Talking Simpsons - Talking Simpsons - The Lew Morton Interview

Episode Date: September 16, 2022

To close out our week of bonus interviews, this time around, we're chatting with the great Lew Morton! If you're a Talking Futurama listener, you likely know his name from our podcasts about his very funny episodes, like "Amazon Women in the Mood" and "Mother's Day." But Lew is also attached to legendary TV comedies like NewsRadio, Veep, Silicon Valley, and most recently, Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe—as well as the recent series reboot of MTV's brain dead duo. Listen in to learn about his long career in the world of comedy writing, and the secret formula to what makes Beavis and Butt-Head work! Support this podcast and get dozens of bonus episodes by visiting Patreon.com/TalkingSimpsons and becoming a patron! And please follow the official Twitter, @TalkSimpsonsPod!

I heartily endorse this event or product. Ahoy, ahoy everybody and welcome to Talking Simpsons. I am one of your hosts, Bob Mackie, the Slurms McKenzie enjoyer who is here with me today. I have fortunately not suffered from death by snoo-snoo. It's Henry Gilbert. That's right. And yes, we have another interview for you this week. And it's somebody who never worked on The Simpsons. But we're still calling this a Talking Simpsons interview because it's our most famous show. So deal with it. Yeah. Up front. Yeah. But you're going to enjoy this because today we're

talking to Lou Morton, an amazing writer. He's written for News Radio, Futurama, Veep, Silicon Valley, and of course he is a writer on the new Beavis and Butthead movie and he is the showrunner of the new Beavis and Butthead series on Paramount Plus. So he basically has touched everything that we love and we talked about him for about an hour about his entire career and some very specific Beavis and Butthead questions. Yes, yes. So if you're enjoying the new season, and by the way, we recorded this when only four episodes were out. He teases some future ones, but so if you guys are like,

why didn't they ask about episode six? We haven't seen it yet, guys. Right now, it's Saturday, August 20th. Yes, yeah. Putting this directly in time. But he shares so many great stories about Beavis and Butthead, and I really loved hearing his theory

on how to write Beavis and Butthead. Like I really loved hearing his theory on how to write Beavis and Butthead. Like what, uh, what level of stupidity can you write them at? How do you make a story work with them? And, and we've been loving the both do the universe and return season so much that getting answers from Lou about it was, was really amazing.

We really appreciate it. If you enjoy Lou on the interview, please tweet at him. He's at Lou Morton, L E W M O R T O. And just say, you enjoy lou on the interview uh please tweet at him he's at lou morton l-e-w-m-o-r-t-o and just say hey we enjoyed the interview and i think our guests always like to hear that oh for sure yeah yeah and he's yeah he's always uh right now he's more active on twitter than uh than usual because he's he's promoting the new season too and so yeah it's uh but i guess he mentions too that if you sign up if you sign up for paramount plus with code

nachos you get get some free months. A free month. A free month. We can't overpromise here. Hey, look, not a guarantee. Hey, it's worth $9.99 for more beefs and butthead. I agree. Without further ado, here is our interview with the fantastic Lou Morton.

So joining us today is Lou Morton. Welcome to the show the show lou and thanks so much for your time thanks guys thanks for having me and it's uh it's so awesome to talk to you lou because you've worked on uh so many shows we really really enjoy and now you're uh well i guess are are you the uh the head writer on on beeves and butthead the new season uh I yeah head writer showrunner okay that's uh that's why I figured I but I wasn't uh well so did I guess let's let's start at the beginning did did your uh comedy writing career uh did it begin at the the Harvard Lampoon it did yeah I I began the Harvard Lampoon what I really really wanted to do is write funny pieces for magazines. And sort of funny magazines, by the time I graduated, funny magazines kind of had gone away.

The National Lampoon was a shell of its former self. And I sort of ended up doing television, the next best thing. And were there any, you know, how many of your future co- coworkers were on the Lampoon with you back in school? Oh, a lot. A couple at Saturday Night Live and a couple at NewsRadio and at Futurama. There were a few people from the Lampoon on Futurama but probably only one was a classmate of mine So early in your career you wrote for a few seasons of SNL and we love talking to people who have been on that show

because we never know who writes the sketches it's never really called out can you name anything from your time there you're particularly proud of or any funny stories from that era of SNL? I wrote a sketch where Patrick Stewart owns an erotic cake bakery, but the only thing he thinks is erotic is women going to the bathroom. Yes. I love that.

Immediately when you said Patrick Stewart cake store, most of the sketches unfurled in my mind. So yeah. And I wrote a lot of sketches with Rob rob schneider that first year i was there including uh you put your weed in there uh semi not as marginally beloved sketch from the mid 90s well did you i i saw like your first one was the the charles barkley nirvana episode which has by is people just remember it a lot for just the crazy picture of nirvana standing next to charles barkley like that seems like a crazy time to start at snl it was pretty great because the first thing you do is see nirvana live from about 20 feet away.

And like, you know, you get to watch the dress rehearsal performance and then the live performance really from like 25 feet away, like just dodging the cameras. And that was pretty great. That sounds pretty amazing. Yeah, I wrote with Rob this sketch where he was co-hosting like a QVC show where they were selling sports memorabilia, but all the sports memorabilia was like the bones of old baseball players.

