In the second episode of In the Know, Peacock’s new stop-motion animated workplace comedy set at a parodic version of NPR, the show’s ensemble is struggling to solicit donations when Fabian (Caitlin Reilly), the office’s researcher, hops on the air in a fit of rage and begins berating the station’s “needle-dicked, neoliberal, piss-pants†listeners into paying up. Pledges begin pouring in instantly. “I guess, deep down, public-radio listeners are just a bunch of progressive pay pigs begging to get dommed,†says Carl (Carl Tart), the station’s audio engineer.
At its best, In the Know — co-created by The Zach Woods, Brandon Gardner, and Mike Judge — successfully “doms†public-radio listeners like this by highlighting their most obnoxious if relatable tendencies. Woods voices protagonist Lauren Caspian, host of the station’s third-most-popular show, a man described in the series as looking like “the stork who brings miscarriages.†His overpowering narcissism is constantly interfering with his desperate desire to be seen as a perfect hyperprogressive ally. At one point, he jettisons a planned broadcast in favor of a sweaty, impromptu “racial roundtable†with Carl and the station’s intern Chase (Charlie Bushnell), but then derails it to throw a tantrum about not having Carl’s personal phone number.
Rounding out the show’s staff are Barb (J. Smith Cameron) as the show’s good-natured producer and Sandy (Judge), an out-of-touch cultural critic and “legal alternative for necrophiliacs†based on a character Judge created in the ’90s. Between its satire of NPR programming and its listeners, desire to find empathy for its characters, and balance of stop-motion animation and interviews with live-action people (including Mike Tyson, Roxane Gay, Finn Wolfhard, and Tegan and Sara), the show is constantly juggling a lot of moving parts. The effect is to achieve Woods’s desire to inject nuance into the show’s discussions and plots without sanctimony. “Something that I wish we could all do as things are becoming ever more polarized is make fun of ourselves more,†Woods says. “I can acknowledge that I’m full of shit in a lot of ways without implicitly co-signing the views of my opponents.â€
In the Know doesn’t strike me as a show that appears in your head all at once fully formed. What was the original spark that led you to the show’s very specific formula?Â
Mike Judge and I worked on Silicon Valley together, and Mike noticed that I end up asking people lots of questions because I’m a little shy. But, more, it’s just genuine curiosity — I find most people quite interesting. He realized that I sort of default to an interview mode, and I am undeniably what someone on the right would call a “beta cuck libtard,†so I fit snugly in the NPR demographic. So it seemed like a good combination to have me be an NPR interviewer with real live guests. Then I started talking to Brandon Gardner, my writing partner, and we just fleshed out the world.
Why did you decide stop-motion animation was the right medium for the show?Â
The reason we chose stop-motion was threefold. One reason is, if you’re going to portray characters who are these kinds of precious delicate little creatures, who are being controlled by forces they’re not aware of, puppets are the obvious choice. The medium matches the characters. Also, I think we wanted to do some satirical stuff, and I think it gives you a slightly longer leash. Something that might feel a little bit caustic in live-action, if it’s being delivered by a whimsical puppet, feels sillier as opposed to nasty. And then the third thing was that we wanted the interviews to get people out of their established talking points. When we’re interviewing these celebrities who are so media-trained and so savvy, we wanted to put them in a position where they were comfortably outside of their comfort zone, where it’s dopey enough that it’s nonthreatening, but it’s novel enough that they’re going to depart from their well-trodden media responses and reveal new parts of themselves. I found that some of them really did.
What are the challenges of working in that medium?
A lot of it is time and money. It’s a slow and expensive medium, but we were with ShadowMachine — which is this company in Portland that made Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio that just won an Oscar — and they were willing to slum it with us, which was very sweet. So you really have to commit. The way I like to work with live-action is to just shoot a lot of different things, and then really build it in the edit. With stop-motion, it doesn’t work that way. You have to know what every single shot is in the final cut, basically, before you even touch a puppet.
You’ve acted in satires in the past like Silicon Valley and Armando Iannucci’s movie In the Loop. What did you learn from those experiences about how to do satire effectively that you funneled into this project?
I learned a lot from Mike, in that there’s an underlying affection in all of his satire. Even when he’s showing really grotesque or asinine behavior, there’s still a kind of warmth to the whole thing. It’s not sanctimonious and it’s not holier-than-thou, and I think that’s really important. I wish I was better than these characters, but I’m not. And the first thing I ever really worked on professionally was In the Loop, and on the first day, I was so nervous that I was acting in a way that was a little bit garish and cartoonish. And Armando Ianucci was like, “No, no, no, you can just be a person. You’re a very specific person, but it doesn’t have to be like a sketch.†It was excellent direction that really helped me. And I think, when we were casting this — because it’s animated — we got a lot of people who were [in cartoonish voice] doing a crazy voice. But the thing I gravitated to were the people who sounded just like actual people.
The jokes about public radio all seem like they’re coming from a place of knowing reverence. Did you have a list of specific public-radio memories or reference points you felt were ripe for parody?
I love The Daily. I listen to it all the time. It really distills these complicated news stories down into a half-hour that any doofus can understand at least the basics of. But Michael Barbaro, when he’s listening, will do this very emphatic “mm-hmm.†He’ll be very active listening, and that part drives me bananas.
