INTERVIEW: ‘Squidbillies’ prepare for new episodes on Adult Swim

Adult Swim brings back Squidbillies, featuring the self-declared fourth favorite animated family, for season eight starting Sunday, Sept. 21 at 11:45 p.m. The series, created by Dave Willis and Jim Fortier, follows a family of squids in rural Georgia. The show lampoons much of American culture and family life, and often there’s no telling what troubles the Squidbillies will get into.

This season, there’s “an episode where Early tries to defraud the insurance company by cutting off every one of his limbs,” Fortier said in a joint phone interview with Willis. “We have an episode where Early protests gay marriage by marrying a paint can, and later a vacuum cleaner, and then later a robot and then eventually marries a wild grizzly bear.”

Willis added: “We have an episode where Early buys a doomsday bunker and has it buried in the backyard, and then when he finds out he has to pay for it, he decides to bring down the socio-economic structure of the United States so that he can use his bunker and not have to pay for it. We have an episode where we reveal the story of how the first squid was allowed into public schools, integrated into public schools.”

Early Cuyler, the father figure of this strange family, is often the focus of the episodes; however, there’s also Rusty and Granny to keep him company. Surreal humor and subversive jokes are often the rule on the Adult Swim show. “As Shakespeare once said, there are only five real … I don’t know if he said that,” Fortier joked. “Maybe it was like David Simon. There’s only five stories you can tell.”

Willis: “And we tell them each twice over 10 episodes.”

Episode ideas usually come after a session of spitballing and gossiping among writers. Georgia, as both a state and state of mind, features prominently as a central theme. “We make the show in Georgia,” Fortier said. “We’re from Georgia, but I think there are things that we can both relate to, and we have that sort of similar vocabulary and similar outlooks to the things around us. And I just think the stories kind of grow out of that, and there are crazy things that happen in Georgia. And we just sort of tend to filter it into the show.”

The name Squidbillies apparently amused Mike Lazzo, who runs Adult Swim, many years ago when the animation show wasn’t even on the radar screen.

“It wasn’t a pitch for a show, and he just mentioned the word down the hall 10 years ago,” Fortier said. “That’s basically where the production started after about a year of many, many pilot scripts and trying to figure out different directions. We had a lot of folks involved, and eventually Dave and I just took the project. That’s kind of the version of the show you get now. That’s the gist of where it came from. In terms of where the characters come from, Dave and I grew up in the same town, went to the same high school, so we have a lot of common experiences. We knew a lot of the same people, so we just kind of populate the Squidbillies show with personalities, elements of people’s personalities we knew. That’s how the characters were built. Now it’s more like making stories and running them through that filter.”

Willis said it’s difficult in 2014 to make a cartoon series, especially a successful one. Often comedians have great ideas but no understanding of the demands behind animation. He characterized Squidbillies’ production as labor-intensive and “very lean.”

“We recycle the animation, and we’re able to rewrite as we go,” Willis said. “So we can make sure that we are delivering the funniest thing we can possibly do. Plus, we’re allowed a lot of creativity. We’re allowed to do whatever it is we want to do essentially. So there’s not a whole stuff getting in our way between our vision and what the viewers see. So I think, you know, you can screw it up a million different ways, and I think we figured out a way to be fairly efficient and fairly clean with it.”

Fortier added: “We also have a lot of good people that we good shorthand with now after all these years. Our editors are great. Our animation house, Awesome Ink, we love, and they do a great job. As Dave said, we’ve got a small group. It’s pretty lean. Everybody knows their roles, and everybody brings something to the show. Why is it on eight years now? It isn’t expensive to make, so it’s not a huge risk for the network. I think that the fan base has just built over the years. It hasn’t had a slide yet. It hasn’t had a drop off yet.”

The show’s content tries to stay away from pop culture, if for no other reason than the production schedule is so lengthy that some jokes could date themselves quickly.

“If we’re going to comment on a topic or have a topic be a theme in the show, it can’t be something that’s going to come and go in the news in a month because shows generally take four to six months to make,” Fortier said. “So if we’re trying to be topical or make some sort of statement in anyway, it’s going to be something like people who are against gay marriage or something like that. Insurance fraud. They’re not going anyway anytime soon.”

After writing eight seasons of Squidbillies, this animated family has taken on the world. It appears there are plenty of adventures still waiting to be had.

“For the most part, Jim and I are either writing them from scratch or completely, you know, rewriting it and putting our spin on it,” Willis said of the writing process. “I also think we’ve gotten better at it. It kind of becomes it’s own sort of living, breathing thing in a weird sort of way. I can’t really explain it, but the characters are who they are.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

• Squidbillies’ new season premieres Sunday, Sept. 21 at 11:45 p.m. Click here for more information.