And I wrote the commercial parody of that episode too, but with the life in me, I will never remember what it was. It was long enough ago. But that episode, there was a sketch where it was Charles Barkley hosting. It was Charles Barkley as the counselor at a donkey basketball camp. It was like, I guess that's something people do in the Midwest is play basketball on donkeys as a fundraiser. I had never heard of it. At any rate,

there I was my first week in show business and backstage there were stagehands literally dragging donkeys down the hallways. It's showbiz. It very much felt like I was in showbiz. you know, down the hallways. It's showbiz. Yeah. It very much felt like I was in showbiz. You know, a Patrick Stewart story also reminds me, have you,

have you heard the John Mulaney bit about Patrick Stewart saying salt in Peppa on that episode? Oh, well, I guess we'll look it up because that the the comedian shama lady very in spot he tells a very funny joke just about patrick stewart introducing salt and peppa on that episode that's funny you were in new york then and i guess you know a lot of lampoon guys they they either went to snl or or to letterman like did you know the letterman guys uh around the same time i didn't know any letterman guys at that time i like i've since met steve young i think was there at the time but but he's older than me i didn't i didn't really know him it was just when that was just when letterman was moving into the new theater

oh okay that's right so he wouldn't have been in 30 Rock anymore with you guys. The Conan show was just starting. SNL then goes straight into Paul Sims starting up NewsRadio. Right. And you were in season one from one to four, right? I was there from two to four. I wasn't there for the first six episodes. Okay.

Yeah, I was there season two to four. One of my favorite stories I six episodes uh okay oh yeah i was there season season two to four one of my favorite stories i've heard from the news radio commentaries the dvd commentaries are some of the my favorite dvd commentaries because you guys just tell every story it sounds like that's uh and do you find those dvd commentaries anywhere they really are good oh no well i mean i bought the first set so i just have them i i've heard that recent sets come without the commentaries oh that's such a shame like what the hell they're one of the good commentaries i feel like there should be a gray market somewhere for uh dvd commentaries that are out of print just somewhere you can listen to them

it's an untapped market uh one of my favorite things to learn about the news radio writing room was that you guys were all playing like games against each other like doom you were playing doom land parties like you were these these gamer writers back when people were not playing video games in writers rooms that much i would bet well news radio paul hired a bunch of people who had never worked in sitcoms before so he. So he wanted to sort of teach us his own habits and not have anyone come in with sitcom habits. So most of us came from Variety. And so like a lot of us came from New York. And so we all moved to Los Angeles.

We didn't know anybody besides each other. And so we just spent all our free time at the office because we didn't know anybody. And so I, you know, I had nowhere else to go. My first like year in Los Angeles, I spent all of my time at the news radio office. And the only place I really knew about in Los Angeles besides that was like the Beverly center. So occasionally I would drive to the Beverly center, but like, that's not really, that doesn't make, all you know is the Beverly Center, Los Angeles is not that great.

So like all, you know, we spent all of our time there. And so we played a lot of video games there and we hung out there. We read tons and tons of magazines. We were there all night. But, and sort of, it was sort of thought in like the comedy writing community at the time that we were being horribly exploited and made to work all night but really as just because we we had no other friends do you do you wish that you had twitch streaming back then and you guys could

have just like played doom or just a shooter on online oh no i we didn't want we didn't want to talk to people we didn't know in any context really and it sounds like uh i mean a lot of your your friends and colleagues uh worked on the simpsons was that ever a path that you tried to pursue uh you went from news radio season four to futurama was there any interest in uh in going on the simpsons or submitting a spec script or anything like that no it's pretty exciting to go on futurama because it felt like it was a new thing i seemed appealing to be on the ground floor something new and uh for like at least a week the the room at at futurama was like matt graining dave cohen ken keeler and me so it was like it wasening, Dave Cohen, Ken Keeler and me. So it was like, it was fun being there like at the very beginning.

But, and like, but no, I know like, like there were, there was at least a couple of people who went straight from Futurama to the Simpsons and sort of been there ever since. But like, I never did. Well, and yeah, I mean uh well uh your one of your old co-workers from news radio uh went to the simpsons season 13 brian kelly so yeah i was curious if you guys i was like brian kelly stewart burns and jeff westbrook all three of them um although brian brian wasn't on was never on drama yeahrama. Yeah, he went from, I guess, just from NewsRadio and The Simpsons. And, you know, I have one other NewsRadio question, too, just because we're big retro gaming fans as well. And to hear the story on the DVD commentary,

like just a little bit of it, how did you guys get Eugene Jarvis on the show? Well, we wanted to do an episode where Dave Foley was obsessed with a video game and it had ruined his life when he was a teenager. And then somehow this video game appears in the office again and it ruins his life again. So that's a story we wanted to do. So it's like, what old arcade game do we want to do?

We at the time were like, because again, we didn't know anyone else besides each other and we're all single and like making TV money. We would go down to like, there was this auction in fullerton where they would auction off arcade games and it's mostly for people who like owned arcades or like like miniature golf emporiums or whatever and but like we would go down there and like buy arcade games and uh and uh pinball machines at this auction and then bring them back to the office and just

we had this room in the office that wasn't really being used for anything we just filled it with we just made it like an old-fashioned arcade and so we filled it we filled with all these things and like uh um so we we settled on like stargate defender as being the game which seemed like the right amount of semi-obscure, but you've heard of it, 80s arcade game. And then we just called him up. I don't remember if it was me or Brian Kelly who just called him up. We just found a way to contact him. We just contacted him and said, do you want to be on?

