September 23rd, 2020 
Jackson Murphy 
Wild Life launches this Saturday September 26th at 12:15am on SYFY’s TZGZ lineup. It’s an adult, post-apocalyptic, talking animal, animated comedy… or as it’s been called by the creative team, “It’s like if The Walking Dead smoked a bunch of Adventure Time and binge-watched Friends.”
Jackson Murphy: What has fascinated you about talking animal shows and movies and made you want to pursue that concept with this series?
Adam Davies (Creator): I extremely love animals, however there’s a tough relationship between humans and animals in the world. That tension drew me towards giving them a voice.
JM: And how did you decide on the storyline for the first episode?
AD: We thought that it would be smart to take a story that would pull the audience through the world and get to introduce everything. A lot of episodes are just gonna be hangout episodes. But the Pilot episode: we get to beat-up some humans at the mall.
JM: Yes – there’s some stuff that goes down. How did you decide on it specifically being a mall?
Alex Plapinger (Executive Producer): It was just a given that it made sense. A mall represents humans left to their own devices in a very effective way. Animals would never build a mall. It’s a very human, capitalist construct, so it felt really appropriate for this showdown to take place there. There’s a genre quality to a tense action sequence in a mall. We talk a lot about there being a Walking Dead quality to this show – like a comedy version of The Walking Dead. Having this take place in a mall expresses that very well.
Dylan Dawson (Executive Producer): Very specifically, Dawn of the Dead famously takes place in a mall as an anti-capitalist statement. That’s one of my favorite movies. It’s an iconically apocalyptic, post-human environment to play in.
Adam Davies
JM: So much has happened at malls in movies. Just look at Paul Blart. (everyone laughs) Adam, what inspired you to choose the animals for the show?
AD: It really all started with Glenn. I was in a weird place, and I was processing trauma through drawing cheetah spots over and over. And I was having a weird creative block. But I kept drawing cheetah spots. Slowly a koala appeared, and I realized that I was trying to tell a story about friendship. And very quickly the backdrop of a zoo was there, and all the animals just kind of showed up out of the bushes. And it happened to be the post-apocalypse. So it was kind of a subconscious thing.
JM: And was choosing Reggie Watts from The Late Late Show with James Corden to voice Darby the Koala an instant choice – someone you always had in your head?
AD: We feel so blessed to have him. I don’t think we thought we could even get him. However when he came onto our radar for the part, it was so obvious because Darby was already a musical character before Reggie was attached. And Darby is our inventor that can basically, in cartoon logic, can pull a solution out of his pocket, and he can create it out of spare parts. Reggie fit all of that together. A perfect little package.
JM: I like his feel and flavor. So you say this is mostly a hangout show, but besides the mall, what other locations could we see the gang at over the course of this first season?
AP: We love thinking of the zoo as the Central Perk of the show, as it were. We get to do two things with the show. We kind of get to create worlds within the zoo itself because we’re a little bit ambiguous about the size of it. There’s an episode where someone creates an entire nightclub within this zoo. And there’s one where they’ve found a tennis court and invent their own version of tennis. And they become miniature worlds unto themselves. But then we do go out into the world beyond. On our Season Finale, they all go tubing, and that shows a different angle on the world at large – and we get to explore what this post-apocalyptic world might look like, and how it might be a paradise for these animals.
JM: I’ve played tennis (in the nice weather) every Sunday for the past 15 years. How do you twist up tennis?
AP: It’s funny: Dylan, you don’t really play tennis.
DD: I haven’t since I was a kid, and I was bad at it, so I gave up. They play their version of tennis. It’s tennis by name only.
AP: There’s more equipment than just tennis rackets.
JM: Okay. I can envision some things already and will probably be surprised by other things. As I was watching the Pilot of Wild Life, I was thinking that this is a comic strip come to life. A dirty comic strip, but it’s a funny one. Were there any comic strips that inspired you for this show?
DD: The obvious one is Calvin and Hobbes – that energy. It’s like if Adam is drawing and the drawings from his notebook came to life. The comps for us are more shows like Adventure Time. Guys, what else? I haven’t read comic strips in 20 years.
AP: Calvin and Hobbes… that tone and imagination of it and ability to go very low-brow / very high-brow. It’s the best. I also like Far Side in a fun way… observations are very on-point.
AD: I remember early on bonding over Calvin and Hobbes in the combination of innocence and deep philosophy all at once. Big influences for me have been Edward Gorey – the humor there. Also, Marcel Dzama – his early work has this single frame comic vibe going on, but it’s sort of surreal.
DD: And Aardman’s Creature Comforts. That sort of energy and obviously zoo animals talking about the hardships of life.
JM: You’re absolutely right. Now is it true that Pilot was ordered [by SYFY] in January and the next five episodes were ordered in April? Have you only been working on these the last four or five months?
AD: Technically, yes. However, Alex and I have been collaborating – going back to 2018. But I was working on the idea in 2016. Dylan hopped on mid-2018. It’s been a slow burn, but yes, things have sped-up very quickly in the past six months. We’ve done the last five episodes totally in Quarantine.
TZGZ — “Wild Life” — Pictured in this screen grab: (l-r) Debbie, Marny
JM: That’s crazy. That’s unheard of. So what’s the secret then? What’s the secret to making 11-minute episodes of an animated series in that amount of time in Quarantine?
AP: Major, major, major credit to the animation studio that we’re working with, Octopie. They definitely figured out how to make this happen in this really, really short amount of time. All hands on deck. There’s a lot of experienced people helping us on that end over there. The other part for Adam, Dylan and I is that we really love this show. We really love working on it. We like working on it together. We’re happy being in constant communication and constantly thinking about it: zooming, texting, reviewing scripts and constantly thinking about how to make it as good as possible. That all comes from a place of love and genuine enthusiasm. I can’t fathom doing this for a show that I was even 70% into.
DD: Alex is also the composer, and he’ll send us [music] at all hours. We’re just constantly texting each other noises and sounds. Bleeps and bloops. And it’s a blast.
AD: And I want to give a shout-out to SYFY and TZGZ… who have given us such a long leash to be weird and play in this world and trust us. They give amazing notes, but they also really leave us to our devices and let us be weird. Early on we talked about wanting to make a show for the people that grew up on Adventure Time and Steven Universe – have a more adult world to keep them interested in animation.
JM: That’s good. How do you feel about what this TZGZ lineup is gonna do to adult animation – what it speaks to adult animation and where we are right now?
AP: I’m incredibly excited. A big part of why we hustled on this too is because it seemed like such an incredible opportunity to be one of the launch shows for TZGZ. In addition to showrunning this show, something I do a lot is producing animated series and projects. What I’m really passionate about… is working on projects with artists who are testing the boundaries and trying new things, especially for adult animation. One thing I’m really excited about with TZGZ is that it’s gonna be showcasing things that are a little bit new in the adult animated world. No show has looked like this before. Adam’s style is very particular.
There’s a sensibility in it as well where we’re blending a really horrific post-apocalyptic world with a huge amount of joy and heart. That combination is a little bit unique. And I think I see that across a lot of the choices the TZGZ team is making – just trying less conventional things, and it’s very cool to be a part of that. I think it’s overall what animation’s going through at the moment – this renaissance. We’re about to see this huge wave of new styles, sensibilities and genres. And it’s nice to feel part of it.
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