INTERVIEW: Harvey Birdman becomes attorney general
Photo: The 46th and a half president of the United States, Phil Ken Sebben, with staff. Check them out on Harvey Birdman, Attorney General. Photo courtesy of Adult Swim / Provided with permission.
Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law is still one of the most beloved animated series in the history of Adult Swim programming, and fans who have been reeling ever since it left the air in 2007 have an October surprise headed their way. On Sunday, Oct. 14 at midnight, Birdman is back, and this time he’s the attorney general.
Harvey Birdman, Attorney General is a TV special that gets the whole gang back together again. Series creators Michael Ouweleen and Erik Richter helped lead the revival, and the original cast members are joining them. Among their ranks: Gary Cole, Stephen Colbert, John Michael Higgins, Paget Brewster, Chris Edgerly, Peter MacNicol and Phil LaMarr.
It has been a full-circle moment to get this one-time special up and running.
“It’s funny because we went from, is anyone going to watch this originally, to oh my God people are watching this, to oh my God these people are exactly like us, and they’re watching this,” Richter said in a recent phone interview. “Yes, we’re excited. We find this incredibly fun and hopefully everyone else does, too.”
Ouweleen reported that the head of Adult Swim, Mike Lazzo, offered to them the idea of a Harvey Birdman special, and they immediately jumped at the chance. The original series follows the legal exploits of the title character, who originally appeared in old-time Hanna-Barbera cartoons. The brand of humor is irreverent and filled with parody, much like Space Ghost Coast to Coast.
“Mike, who runs Adult Swim, was sort of like, ‘Oh, you guys should do a special,'” Ouweleen remembers. “None of us, including Mike, I think, took that to mean a Harvey Birdman special because we were kind of done with Birdman. He had died in the last episode, so we weren’t looking to get back into him necessarily. But Eric and I always wanted to do stuff together after that, so while we were thinking about special ideas, my boss, Christina [Miller], who runs Cartoon Network, Adult Swim, she was like, ‘You know, you should just do Harvey Birdman, Attorney General.’ So she kind of cracked it, and once Erik and I started thinking about it, we were like, OK, this is great.”
Richter added with a laugh: “We just found out she meant attorney general of Ohio.”
The special also deals with a megalomaniac billionaire president who appoints Birdman the new attorney general, but it doesn’t take long for the attorney to start devising ways to remove the president from office. It is inspired by the current political climate, but it’s not overbearing in its references to Washington, D.C.
“We didn’t want to be too on the nose topical because it’s exhausting, and everyone is kind of sick of it and you can’t keep up,” Ouweleen said. “We were trying to go for larger themes of what’s it like when everything’s out of control, and Harvey as a character is always in a world where he’s not in control and he’s always responding. That’s when he’s funniest, so we were trying to lean into that. … The politics thing just kept creeping in. Even if you wrote a grocery list today you can’t avoid thinking about while you’re writing the grocery list what’s going on in the world, so it kept creeping in.”
Richter added with a laugh: “We wrote this script 10 years ago, and reality has just caught up to it. All of these characters would naturally do this. It’s incidental that it’s paralleled elsewhere.”
Perhaps the most special thing about this TV special is the chance for the creators to get back together with the original voice cast.
“That was 100 percent special, and we knew it,” Ouweleen said. “We knew during the intervening 10 years that that’s the part we missed and that we loved that, and we’ve been frankly trying to come up with an excuse to see all those people again and work with them because it was always the most fun. It was completely special. Everyone said yes pretty quickly. … We sent references to people, like voice references — completely unneeded. No one needed to study what they had done before. They all were just ready to go, so it was a pretty amazing couple days of recording.”
Fans of the show will undoubtedly watch Sunday night and consider whether Adult Swim executives are unleashing Attorney General with an eye for a full-on revival. Could this be a testing ground for a new Birdman series?
Ouweleen added with a laugh: “We need those people watching to send letters to Adult Swim.”
Richter took it a step further with an idea for a new series: “Maybe Harvey does indeed become attorney general of each of the 50 states. … And it’ll be a little glimpse into the life in each one of our great states.”
Ouweleen retorted: “I also think Erik secretly wants us to write Harvey Birdman airport thrillers. Maybe we’ll start doing that. … We want to do something in this universe again. We certainly want to work together as a team again. We always do, but I think if we were to do something it would be a change, it would be an evolution of this … Do something that’s more of today.”
Except for reruns, Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law has been off the air for more than a decade. The decision to end the original series seems like it was a mutual understanding among everyone involved that the humorous show had naturally run its course and was winding down.
“It was Micahel Lazzo who called me over,” Ouweleen said. “He’s like, ‘What’s the next idea?’ So Erik and I had some ideas that followed, but then life just took its course. Mike’s got a good sense of things. I think he felt like the show was in a good spot and that it was time to wrap it up so it wouldn’t sour on the vine.”
Richter added: “We were at that point in the party where there’s kind of a silence. It’s like, oh, wow, what an awesome party this has been. … So Mike, it was weird, he said it, and we were also kind of feeling it. We didn’t feel exhausted. We certainly didn’t ever feel exhausted by the cast and working with those people, but even with the stories, we were getting to the point where it would have been, OK, what’s another season of this look like? We didn’t want to go there.”
Ouweleen said with a laugh: “And Mike, Eric and I are the kind of people that leave a party when no one is looking anyway without saying goodbye, so it kind of fit.”
Richter, without letting his writing partner have the last word: “I’m the kind of person that convinces two or three people to say really, really with great certainty that I was at the party even though I wasn’t.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Harvey Birdman, Attorney General will premiere Sunday, Oct. 14 at midnight on Adult Swim. Click here for more information.