And like, then he agreed. And then it's just like, well, let's make him an extra. And we never really like asked the network or anybody. We just sort of like he arrived and was like, okay, go ahead and put your costume on. But yeah, he ended up having like a tiny role as the delivery guy. Yeah, so like at the time I was pretty obsessed with Robotron, so I got to play Robotron with Eugene Jarvis before the show.

He's pretty good at it. He's not that great. Was there similar amounts of gaming happening within the Futurama writing room? No, no, not really. I had my Robotron. I owned a stand-up Robotron, and I had it in my office at uh at futurama so i play it sometimes and like it like if you have any video games in an office the production assistants get unbelievably good at them and i think i ended up when i left that job i ended up like giving my robotron to to the writer's assistant. It's a nice gift.

I'd also like to get his 400 pounds. You take it. Well, speaking of Futurama, we want to know your experience on the inside as the show was taking off in its first few years. We know on the record there were a lot of late nights.

We know David Cohen quit briefly because things were pretty tough and he came back to the show. It sounded like a very difficult operation to get the show off the ground. And then it ended up being disliked by the network. What was it like to be on the inside of a production like that? uh you know you have to figure out what it is we had to figure out like how big these science fiction stories were and so like it's we not only had to make it funny but we had to make this science fiction world work and uh so yeah there were like i would say any new show any that's a comedy there's going to be a lot of late nights because it's just difficult that that first season is always really difficult and so yeah we worked we worked a lot of hours we worked a lot of days uh but i feel like we always felt like we had something i always felt like it was going to be good and then like yeah when it came out we really liked it and like the network was not did not care about it at all and we were they would basically like we thought

we were going to air like after the simpsons and instead we aired basically during football fox had box had football. So the second, like we were aired at like 7 p.m. on Sunday. And like, so like the football game doesn't end before 7 p.m. on Sunday. We were preempted as often as not. It was just like being at news radio where we were promised we would be on between Friends and Seinfeld. And then we were bounced around the schedule forever. You were a must-see Tuesday night.

I mean, all the Futurama fans learned to hate sports even more than they already did. Yeah. And like Matt Grady coming from The Simpsons, he did not want to take notes at all because The Simpsons didn't. And, you know, I guess he felt like it would be, you know, it's a real step back to go from something where you're not taking notes at all to something where they're giving you notes. And like this was in the days that Fox just just wanted to micromanage every single thing. It's like now that most TV is streaming, this doesn't happen the same way it used to. I don't believe, at least not in anything that I've worked on in a very long time. But the network used to just note shows very, very heavily.

Whereas now there's a little bit more sense that we paid a lot of money for the show. We paid people who theoretically know how to make the show, so we're just going to let them make it. That was not the idea at all. So the Mac Manning's position was like, we're taking no notes at all. And they're like, can we fax you some notes

and you don't even have to read them and i'm like no and so we're immediately like at loggerheads with the network like it seemed at the time that might be why they didn't like the show but like i imagine like that the the ego between network executives and that framing that that might not have been the whole of why they we were on the fox network uh fox network siberia but i don't think it helped yeah i mean we we do a podcast about futurama we dig deep into the production history and when we look at the seasons uh we see wow uh after season two everything is out of order there's months of delays i mean we live through it so we know but now we can look at the details and just realize

like how mistreated it was and you never would have believed the show would be rebooted basically three times at this point uh are you are you surprised by the like just the the power of futurama how it just keeps coming back no i i'm not not. It's a really good show, and it has a really specific appeal. It's really serious about its sci-fi, and it's really serious about its comedy. If you're really into comedy, it cares about you, and if you're really into sci-fi, it cares about you. It's the kind of sci-fi where if you know a lot about science, you'll always be rewarded and not punished, which I feel is rarely true. You guys know this if you do a podcast about Futurama, but

it was a very overeducated writing staff that knew a lot about science and science fiction. I remember that first week I was there where there weren't a lot of writers yet. There was a point where the whole discussion about the show got sidetracked into the argument about whether or not Mars's moons were geosynchronous with Mars. Wow. And then it's like no one really knew,

so they're trying to derive it mathematically. So it's like I was just a long time. It's sort of like being in a really great graduate seminar that I hadn't taken the right prerequisites for. I believe there are four PhDs on that original writing staff. But they were all Ken Keeler. Yes. I think he had them all. Were there four PhDs?

There are a lot of people who dropped out of Keeler. Yes. I think he had them all. Were there four PhDs? There were a lot of people who dropped out of PhD programs, but like... Okay. I know a Bill Odenkirk, Ken Keeler, Dave Cohen. Bill Odenkirk wasn't there

in the initial... Oh, yeah. He's season two. But Jeff Westbrook was a professor at UCSD. He was a computer science professor, and he took a sabbatical and spent his sabbatical writing on Futurama.

And I remember there was a day he had to go into Dave Cohen's office and said, you have to, I'm sorry, but it would really help me if you can tell me whether or not you're going to pick up my option. Do I have to know to tell them if I'm teaching any courses next semester? And he didn't. He never went back. They picked up his option.

