Robert Carlock and Sam Means are the writers and creators of Netflix’s animated series Mulligan. In this interview with Awards Daily, they detail where the idea of the show and several of the out-there characters came from in addition to the learning curve on animation and how flooding Washington D.C. can be has hard in animation as it is in live-action.
Awards Daily: Where did the idea for the show come from?
Sam Means: It’s funny. It’s actually from the end of the movie San Andreas with The Rock and Carla Gugino where The Rock plays a helicopter pilot as San Francisco is destroyed by an earthquake. At the end, he and Carla Gugino are looking out over the wreckage and she says, “What do we do now?” and he says, “Now we rebuild.” There was this moment when I turned towards my wife and said, “Is he going to do it though? I am not sure he is qualified.”
Robert Carlock: Sam came back to the office with that joke, and we started talking about all those movies like Independence Day or Transformers or a Marvel movie where there’s a reason they end where they do. Because the rebuilding is either boring, hilarious, or tragic. We just thought it would be funny to keep going forward and see what happens when Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson, or Will Smith is in charge. You saved the day, we are all looking to you to lead, you are now our George Washington. What are you going to do about water? Are we going to change the way we run our country? Are we going to start baseball up again? These are the big questions, and it seemed like such a rich premise for a world where aliens exist and things are blowing up, but then it could also be an office comedy—which is how we think about it in this ruined White House with President Mulligan’s ad hoc cabinet. We get to put a lot of different people with different viewpoints in the room together, which is something we’ve loved to do since 30 Rock.
Sam Means: And one of the cabinet members is an alien.
Awards Daily: Speaking of the aliens, Axatrax’s species has some specific attributes that you can play with. How did you come up with what you wanted him to have in terms of contributing to the show?
Sam Means: Most were jokes that we wanted to do.
Robert Carlock” Going in we thought, well, that’s a different point of view of someone who came from a technologically superior civilization who looks down on his flesh bags. He also brings a completely different set of mores, social limitations, inhibitions, sex, and everything. So you can have Matty and Lucy and their will they or won’t they, and he’s coming in saying, what are you talking about? Just wait until your gender changes naturally like mine does, like a clownfish. In a world where you’re trying to build different dynamics and different points of view, someone who comes from light years away can literally have different points of view about everything. We want to take those points of view as seriously as the humans or the cyborg character who is having this arc of realizing he was once a human with hopes and wants. The fun for us was taking seriously what was originally stock characters in the action genre.
Awards Daily: Speaking of TOD, the cyborg, why did you decide you wanted to have this kind of super soldier character when everything else within the world besides the alien invasion is pretty much our time period?
Sam Means: To your second point, we did want to make it feel like this really destroyed Earth and the craziness is on top of that. We were still making a sci-fi alien TV show, and we wanted to take advantage of the opportunity of being in animation as much as we could. The robot discovering its humanity was an archetype we wanted to play with.
Robert Carlock: Then we also got to slowly play out this dawning of humanity that has this kind of sweetness to it. Having a human brain in this killer robot body. So yeah, you can do that in animation but after we got our designs back or the supervising director told us, “You realize he can’t go through doors?” So we made some adjustments, like we decided his wings could be retractable!
Awards Daily: Do you have his full backstory planned out besides the glimpses that we have gotten? Or is it just something you’re playing with as you go?
Sam Means: A combination of the two.
Robert Carlock: Pretty early, we figured out we wanted him to have an artistic dream that he had to let go of when he joined the military, and he got in trouble along the way and got sucked into this program. His brain has been removed, but he’s trying to get back to that human being that wanted to play the piano.
Sam Means: Which is a nice counterpoint to the military super cyborg.
Awards Daily: Cartwright was a particularly fun character for me. He fits so many stereotypes of the corrupt Southern politician. Did you have any particular real-life politicians in mind, or did you just kind of fit the beats that you needed?
Robert Carlock: He’s an homage to people like Mitch McConnell and Lyndon Johnson. We tried not to think of it necessarily as one wing of the political spectrum, although he tends to be pretty conservative. If this show is about all these different characters trying to get to a version of the world that they think is better than the one we lived in, he is the one who wants to go back to the 1950s–when no one was questioning the patriarchy and white male hegemony.
Sam Means: As he says in a later episode, the 1950s: “When everyone was happy, no exceptions that I can think of.”
Robert Carlock: So that set us down a certain path, but the origin was really that one of the people that survives knows how things work in Washington D.C. and will just reflexively stand in the way of change. So he’s both competent and a little bit evil and again, like anyone in the show, we try to understand where he’s coming from and treat him with some respect. Then in the second season, we’re going to get more of his backstory and the pathetic relationship he has with his father and give some insight into why he is the way he is.
Awards Daily: You start Season 2 with the idea that there are more humans out there and there are alternate new civilizations. Is that something you still want to play with potentially down the road?
Sam Means: We do like to focus on that this is the world we’re in with our characters but in these post-apocalyptic shows like The Last of Us or The Walking Dead, there is always the opportunity to stumble upon a group of people who have been doing it differently. Which is how we view the cruise ship that appears at the end of the first season. Did they make better choices than we did when they had the opportunity to be the last people on earth? So that is something that is always out there as a possibility to get new viewpoints.
Awards Daily: You have both worked in television for a long time but you have not done an animated show until now. How has that been different for you?
Robert Carlock: It’s been a learning experience and I mean that in a very positive way. It’s been fun to understand the possibilities and the limitations of animation versus live action. As someone said to us very early, you can try anything, this office could be Mars, but then you have to draw everything. Or the chairs could be on the ceiling because of a rendering problem, which is something we never experienced on our live-action shows. So it was always learning that fixing the chairs on the ceiling costs time, and time is money and we have to do it. You can control everything, but there’s only so much time, so it is like live production and learning how to use those limitations.
From a writing standpoint, not a lot changed; we were always kind of writing at the pace of animation. I think we were even more aggressive, in terms like we couldn’t flood a ruined Washington D.C. in live action. We were later told flooding even in animation is really hard to create, which made the episode hard to make. We also learned that horses are hard to draw. So that was duly noted. But writing more than one episode of anything is finding the balance of how you let your characters change without changing the dynamics of what the show’s about. Larry David may have mastered the never-changing; we try to write arcs and have our characters learn things. Animation just allows you to go farther and yet still snap back to normal more easily than you can with live action. So it allowed us to go to comic places we haven’t gone to before.
Sam Means: The comic rhythm was ultimately the same as 30 Rock and Kimmy Schmidt, but you don’t have to rig up Jane Krakowski on wires that go up to the ceiling. You can just draw it.
Robert Carlock: You don’t have to get puppets you can draw real beavers to take over Washington D.C.
Awards Daily: Final thoughts?
Robert Carlock: We just like to emphasize in a world where we’ve always written hard joke comedy, where we love to take a premise and find the comic angles even when it’s a premise as extreme as this, we have this cast: Nat (Faxon), Tina (Fey), Dana (Carvey), Chrissy (Teigen), Phil LaMarr, Daniel Radcliffe, and Ayo (Edebiri). It’s really funny, and I feel like not a lot of half hours are the kind of funny I want, and if you’re looking for it, I think you’ll find it here.
Mulligan is streaming on Netflix.
