Showalter: I don’t think it was as specific as that and David and I might have a different answer to this question. It was nothing he and I ever sat down and said “This is our position” on. It was more, just for me, I think as I said, the camp, the characters of Wet Hot American Summer, especially over time as they’ve kind of settled into my consciousness have taken on that quality of being just kind of these archetypal characters who kind of exist in a little bit of a serialized comic book reality for me. So some of the books that I grew up when I was kid, that I loved so much were like Asterix and Obelix or Tin Tin or Archie and his gang or The LIttle Rascals and so on and so on where these young people who you kind of endlessly just telling their story and the different adventures that they had. So in my mind, whether it’s ten years later or a prequel or that same summer on a different day or five years earlier or whatever, you’re kind of just creating the mythology of these characters. So the way my mind works is there’s never a shortage of these stories to tell because these characters have a life outside of that one day. The original movie we told that one story and set them in motion but that’s certainly not the end of it. IGN: How much did it change or not change when it became clear that it was going to be this eight part series instead of a movie and how did you approach writing it? Did you write it as one big script or did you write it as episodes?
Showalter: We wrote it as episodes. We took the larger story that we knew we had and we sort of made it into arcs and pieces, similar to the way we did the movie actually which is like every storyline was outlined individually so every storyline had it’s own beginning middle and end and the cards were just kind of shuffled around to kind of try to create episodes out of them but the advantage of the way we tell the story in Wet Hot is that all those storylines do exist sort of in a vacuum. We do have to be somewhat faithful to whatever time of day it is. We don’t want to have scenes that are culminating at night happening in the first two episodes. But we’re not bound to much by character continuity so you never have “oh no we can’t show this scene because Beth and so and so just ran into each other in the arts and crafts bunk.” That won’t happen because they’re separate. They’re kept apart and that’s by design.
Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp Photo Gallery
IGN: On a similar note, this is an absurdist comedy and there’s an anything goes nature to it and yet you still are pretty faithful to the mythology, as it were, that the movie established and if Beth and Henry meet at the beginning of that movie or Katie and Coop have barely spoken at the beginning of the movie, the show is trying to stick with that. Did you ever debate, “Well we could just find a funny line that deals with that,” or did you want to stick with what the movie said?Showalter: We learned this word - “retcon,” I guess is the word. Anything is possible. Whatever we decide we want to do, you can always figure out a way to explain it, especially within the rules that we set up. I do think though that there was a desire to not throw the baby out with the bath water. We didn’t want to take it so far that we were basically saying that whatever happened in the movie is of no consequence and that we didn’t owe it anything. We didn’t feel that way at all. We do want to have fun and not feel like we’re completely bound by whatever happened in the movie but at the same time, we don’t want to abandon what happened in the movie either and we want to try to strike a balance between inventing new ideas but at the same time paying off old ones. IGN: I did a set visit and I think I mentioned that day that even just as a fan of the movie there was something surreal standing there and seeing Marino and all those guys, yourself included, in costume and wearing wigs to look like your hair back then when you made the movie. After all this time, and knowing everyone was on board when you were on set with alot of these guys back in costume, was it a strange, dejavu feeling?
Showalter: Yeah. It was strange and then in a weird way, there’s a moment with the same feeling that you get when you’re back with your friends from high school or something like no time has gone by. That’s sort of the strange part, if anything, how familiar it felt. Fifteen years goes by in a heartbeat once you’re there and then at the same time, no one’s really changed. Obviously we’ve grown up a lot and most of us have families and whatever and there’s also the enormous careers that have happened. Even just since we shot the series, Elizabeth Banks’s movie [Pitch Perfect 2] hadn’t come out yet so even just in the time that we’ve made Wet Hot, Elizabeth Banks has become this internationally giant director that made this movie but I think for me, probably the most surreal aspect of it was how normal it felt. Continue to Page 2 as Showalter talks about the logistics of reuniting the huge cast, creating backstories, the joy of repeating jokes and Wet Hot's future.
IGN: Everyone was game to come back, but it is a very busy group and of course scheduling was another difficulty. What was that like, logistically, just trying to figure it out and make sure that you could tell a story that was working, but knowing that you would also have to work around people’s schedules or sometimes do a little editing trickery if people couldn't film on the same day?
Showalter: That’s a question that I think David would be more equipped to answer than me and that’s kind of his specialty I guess. There’s a kind of controlled chaos to the way he’s kind of able to wrangle all these different characters and I think both he and I enjoy the challenge of stitching together such an elaborate cast and put all the pieces together. There’s a certain illusion to it that makes it fun to view it as a puzzle in that way. in terms of the challenge of it, it’s no more challenging or any less challenging than any of it. It’s all challenging. It’s always a challenge but in the best way possible to mount a production like this when you have a bunch of cast members and speaking parts and all these different storylines and things you’re trying to juggle. It’s always a challenge but it wasn’t an insurmountable challenge or anything that ever threatened to -- there was never that moment where we were like “how are we going to do this?” It was always something that felt achievable and really the scheduling falls on the shoulder of people other than myself so I was pretty unaware of whatever the real challenges of that were.
IGN: Some of these characters, whether it be Gene or Lindsay or the Can of Vegetables, you’ve come up with pretty elaborate backstories for. Is it fun when you know that you don’t really have to limit yourself as far as how out there you can go with these ideas?
Showalter: It’s great. It’s awesome. It’s so fun to just be able to let our minds wander and just imagine whatever. IGN: Was there one backstory you were particularly excited about?