And then, beyond the vocal affectations, there’s this thing that I’ve noticed where some public intellectuals have a kind of puckish, intellectually naughty quality where you don’t even get the sense that they necessarily believe what they’re saying. They just think it would be provocative and interesting and a bit transgressive if they were to posit this theory: “Dare I attack these sacred cows?†Sometimes they’ll ask these kinds of rhetorical questions where they’ll be like, “Everyone agrees that violence is wrong, but what if it isn’t?†It’s that kind of shit that drives me crazy. It’s like, Look, do you think it is, or don’t you? But instead it’s like, “I’m gonna tickle you with my cerebral cortex.â€
You had Elise Hu from NPR come into the writers’ room and chat about specific public-radio things that you could mention in the show. Did anything she mention make it into the show?
Yogurt week is a real thing. At NPR, their big treat is yogurt week. That’s a real NPR celebration. The other thing she said is that there’s these verbally abusive grammar nazis who will call in and be like, “You used this word, but you mispronounced it†or “You ended on a preposition,†or they’ll lacerate the host about their vocal fry. It’s these priggish, mean nanny callers who feel entitled to verbally torture the hosts because they give ten bucks a year to NPR. I think that’s a small percentage of the listeners, but I gathered that they’re a very vocal small percentage. So that idea of the listeners’ aggression and entitlement made it into the show. It’s really more of a satire of NPR listeners, which I am one of. It’s less trying to do like a very faithful depiction of NPR and more using NPR as the staging ground for our self-loathing.
A lot of the jokes in the show are about the hypocrisies of the types of hyperprogressives who work at institutions like this. Watching it, at times, I couldn’t help but think of right-wing platforms like the Daily Wire, and I had the thought, If they knew how to write comedy, this is what it would look like. Did you worry at all about the show sending the wrong message to the wrong people?Â
It’s a valid question, and I’m sure it’s one that we have variable levels of success with. I’m not usually a big fan of polemics, and when I feel like a show is wagging its finger at me or telling me what to think, I feel myself naturally kind of recoil from that. In the case of this, we didn’t want to make some right-wing fantasy of a left-wing Frankenstein come alive. Something that I wish we could all do as things are becoming ever more polarized is make fun of ourselves more. That’s a source of real credibility. It telegraphs a degree of self-awareness and humility, but also confidence. I can acknowledge that I’m full of shit in a lot of ways without implicitly co-signing the views of my opponents.
Throughout the whole Trump era, every late-night show was endlessly lampooning Trump. I don’t know if that does anything for the left, but what I do know is I didn’t see a lot of people on the left making fun of the left, and I certainly didn’t see a lot of people on the right making fun of the right. I would be so happy to see it if Ben Shapiro did a comedy making fun of the right. My blood pressure would go down. I’d be like, At the very least, they know what is absurd and indefensible about their way of being. And I feel like there’s a lot that’s absurd and indefensible about my way of being. So we’re trying to put our money where our mouth is and be like, We know that we are not perfect by a long shot. Often, we’re not even good. But we’re trying.
I don’t know that the aspirations of the characters in the show are bad. Concern with language is totally valid. I am progressive in a lot of ways, but I’m also aware that I don’t always walk the walk, and someone on the other side of the political spectrum could easily point at me and be like, “Okay, Hollywood, you say this stuff, but how come L.A. is covered in homeless encampments? Why aren’t you, an ostensibly progressive person, devoting more time, attention, and political capital to dealing with that?†And I wouldn’t really have a very good answer.
You’ve explained in other interviews that the celebrity interviews on the show were a mix of prewritten and improvised questions and that the subjects were given instructions to simply treat it like a normal NPR interview — albeit one being conducted by a still of Lauren Caspian. But when the show’s booker, Hillary Kun, was reaching out to celebrities’ publicists to get them to do interviews on the show, how did she pitch it to them?
I really don’t know. We were kind of like, “Work your magic, Hillary. Please go get us Mike Tyson.†Then she’d be like, “We got you Mike Tyson,†and we’d be like, “No, you didn’t.†I think the crux of it was that the joke would never be on them. It was that Lauren was the clown and they were the foil, and that it was not a “Gotcha!†Borat kind of situation. I thought those Sacha Baron Cohen things were very funny when they came out, but as I get older, I really don’t like watching them. Sometimes they’re with people who have done very vile things, and in that case I feel more comfortable with it. But, sometimes, it’s just people who are walking into a buzzsaw, where you get this feeling like, Oh, you interviewed someone for a gazillion hours and then just took the worst moment and edited it to make that seem like the thing. I’m not party to the inner workings of that show, but there’s something nasty about it, even though it’s super funny. So we really wanted to avoid that. Even if there were guests where we took issue with things, we were kind of like, This isn’t really the venue.
What do you think Lauren Caspian would ask you about the show if he were interviewing you instead of me?Â
He’d probably ask why there weren’t more sex scenes with him, because he feels like that’s what people would want to see. I think he just would have a lot of notes about the depiction of himself and why his undeniable radio Lothario persona wasn’t given more space in the narrative.
Actually, I think that’s wrong. I think he would ask about the mise-en-scène. He’d be like, “I would have preferred a more Godard-ian approach or a Tarkovsky-ian approach, and the framing was very pedestrian. I felt that you did me a disservice. My best angle is a Dutch tilt, and you should have shot me from a Dutch tilt. And if my story isn’t on Criterion, I’m gonna put rocks in my pockets and walk into the ocean like Virginia Woolf.†There really wouldn’t be a question. There would just be a stream of recrimination.