller: A lot of people are going to be coming to the show not knowing the first season, and then there’s all the people who did see this show. Trying to do something that will be entertaining and engaging for both audiences is a real challenge. There was definitely a lot of balance of like, How much backstory do we give? How much do we just let people figure it out? That took a long time.

Rivinoja: We wanted to do: This is what we think is funny. This is what we want to see on the screen. This is what we want to see these characters do. And also, this is a treat for the fans, this little thing. We were trying to give the fans what they wanted, but make a new set of fans. It was really hard. I’m not sure we succeeded. But we tried.

Lord: I’d say if anything evolved since the pitch, it’s that the show got more affectionate for all the characters, and it got more sympathetic. The things that turned out to be the funniest were the ones that were honestly the warmest.

Rivinoja: The writers room was a few of us super-old, aged people, and then a lot of very young, smart, brilliant writers. We always thought that Abe was the hero in it and he was our POV guy and we loved him, and people don’t. People hate Abe and think he’s such a turd. Chris and Phil were like, “We need more Abe stories,� and I was trying to say, “A lot of these young writers don’t want to hear from Abe ever again.� Even though at the time we thought Abe was our way in, I think it was really Joan.

Sullivan: When I read the script, I was like, “Joan has her confidence!� The first season was so, Joan just getting tossed around in a pinball machine to everyone else’s emotions. She was reacting. I love that in this one, Joan is still just as messed up as the rest of them, but she got to at least own her own version of being a messed-up high school student. That made me beyond thrilled.

Rivinoja: We got Tommy Walter to score, and then it was hiring the animation studio that we were going to use because it was really important that it looked similar to what it was. Phil and Chris will know the actual terms — I don’t know the terms. But we wanted it to look pretty trashy and garbagey, basically, like the original one.

Lord: Erica might need some media training. [Laughs.] We were always inspired by the Golden Age of limited animation. The high watermark is Rocky and Bullwinkle, which are really cool designs that don’t move that much because movement is expensive. In the ’90s, there was a revival of that at Cartoon Network, and a lot of those great shows like Dexter’s Laboratory and The Powerpuff Girls came out of that affection for that tradition.

Another reason why the style is really minimalist in terms of movement, and really flashy in terms of color and design and line work: When you ship something to another country that may or may not speak the language or appreciate the jokes, you have to make the animation style really robust. We would almost make inside jokes about how little something could move and still tell the story. We tried to make virtue of the fact that Gandhi was really, really short and Abe was really, really tall. There is a visual sense of humor to it, which is why I think we had a lot of people really excited in the animation community to work on the show. We got all of these ringers from the Jam Filled Animation Studio and Shadow Machine to come in and help us out because you don’t always get to work in that style anymore.

I don’t know if I would call it “trashy.� What would you call it, Chris?

Miller: It’s a limited art style that favors design over movement. The character set is still wackadoo as far as there’s tiny people and super-tall people and people whose hair is enormous. We were trying to get everyone to have a very distinct silhouette, and be very iconically them. The animation quality is better than we were able to do 20 years ago. The tools are more advanced. We’re older and tired-er now than we were before, so there was a whole crop of talented young people who dedicated themselves to making the show great.

Lord: Scudworth is very easy to get back into. I just have to tap into my deep wells of anxiety and rage. I do remember going, “Shoot. Can you play me what we used to sound like?� Sometimes, Chris, I would accidentally become Lord Business.

Miller: Phil was the scratch voice, the temporary voice, while we were making The Lego Movie for Lord Business, before Will Ferrell. It’s a similar type of role: the evil boss. I remember being in the room the first time Phil did his Scudworth thing for the new season’s first episode, and I was seeing the veins pop out of his forehead as he’s screaming. I was like, “Oh, it’s nice to be back here. It’s fun.�

Sullivan: Will and I both use our same voices, exactly the way God gave them to us. His is more hyped-up energy and mine is more low-key. I don’t think either of us had to go back into the vocal cords, like, “I remember where Clone High lives!� We just talk like ourselves.

Forte: It was the opposite of rust. We were lubed up for season two. More than anything, it’s just the confidence of having a little more experience.

Lord: We’re at the age in our lives where you’re starting to go, “A whole generation has passed since I was this age.� We’re starting to feel the differences, and so you get to write a show about people from 20 years ago navigating what’s happening now. Our original idea was, “It’d be so nice to represent a success story, of people being unfrozen and learning to navigate the current times.� As opposed to crossing their arms and being like, “These young people don’t know what they’re talking about,� it’s more like, “I want to learn what they know and I want to understand it and be part of it.�

Sullivan: All of a sudden, I saw what Chris and Phil saw years ago, which was an endless tapestry to play with. I didn’t get that. Then the second season, I was like, “Oh, this is what they were thinking the whole time.�

Forte: The potential for this show was so great and unfulfilled. It really did feel like there was so much there. To get to, after so long, have it resurface and be with all these people — it’s a very emotional thing.

Sullivan: It’s emotional in all the right ways. It’s like a weird comfort blanket that you didn’t expect to get.

Lord: I feel very happy that the work was strong enough to crawl out of the dirt, like the undead, and find life. That’s the thing that you always hope for.