Showalter: I like them all. I think the Lindsay backstory is really clever and it’s everything, tonally, that Wet Hot is about. It is a curve ball. It is absurd and silly but it is kind of rooted in these very emotional things of her not wanting to betray these friends she’s making and at the same time it’s kind of a trope. It’s a reference to Cameron Crowe and these other kind of movie tropes that I think inform so much of the comedy of what we do.
IGN: You’ve also got this huge group of guest stars, including three Mad Men cast members. Was that just happenstance?
Showalter: That’s just happenstance. Certainly we love Mad Men but we’ve gotten to know these actors just kind of almost as friends and they’re so great and talented and they’re great serious actors. I think it’s always fun to get serious actor to play these funny roles. They bring something different to it then if it were comedic actors. Not that the comedic actors aren’t also phenomenal but it’s fun to have a John Slattery or a Jon Hamm or a Rich Sommer bring some of that actor-y acting to the comedy.
IGN: For playing Coop, was it a familiar fit getting back to that character?
Showalter: It took a little while, like maybe a day or two for me to get back to what Coop’s deal is as a character but once I did it was fun to get back inside that brain and that mind set. Coop is this sort of unbelievable earnest, wears his heart on his sleeve to such an appalling degree... He’s that hopelessly earnest kid who loses out to the cool kid in Andy who knows the value of like not wearing his heart on his sleeve and being cool. Coop’s not very cool. IGN: Whether a prequel or a sequel, there’s always that fine line of having moments that reference what people love without it always being repeating gags. Did you guys discuss that like hey, we want to have “Higher and Higher in here” but we don’t want it to be like. “now they go to town again” and everything happens beat for beat the same?</strong?
Showalter: Right, yeah. We definitely didn't’ want it to just be a trip through memory lane and what can happen often times in sequels where you find yourself just riffing off of what worked in the first one. We definitely didn’t want to do that. To the extent that there’s repetition, there’s a certain -- I think repetition in comedy gets a bad rap because nobody ever criticizes the Ramones for using the same chord progression. In music, you get to repeat yourself endlessly and it’s celebrated. The Strokes or the Velvet Underground and bands that made a signature sound and were able to repeat it. I think comedians are the same. We have motifs in our work that we like to come back to, not because we’re lazy or we lack the imagination to think of a new idea, it’s that those motifs create who we are. They are the sum total of who we are and I think there’s a kind of -- in comedy there’s a lot of pressure put on comedians to never repeat themselves and they’re criticized if they do like “oh they already did this joke before, they already did this” and I see no problem with that. If you go and see a vaudeville show, these guys do the same exact act for fifty years and it’s great. Victor Borgia and these classic comedians who have their schtick and their bag of tricks and we love it. That’s why we go. It’s why we love whoever it is and I know you’re not saying this, I’m just taking this minor little moment to be able to -- I really feel like it’s misunderstood. I’m somewhat responding to some criticism that I’ve heard, not just in general, but this notion that you can’t repeat a joke, that you can’t recycle yourself. I just personally don’t agree with that. To me, it’s who we are and some of these jokes are who we are and the recycling of them -- though that might not even be the right word-- the repeating of them, is not because we lack the imagination to do a new joke but because that’s a note we like to hit. That’s a chord progression that we enjoy and so that would be my response to those people that bristle at the repetition of humor. It’s simply just we like it. We like to repeat those beats and they’re notes that we like to hit.
IGN: I just saw Trainwreck the other day and some of the gags I’d seen Amy Schumer do in stand up and on her show and I didn’t mind. It’s a good gag. Of course she’d want to use it in the movie.
Showalter: Again, it really does astonish me. Nobody would ever criticize U2 for signing “The Streets Have No Name” at every concert they play. We go to a U2 concert to hear that song. Why shouldn’t a comedian get to redo their jokes? It’s like what’s your Freebird? Let’s see your talking can of vegetables. That’s your best bit. That’s what vaudeville is. That’s been lost in modern comedy. The notion that we all have our bag of tricks and that we can keep taking our tricks out of our bag has sort of been lost and musicians aren’t held to the sme standard and for me, in my own sensibility, there are these jokes in our trunk that are funny and I like repeating them. I like the repetition of it. It makes it special. It’s underlining it and saying “this is a joke we really like.” IGN: Even in the film itself, you have things like the crashing glass sound when people throw things as a repeating joke.
Showalter: Right. There’s a joke in They Came Together that we just completely re-tooled [for the series] and some people will recognize that and realize that it’s a purposeful thing that we’re actually covering our own joke.
IGN: Have you guys talked in any real sense about where you would set another installment? This is the first day of camp so there’s obvious things we wonder about the middle day of camp or what not.
Showalter: I mean we’ve definitely talked about it. It would be impossible for us not to and yeah we’ve got a bunch of different possibilities floating around in our brain.
IGN: I was very amused during the panel when there was a reporter who clearly wanted you to say “it would be impossible to get everyone back together again” and you basically said, “Sure, we can do that again.” Does it just seem like now that you’ve done it and obviously everyone loves doing it, there’s no reason you can’t work out the schedules?
Showalter: There’s no reason why it can’t happen. It’s logistically feasible. I can’t speak for the actors in the show but logistically there’s no reason why we wouldn’t be able to do it again. We’re not requiring anybody to make a commitment to this. We don’t want them to. We’re not asking for it and we don’t want to ask for it that we’re asking people to make commitments for it that would preclude them from pursuing whatever else they’re doing in their careers. So logistically, I see no reason why we couldn’t do it again. All eight episodes of Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp debut Friday, July 31st at 12:01am PT on Netflix.
Eric Goldman is Executive Editor of IGN TV. You can follow him on Twitter at @TheEricGoldman, IGN at ericgoldman-ign and Facebook at Facebook.com/TheEricGoldman.