Sit Down, Shut Up Stands Out
If there's one thing Mitch Hurwitz likes, it's orchestrating a bunch of bizarre characters and sending them bouncing off each other like billiard balls. His legendary-from-day-one series Arrested Development vanished from the FOX schedule back in '06, but Hurwitz has been busy in the interim. Word on the street is AD is due for a big screen resurrection next year, and this Sunday his new ensemble series Sit Down, Shut Up joins the network's animation block in the cushy post-Simpsons time slot.
If anything, SDSU's ensemble -- the dysfunctional faculty of Knob Haven High School -- is even cartoonier than the Bluth clan, which isn't hard considering they really are cartoon characters. It's Hurwitz's first foray into animation. What led him to adapt a live-action Australian sitcom into an animated series for American audiences? "Mostly it was because I needed money," Hurwitz admitted, tongue-in-cheek, during a recent over-the-phone press conference, but went on to credit an intriguing source: Mo Willems' award-winning children's book Knuffle Bunny. "I saw it on a shelf in a bookstore. It's got all these pictures of Brooklyn and these little drawings on top of it."
Hurwitz may or may not have been aware of Willems' track record as an animation producer and scripter (The Off Beats, Sheep in the Big City, Codename: Kids Next Door) before moving onto a new career as a children's book author and illustrator. Knuffle Bunny itself had been turned into a cartoon short using the same technique of drawn characters atop photographic backgrounds, but Willems' sharp-edged character designs also caught Hurwitz' eye.
"I got in touch with Mo, and he actually designed [SDSU's] characters. He has asked that the show not be represented as Mo Willems' show, because he's like the number one picture book guy and there's a lot of inappropriate stuff for kids. There's a lot of stuff that's inappropriate I think even for Will Forte."
The Saturday Night Live player voices Stuart Proszakian, the school's clueless Ass Principal. He's joined by Arrested Development veterans Will Arnett (would-be womanizer Ennis Hofftard), Henry Winkler (sad-sack Willard Deutschebog) and Jason Bateman as reluctant PE teacher Larry Littlejunk. As on AD, Bateman's character is the closest thing the show has to a voice of reason, but even he's not immune to the air of not-so-quiet desperation hanging over the faculty in his eternally backfiring attempts to woo hippy-dippy science teacher Miracle Grohe (Kristin Chenoweth).
In reality, there's more to Hurwitz's decision to toonify his cast than the search for more money or a bookstore Knuffle Bunny sighting. "I had this script [first written in 2000, years before Arrested Development premiered]. You pitch it to different networks and you try to get a little bidding war going. What everyone kind of said is, 'We're interested in a show about teachers, but these characters are way too broad and way too self-centered and oblivious, and you have to rewrite it.' So I thought, maybe I can avoid some work -- and this is where the joke's on me -- by doing it as an animated show. Cut to like 17 months later, and I'm still rewriting the pilot. Yesterday at 5 o'clock I was still rewriting it, still putting jokes in. I mean, it just never ends in the animation world -- which is kind of great too."
SDSU isn't all-cartoon, though; like the animated Knuffle Bunny, the show keeps one foot in the real world by superimposing its characters over live-action backgrounds. "People said you don't want to have detail in the background; you want the background to be bland and to fall away," Hurwitz recalls. "But you really stop noticing it. It's just more interesting to see actual grass than just a field of green. And in a way it helps keep the show in the real world. It's changed the show's scale so that you don't expect animals to talk or UFOs to land. You somehow believe you're in the world that we inhabit, and I think it lets us reset the comedy bar a little bit."
Sit Down, Shut Up began as a co-production between Sony Pictures Television and 20th Century Fox, with Sony producing an animated presentation piece to pitch the show to the network. When it came time to put the series into production, Futurama veterans and SDSU producers Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein pointed Hurwitz in the direction of Rough Draft Studios, the folks responsible for Matt Groening's sci-fi series and The Simpsons Movie. Rough Draft producer Claudia Katz recalled being called in "to do a little bit of additional development on the show and characters. I think the thinking was we had lot more experience in doing prime-time, script-driven shows."
According to veteran Futurama and Drawn Together director Peter Avanzino, Willems designed the initial line-up of eight teachers while working with Hurwitz and Sony "and we had to build the rest of the world. They had some really nice initial designs that needed some tying together. Characters always need a little adapting to make them work on a week to week basis, adjusting their mouths, eyes, whatever. Some characters needed more work than others; we had to make sure cartoon characters could act the way the live actors Hurwitz chooses to work with could.
"Our biggest asset is we have a lot of experience working with networks and having to take a million notes," he continued. "Mo was probably not used to that. I think just the back and forth they had to get the characters where they wanted them just frustrated him enough that he said, 'They can just do it.'" Was it an 'I've had it, I'm outta here' situation? "Pretty much," Avanzino agreed. It's a perspective shared by one industry insider: "Mo had disagreements with FOX, he kind of got disgusted with it and walked away."
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