Hundreds of ordinary Americans across the U.S. are interviewed, then clay-animated into Aardman-style talking animals on Creature Comforts. All images © 2007 Aardman Animations. All rights reserved.

It's been quite a while since CBS last dipped a toe into the waters of primetime animation -- the early 1990s to be exact, when they aired the short-lived Fish Police and Family Dog cartoon series. What drove the network to take another shot at a genre that so far has had little success outside of FOX's Sunday night schedule?

Perhaps it was the pedigree of the people involved and the show itself -- the world-famous Aardman Animation stop-motion studio and its 1991 short Creature Comforts. Nick Park's Oscar-winning work inspired a series of popular British TV commercials, followed by a 2003 U.K. TV series. Then again, NBC's hugely successful adaptation of the BBC series, The Office, may have played no small part in CBS's decision to commission a short-run, seven-episode U.S. version, due to premiere June 4, 2007.

"When you're hired to adapt a show, you feel like you have to change it, but we dismissed a lot of changes we talked about." So says Kit Boss, seven-year writing veteran of King of the Hill, and exec producer of the American version of Comforts. "Greg Daniels [who adapted The Office for NBC] hired me to work on King, I consider him a mentor and friend. He talked about how he changed The Office pilot -- which was not much at all. Instead he focused his creative juices on anticipating questions from NBC and coming up with smart answers why the show didn't need to be completely revamped, but given a chance to find its own tempo and footing with American characters."

For the uninitiated, Creature Comforts -- both the U.K. original and its U.S. adaptation -- take unscripted audio interviews with average folks and clay-animate them into Aardman-style talking animals. The result -- the critters' observations on their bestial lot in life turn the subjects' original chatter into an ironic comment on the human condition. Beyond the obvious switch of replacing British accents with all-American voices, Boss fine-tuned to the show's basic concept to make U.S. audiences (and CBS) more comfortable, "The obvious question is how do you translate this into 22 minutes without a through-line, a single narrative driving a show? I think the answer is to establish regular characters you look forward to seeing and hearing what they have to say about different topics.

"We tried for a higher proportion of paired characters [than the British version] so we could have two voices interacting with each other. We were looking for the moments where the relationship between them came through in the things they said. Writing a sitcom, you'd spend so much time trying to reveal that without coming right out and saying it. You ask a couple going to the doctor if they're afraid of needles and, in 10 seconds, you understand the kind of issues they face in their relationship -- your partner has forgotten the most obvious details about your life. And we made them porcupines, which helped the joke about the needles."

The critters' observations on their bestial lot in life turn the subjects' original chatter into an ironic comment on the human condition.

Boss adds that the regularly appearing couples will be supported by a variety of one-shot and supporting characters "who will provide the more bizarre moments." The American tendency toward speaking one's mind (Boss observes that "the British talent for dry understatement is much less common in America") helped the series quite a bit.

According to Aardman's supervising director Richard "Golly" Goleszowski, "Americans are much more confident with the English language; the few people who can do that here go into politics."

Casting can make or break any project, and the stakes are even higher with non-professional talent whose personalities are meant to carry the show. The show's interviewers found their subjects on their own, according to Boss, ranging from Civil War re-enactors to people who seemed completely unremarkable but revealed surprising depth once they started talking. "We weren't interested in their résumés, only if they had interesting, 'musical' voices -- any kind of 'music,' including experimental or atonal. And they had to have lot of opinions; people friends describe as 'real characters.'

"At first I thought we'd try to find the kind of people you don't want to sit next to on a cross country flight, but a friend said no, you want the people you do want to sit next to; people who won't shut up are a good place to start." In Golly's eyes, they're "people with a passion," to which Boss adds "[their] voices are filled with passion and personality that gives the animators something to animate to, not announcer voices. It's fine if they stutter, giggle or have a bit of lisp; it shows they're real people, not actors we put in a studio."

While interview subjects were told where their voices would wind up, "we didn't go out of way to drill it into them," says Boss. "We wanted them to know it was Aardman, the Wallace and Gromit people, and that we were using their audio as basis for animated creatures. We just wanted them to act like themselves and not think 'what would an animal say about this?' or 'what is my animal, what are they going to turn me into?' We steered away from that because we didn't want them self-conscious. Some of the interviewees could probably paste it together themselves based on some of the questions we were asking. But whenever there was a hint of them getting on stage and pretending to be something they weren't -- we never used those answers, because they came across as artificial and fake."