He's been at the Simpsons, you know, after that show ended, he's been at the Simpsons ever since. Which show would you say in the four seasons had a rougher time with networks in your experience? Was it NewsRadio or Futurama? Well, oh, it was definitely news radio i mean i mean futurama we had a tough time in that they didn't they you know we had that a bad time slot and like we were never like it was sort of like this this moment where or not a moment of slow

dawning realization it's like oh we're never going to be as big as The Simpsons. Like that's just not going to happen. And it seems like Fox never gave that the chance to happen, which was kind of a bummer. But NewsRadio, we also got lots of notes. It's like NewsRadio, we got lots and lots of notes until finally they kind of gave up on us. Like they didn't like, so they kept, it's sort of like we weren't worth the executive's time.

We were, like news radio was incredibly low rated. And like we constantly thought we were going to get canceled. And we were always what they, you you know what they say on the bubble but like uh uh after season two is like they kind of stopped giving notes and like if they we had more and more junior executives covering the show because i think like they just kind of you know we just weren't worth we they just didn't care so like we were so of, you know, we just weren't worth it. They just didn't care. So like we were so unsuccessful that we were under their radar, which was great. Well, we love asking writers this because it makes them think about the thousands of jokes they've written over the years.

But we know if your name is on a script, doesn't mean you have responsibility for everything. Right. So we like to ask writers, do you have a favorite joke or a favorite scene that you wrote that is in someone else's credited episode? Someone else's script. Oh, that's a really good question. Oh, shoot. On news radio, there was a, Dave Foley brings in like a counselor

to help everyone through their morning about this extra had died. And sort of the basis of the episode was in our show, really in any workplace sitcom, there's all these extras crossing by who clearly work there, but no one ever talks to them. And like, you don't know any, like, like it seems like they're just not friends with that guy. So we had like one of the extras dies and they all feel guilty. They didn't really know him. Uh, and so, uh, Matthew goes in and he's just written a song about this guy, this guy who died. It's just a song about Dungeons and Dragons.

Right. Right. I should realize you wrote that one. Well, yeah, I guess on, on the Futurama episodes, your credit writing on one of our favorites in the,

in the first run was Mother's Day, but that almost felt like it was like when we watched it now, we're like, ah, that, that could have been a movie. Like it's all the robots just turn on everybody was were you guys ever thinking i mean obviously you weren't going to just make a movie then movies are hard my friends no one wants to write a movie they're hard uh what you want is a tv show that feels like it

could have been a movie like that's the goal it's's sort of like it's like it only has to be 20 minutes long and it has a lot in it. And you feel like, oh, I wanted more. That's good. That's what you want. No, Beavis and Butthead is something where like we're trying to write a half hour special and accidentally wrote a movie. And then we had to produce a whole movie. It's a lot of work. Um, no, that one was like, I, uh, in college at one point I thought I was going to major in like

government and like, and I like, and like poli sci and I took this course where i read like almost all of marx it's like i so like i so i i used it all for the the the marxist greeting card i was reading the it all checks out yeah they have nothing the the robot greeting card had nothing to lose but their shackles that's true yeah another one of the ones you're credit writing on is raging bender which had the ultimate robot fighting league and i noticed that and uh news radio like i was i was into mixed martial arts before it was cool that's why but but it was but that was like you never saw on tv back then like actual references to the ufc or or ultimate fighting or any of that back then

it was very new yeah like when we for raging bender it was very new uh and really it's a show about like 1950s wrestling or like 1950s boxing we just we just used the word the name but like uh i'm sure i'm sure i knew nothing about ufc do we talk about ufc and news radio if that was almost certainly joe rogan i i assumed it was a joe rogan pitch but i was like oh wait they did have they they did mma fighting on an episode of of news radio yes yeah it that Joe Rogan would pitch things, it's just he would talk a lot and we would just take everything he said and just put it in the script. When you were starting on the show, it definitely seems like you guys

had big plans for Zap Brannigan, but then season two starts with Brannigan Begin Again, which is like the super Zap episode. When did you guys fall in love with Zap Brannigan? Oh, like the second from from from minute one it's like everyone loved i really it's like

i think the reason we love zap brannigan is we love kip croker and it's sort of like just the interplay between those two voices so it's like when did we like as great as the zap brannigan voices when did we fall like as great as the Zapparangian voice is, when did we fall in love with Zapparangian? We heard Kip Croker's voice, I think. And just, they're such a great comedy team. And it's just great, you know, like there's so much comedy we had from characters

with no self doubt, with misplaced confidence. So that's what Ender is mainly, but like this is sort of like the more villainous version. Yeah, so we were always going to do lots and lots of Zafranagan stuff. That first season, it was tough to bring people back because we were just sort of establishing what the show was.

And it was tough to say, well, let's have multiple Zafranagan episodes in this first season, which was only like, what, eightannigan episodes in this first season which was only like what eight or nine episodes because first of all like we just needed to develop our the main characters who worked at planet express and like second of all what if everyone hates zap brannigan or like what if it doesn't really what if people don't like it as much as we do and like we don't and like we're we're stuck with it you

know like we're because like remember like like news radio or like animation has such a long lead time that you don't get any feedback until really really late and i'm sure that hearing uh billy west performance inspired you to write more for the character i assume the first time you heard billy do the voice yeah we all really liked it and like that uh and and and him and kip is delightful so we knew it was coming back but like it's tough it's tough to it's tough to have secondary characters recur when you have like there were just so many characters who actually worked at Planet Express that we had to serve so it's tough to give him his second episode before you've done an Amy episode and earlier this year we covered Amazon Women in the Mood and we were we thought it was very funny but we're also slightly shocked by how dirty it was for a show from 20 years ago that aired on Fox at 7 p.m.

