Home Movies was created because UPN invited us to pitch a family comedy (which means not just a comedy for families, but also a comedy about a family). While we were developing it they changed their focus away from family, but they still bought the show from us—probably because we had produced seven or so minutes of animation on our own, and that must have made us look like real go-getters.

I know UPN dropped the show after five episodes. What were the main reactions to the show at that point?

The main guy we were dealing with called after the first episode aired and said, very clearly, that he would be fired if he even hinted that there was a chance that they would pick up more episodes (they had only ordered the five because it was premiering in the spring). He said when he looked at the minute-to-minute ratings report you could see people almost racing to the remote to change the channel. This was not a great call to get, as you can imagine.

As far as I could tell, from that call, and from the ratings of the next four episodes, no one saw the show. But I’m glad to say that the one person did see it on UPN was Khaki Jones, who was helping set up Adult Swim with Linda Simensky and Mike Lazzo.

Home Movies was part of the Adult Swim debut, which seemed to mark a big shift in how adults and teens watched animation. What did you think of it at the time? Were you worried about moving from a more mainstream station to this experimental programming?

No! We were so happy to be back in production. Speaking personally—there are a few events that, looking back, I can now see were truly, clearly, unmistakably life altering, and Home Movies getting picked up by Adult Swim is one of them. We didn’t know what Adult Swim was exactly—it didn’t exist yet when we got the call—but we were ready to be part of their experiment, whatever it turned out to be.

When did you realize you had a cult hit on your hands?

Now? Never? I’m not sure. Cult hit—it's hard to define. I think we were aware that it connected with some people and that was enough for us. It still is.

One thing I see in a lot of your work is something my friends and I call "kid logic." It takes the worlds and concerns of children absolutely seriously, even if they seem completely unimportant to adults, but also isn't necessarily a show for kids. How do you strike that balance?

Part of the tension comes from hiring adults to play kids, and part of it comes from making a cartoon for adults. You end up with a little bit of cognitive dissonance from those two things alone. The last piece comes from a character-driven approach to storytelling. This attitude—that the character must act in some authentic way—gives you your secret sauce. The audience feels that we’re trying to treat these characters as if they were real kids even as we stretch beyond what real kids look like and sound like. We also try to add jokes.

How do you get into that kid headspace, where you're having these really sophisticated conversations that are about things adults might think is nonsense? How do you encourage that with actors?

The actors and writers and artists that we’ve worked with over the years are inherently childlike—interested in being silly, etc—so they very rarely need encouragement. They live there.