Were there any challenges getting that on the air? And by the way, one of Bea Arthur's best performances in her entire career. She was so good. Because that's like her big long line about being a woman in a man's world. That makes no sense i mean like that is an unperformable line it's really long and it's really logically convoluted and like it it kind of makes no sense and like like i like i was really worried like this is an unperformable line what are we going to do to be arthur and like it's not an unperformable line. What are we going to do to be Arthur? And it's not an unperformable be Arthur. She was just...

She's a genius. But I don't think so. I think those 90s sitcoms were all really dirty. And I think people were very happy to have stuff, have a lot of like sexual language on TV at that point.

I don't think that's what standards and practices really cared about. It's like like I feel like NBC would have liked news radio to be dirtier. And like we, you know, our sensibility was more like classic TV, like, you know, Green Acres, Beverly Hillbillies, which wasn't dirty at all, you know. And so I don't think so. I think they were, they were fine with the snoo snoo.

And in, in those, you know, since hearing that you were like the third guy in the room, so early in Futurama, like how early were you guys figuring out the, you know, not all sitcoms back then had long arcs or plan to have like, Oh, where you've got the secret reveals of like nibbler or leela's parents or whatever and continuity as well yeah and tons of continuity like how much were you planning that early on zero oh oh zero um yeah like the reveal of nibbler and the reveal of leela's parents oh no we figured out that for that episode and just tried to make it work with what we had already established several classic Futurama writers

came back for the the Comedy Central seasons and yourself included and I gotta say the late Philip J Fry is like seriously one of the best Futurama episodes ever oh thank you was it easy to get back into the groove with with all the characters well i i didn't come back full time i just wrote a couple uh like three um uh freelance scripts but uh no no it's like coming home i mean the the concept of time time travel that only happens forward was so clever in that they had to just go around the horn every time. But then on top of that, it still had the heart that makes so many classic

Futurama episodes so memorable. Yeah, the idea of a forwards-only time machine was Matt Groening's idea. And then, like, yeah, it's just a matter of having like that the fry lila love story um actually take it seriously enough to make it play and how did working on uh futurama compared to other animated shows you worked on i assume obviously fewer phds in the room but what were the other major differences oh they're all totally different I mean like uh we did big science fiction stories that we took seriously we took the emotional you know relationships between the characters seriously family guys

really like mainly everything is to serve the cutaways uh before you you went on to Beavis and Butthead I know you know uh David Cohen wrote in the original seasons of eves and butthead like were were you watching those back then oh absolutely yeah uh everyone was like it this is like i just graduated from college when uh season one came out but yeah uh definitely yeah um uh stew burns too from futurama got his first job was writing Beavis and Butthead that's definitely something I wanted to do on this run of Beavis and Butthead is is give people their first job yeah we are watching the new series it's great by the way uh and we notice uh returning writers like Sam Johnson and Chris Marcel and then a lot of newer writers as well all doing different kinds

of episodes that still all feel correct in the Beavis and Butthead mold we we buy a lot of newer writers as well, all doing different kinds of episodes that still all feel correct in the Beavis and Butthead mold. We buy a lot of episodes freelance. And that's what, that's like what they did back then. And that's sort of how we feel like we can give scripts to people with no credits. Oh, well, you know, one,

I was a Jess Dweck from, I was like, oh, I know that person from Twitter, like from just funny tweets. And then, wow, writing on the news, Beavis and Buddy. Yeah, uh-huh. She wrote some good episodes. Yeah, we basically, we've hired like mostly writers without a ton of credits and freelancers and a smattering of heavy hitters from the old days, like Chris Brown and Chris Marcell and Sam Johnson. Chris Marcell is actually working full-time on the show now.

Oh, great. Oh, cool. Yeah, we've looked at Beavis the Butthead on our other podcast. After revisiting the shows as adults, we have a real appreciation for the writing because there's like a specificity to the characters and how they interact with each other and to how difficult it is to make these dumb characters do anything uh what's what's your philosophy when it comes to uh what makes these characters work and how you write an episode well the the thing about beavis and butthead is if they

get out of character for even one second the whole thing comes crashing down and so there's no you just have to go in that there's no joke funny enough to bring them out of character um which is not entirely true in the video segments when they're watching the videos you'll notice they're a little smarter just so you can you can do jokes they can refer to things but like in the in the cartoon segments they don't know anything and they have a a vocabulary about a hundred words it's that and uh it's sort of like writing a video about an episode it's like building like a Lego house, but you only have eight Legos. And so like every episode, you only have the same eight Legos. You just have to find a different way to put them together.

But it's just keeping it simple. And like the learning curve of Viva's in Vitehead is figuring out how much needs to happen in an episode. And it's not much, but it's's something you need like a very tiny story and uh it's just a very simple story and then it you it's just like very simple they talk really slow everything happens pretty slowly it's like the slowest animated show like i've ever heard of we're like like this like most animated shows the dialogue is cut really tight so there's no pauses and like like i remember in futurama editing dialogue and any like the first thing you do is anytime an actor breathes you cut it you snip it out just just close up the space and uh no beavis and

butthead we add pauses we tell the actors to slow down it's just like it's a very slow deliberate show but like yeah the philosophy is basically like they you just you can't bring them out of character to do a joke even for one second yeah i uh i was i was curious you know was silicon valley uh was that what got you uh into mike judge's orbit or had you worked with him before uh silicon valley okay and and so you guys just kind of clicked really he knew you'd be good for this job i guess so yeah yeah i guess uh i seem dumb enough yeah i mean at first i at first it was strange to see oh uh when i saw who was writing the movie lou morton i recognized him immediately but then i thought well futurama writer but then i went back

to the podcast that we did and thought well beefs but is a difficult show to write so i'm sure there'll be futurama style ideas with the the slightly complex but stupid Beavis and Butthead comedy and that's what the movie turned out to be entirely yeah the thing about like writing a Beavis and Butthead movie is it's the problem in Futurama we have with Fry sometimes that like your main character is too dumb to understand the story that they're in. And like, that was a problem we had in like some early Futurama is that like the story doesn't work. We learned the hard way that like the story doesn't work.

If Fry doesn't understand the stakes of his own story, you have, you Fry had like, so we, we sort of quickly learned like, Fry has to know as understand what's going on enough that he's invested in the outcome. And like that, like Fry always needs to like, he needs to be actively working towards his goal because he wants the goal. And he has to be smart enough for that to happen,

for that to work. But like, even better, they can't be smart enough to achieve their goal or pursue a goal or anything and so it's like we that's why we ended up putting in smart adding smart beavis and butthead chasing them and uh the governor chasing them and the cia chasing them just because you need people with uh you need people pursuing goals in a movie and it was but it can't do it so you're officially saying fry is smarter than beavis and or butthead oh he definitely is yes it's on the record now and you're saying you're saying earlier in the

interview that this uh beavis and butthead do the Universe started as a special but evolved into the movie that we know now. How did that happen exactly? Well, we knew they wanted a special, and there already existed this, like far long before I joined the project, this script for a live-action Beavis and Butthead movie that was written by Mike and Ian and Guy Maxton Graham. And so we just took that script and rewrote it to sort of suit what we felt we needed

this movie to do. It seemed like we had enough there to be movie length, and it seemed like we could make a movie plot. it seemed like we had enough there to be movie length and it seemed like we could make a movie plot and so we just like there was a point like i took christmas break two years ago and just sort of like took everything we talked about and just like just like and took the existing script just just like wrote 100 pages in two weeks just to sort of almost to prove that it wouldn't work. It's like, ah, this looks like it will work. But there's one thing like we had to add.

I feel like the thing that really made it work better than uh made the movie work sort of as a movie is uh um adding the beavis emotional story which is really hard to do with those two characters who barely have emotions at all like butthead has no emotions at all beavis sort of has the emotions of a two-year-old and uh sort of poorly his poorly understood emotions but like we sort of like like i feel like the thing that really made it come together is sort of like this putting big stakes on if beavis can say i love you to the woman who's trying to kill him kill him actually beavis is seen talking to siri and really opening up was like that was such a kind of beautiful scene to finally see beavis open up like that this i feel like that that acting on that scene like the the

in animation there's two types of acting there's the vocal acting and the the the drawn acting the animated acting that the animated acting on that scene is unbelievably good yeah that's the one thing like it's it's hard like all the people who animated the 90s they're they're like animated acting that the animated acting on that scene is unbelievably good that's the one thing like it's it's hard like all the people who animated the 90s they're they're like they're uh they're they're they're at the the old animators home i suppose they're they certainly can't find that many of them we have we have like uh uh jeffrey johnson uh from the old days and we have johnny rice from the old days we're both great directors but mostly it's only people but like that's the thing is like

finding just like like in the writing there's they can't they don't they don't have many things they can do and stay within characters and in acting that they they're acting is unbelievably limited and what they can and can't do it's like they can almost not move their arms um it's like and like it's the kind of thing when they do and something that's acting that that seems out of character you immediately notice it and it immediately pulls you out and so it's like you have these so it's like that like a really genius uh bit of storyboarding where they like he's really expressive in that scene beavis is really expressive in that scene without getting out of his incredibly limited visual vocabulary of the poses he can do yeah it seems like uh this could just be the episodes that have

aired so far as of this recording but it seems like with the movie and the episodes i don't know if it's intentional but a lot of it does seem to be exploring how beavis is actually a very sweet boy but uh life keeps sending him down the wrong paths yeah yeah um uh this there's more there's there's more there's more butthead coming uh oh good definitely leading with leading with with with the deepest episodes sort of fall early in the schedule but uh yeah that's something i always like in comedy and we did a lot on veep that like your characters could be happy and the choice for happiness is right in front of them and like they could easily take it but their character flaws prevent them

and confine them to miserableness we were like everyone on VEAP had the story that like if they just quit there's this thing right here that could make them happy if they just quit politics and did that I just can't I'm like I sort of

that with Beavis yeah so far there have been two episodes that felt experimental but still fit within the constraints of the formula the one with Beavis talking to the fire and the one that just aired last week with Beavis and the the annoying new friend

it feels like it was interesting to see Beavis kind of on his own without the butthead dynamic, but it's still really worked well. Beavis is a good character to put with other people. He, he wants things, but he's,

he's totally helpless. Uh, yeah, I, I, I was pretty excited getting started to do episodes that break the format a little bit. And like,

uh, I felt like the trapped in a box breaks format a little bit that's like so much of it is their their trap they don't move which is sort of a weird thing and we have one in season two where they're like they fall in the sewer and the point where the lights are out and we play like like at least a solid minute on a black screen and it's sort of like we're sort of figuring out like what do we have to do to let people know their tvs aren't broken like we're still figuring out like do we need to see like one little bit of light up in the corner so you know your tv didn't shut off people are going to be canceling their paramount plus subscriptions thinking that it's broken yeah uh no i i love that beavis in those in those two episodes bob

mentioned that he's kind of if he's not with butthead he's just like wandering around town looking for butthead and it it's just like so sad. They're really codependent. Oh, and also in the fire episode, I love too that you take this concept that was like one of the most controversial things in their first series of Beavis and Butthead about Beavis' love of fire. And then you turn that into the healthiest relationship he's ever had which he rejects really leaned into fire back then the fire that's that's why they're so bad

in a fire yeah yeah it's funny like what is and isn't taboo in the 90s and now, whereas now it's just like, you ask Paramount Plus and like really our, the executives are, are Comedy Central executives. And like, like, like we're gonna, we're really gonna lean into Beavis Loves Fire. And they're like, great. There are much more dangerous things now. Yeah. Yeah. And working with Mike Judge,

was it easy for him to just slip back into these voices because every time i mean abeavis and budda has come back twice now and every time i'm just so surprised that the voices uh sound identical to me uh and he's just such a skilled voice actor too on top of that is is he pitching things in the voices is he like it feels like he must have editorial control if he is the conduit through which all writing must flow. Yeah, of course he does. Yeah, he's super involved in the whole thing. Yeah, I mean, he's Beavis and Butthead. I, it seems really effortless for him to keep doing the voices but i'm not doing them i'm like i think

like beavis is harder to do than it was when he was 30 just because it's so raspy i think it's just physically harder uh but uh he sure does it sounds great to me and he's like such a great performer i mean without his performance there's no like there's no way any of it is funny. None of it seems like it would be funny on the page. Well, yeah, and he has to scream. Well, speaking of being raspy, Beavis has to scream a lot in the show, too. So many horrible things happen to us. He's got to scream quite a lot.

We limit how often he has to actually scream. That's good for the safety of my judge or like because like you it's a good thing to do with voice actors in general is like you you save all the screaming for the end and like you try to limit how many times you ask them to scream like you don't you don't do you don't do it you don't do eight takes of the screen oh well so in in do the do the universe two you guys made you know this big move to have the characters you know teleported to 2022 not not that they really notice at first but like so so uh you know how how important was for you to have you know these ideas of beavis and butthead interact with modern day um we like the idea of beavis and butthead interact with modern day um we like

the idea of beavis and butthead interacting with modern day and it's sort of a lot of like me and mike talking about like do we have enough modern day is that like should we have more modern day and like in the new episodes and it's like well i guess escape room was just sort of modern day so like maybe that like like i guess that's good but like really like that's not what beavis and butthead is here to do like to comment on modern day it's just like we're just being as funny as we can and the fact that it's set in today means we're gonna end up uh you know like like we're gonna end up uh commenting on things that have that are happening today because it just it just gives but it takes place in the world but like being satirical is not like what mike and i wake up in the morning excited to do. It's like we're just trying to make the show as funny as we can.

And the show is like, at its heart, it's like the show is, the show is basically like it's closer to Three Stooges than any modern show. That it's sort of two incredibly dumb guys run into these secondary characters. The secondary characters give them the benefit of the doubt and it's a big mistake. It's like that sort of thing.

Well, as we wrap up here, Alou, I wanted to know, as a Futurama writer, you're used to having an audience full of pedantic nerds who love continuity. It seems to me the movie ending does not really mesh with the series reboot. I was completely fine with it. I thought, oh, is Van Triesen aged up?

But as soon as I saw Mr. Anderson was still alive as the world's oldest World War II, but I was like, okay, that's fine. I just like that the characters are back. What was your idea about like if there would be continuity between the movie and the show? Like, were you thinking about that at all? Well, at one point, we definitely were. It was going to be continuity we're never going to talk about what happened in the movie in the show because like that's not

the kind of show beavis and butthead is with continuing stories and stuff and it just felt like you shouldn't be required to watch the movie to understand a beavis and butthead episode but like we did age up van dreesen and mr anderson um a lot at first and then we just scaled it back and scaled it back and scaled it back but like van dreesen is is aged up it's sort of if you look if you looked at the like his model now and his his 90s model right like next to each other you would notice but like if it's not right next to each other you might not notice but like there's the idea that like like well van riesen will be in his he's a wet he'll be in his 50s and like um Mr. Anderson is supposed to be super old now. He does need a hearing aid that he didn't need before.

You'll notice you haven't seen Stuart and Todd. Stuart and Todd did get older. At some point, we were to have like old fat Todd. And like at some point old fat Todd was in the movie and just got cut. But the thing with like, we sort of learned and leaned into is that we're not that interested in continuity and like uh the we're very happy for the episodes to be self-contained the i defy anyone to have

them to say what order they had that like that they happen in any sort of order like nothing nothing in episode two will have informed anything that's going to happen in any sort of order like nothing nothing in episode two will have informed anything that's going to happen in episode 20. uh they don't they certainly don't learn things or grow and we we kill them at the end of a lot of episodes like that killing them at the end of every episode is anti-continuity i think yeah oh yeah uh no uh yeah well actually the the continuity bit too in the movie another of my favorite jokes is you guys tease answering like who's beavis's mom like what's her deal and you will not give it to us you you have no no like i i was petrified like she does she was saying something underneath the garbage disposal,

just so we could, just so it would sound like there's something you couldn't hear. Just like the faint, faint noise of something you couldn't hear. And like, I was petrified that, that, that what she was saying would somehow end up on the closed caption.

Like we don't know. We don't, you're not allowed to know anything about their parents. That's something, that's something Mike said a lot of times a lot of times but like the reason you never see their parents is basically it's it's it's uh it's inspired by uh by charlie brown where you never see their parents and it's just we're seeing the show is from their point of view and from their point of view their parents are completely unimportant so their parents kind of aren't an important part of their lives their lives are what you see you know that that's what's important to them so just you

just like it's not we just don't show it they have like they have parents it's sort of unclear now if they have parents because we still refer to their parents even though we're in some ways 25 years. They want 25 years in the future. But again, we kind of have come around to that we don't care about continuity at all. Well, I thought the movie was very funny, but I also walked away thinking, I'm glad I know it's Beavis' house now.

Yes, we do know that now. It's a fact. Yeah, like Mike said, no, I i know it's beavis's house now yes we do know that now it's a fact i try yeah i try like mike mike said no i always thought it was beavis's house well there you go yeah yeah that's it's apparently established somewhere in some book or something that's butthead's house but um well you know there's book continuity and then there's what happens in the show like that's an extra level we don't have a canon the catholic church has a canon we don't we don't have a canon uh and later we we do at we're they're coming we're doing episodes where they're older where we sort of explain we have and we bring smart beavis and butthead back to sort of explain why they're older in this episode oh great i love those guys and basically say like we're much smarter than you we spend our time and what do we do because we're so smart we spend our time watching the most

interesting universe in the whole multiverse which is the one where beavis and butthead are old here's here's something we observed once you won't understand it because it's too complicated, but do your best. And then it's an episode with more people. Oh, man, I can't wait. Well, we should wrap up soon with you, Lou. We appreciate your time. Great answers. I love learning more about your career.

Futurama, Beavis and Butthead Newsradio, all the great stuff. Anything else you want to tease about anything you're working on? Anything you want to tease about? Anything coming up on Beavis and Butthead this season? We've got a lot coming. We've got Beavis and Butthead are old. Stuart, Beavis and Butthead, when they're old, run into old Stuart. That's coming.

They die at the end of a lot more episodes. Oh, that's great. At the very end, we have an entire episode of Smart Beavis and Butthead. Excellent. Oh, hell yeah. I was going to ask, can we confirm Cornholio, or is this still a secret? Yes, yes. cornholio or is this still a secret yes yes there are cornhole in the 24 episodes and 48 scripts we're doing uh i believe i believe i can promise you two cornhole excellent it's on the record now

and breaking news when you're digging deep into like there's only so many music videos that exist now so you guys are digging deep into the the social media as well for great videos too right uh yeah those that's turned out to be pretty uh pretty fruitful uh doing the social media stuff doing doing youtubes and tiktoks uh it's it was really really hard getting any videos to clear at first because you need like the people who make a lot of YouTube videos it turns out these days don't care about being on TV at all they're like are you paying me a huge amount of money no but now that people see what it's like to be on Beavis and Butthead, I'm thinking it'll be easier to clear because maybe it'll look like fun

to be made fun of by Beavis and Butthead. And we're still doing the music videos, which I think we were a little afraid at first. If we do music videos, will it seem like we're trapped in the past because there are no music videos anymore. People don't watch music videos, but it kind of, we've kind of convinced ourselves at least

that people do watch music videos still. And like popular music videos are like on YouTube, get like a billion views. So. Yeah, honestly, music videos feel more alive now than they did for the 2011 reboot, I think. Yeah. Yeah yeah yeah that's it it feels like they're like a little bit they're not like it was when in the glory days of mtv when you're sitting down and watching music videos would be like your afternoon

every afternoon but uh it it definitely feels like it's it's like it doesn't feel like we made them up. I feel like it's a real thing. And like we did the BTS one. And it does, I feel like it does feel irrelevant doing the music videos in a way we were afraid maybe it wouldn't. So we're going to keep doing them. Well, man, we can't wait to see the rest of the season, Lou.

Thank you so much. Yes, thank you so much for your time, Lou. And the new season is amazing. If you haven't seen Yes, thank you so much for your time, Lou. And the new season is amazing. If you haven't seen it, listeners at home, check it out on Paramount+. Use code word nachos for a few months. Ooh.

Ooh, boy. I'm out.