HUGH DAVIDSON: I think we kind of hit our stride during the second season. I don’t know, but to me, I think the cast is perfect in terms of what’s funny about one character does not at all overlap or cannibalize from another character. Which feels kind of rare, at least to me. I think it’s very lucky. It’s not like we were geniuses here or anything. We were lucky that Norm MacDonald was cast and that they believed in Jim Rash—because at the time, I believe that Jim Rash was lower on the list of people that they wanted for Marquess. I knew Jim from Groundlings along with Rachel [Ramras], who plays Mike’s daughter. So I didn’t know Norm MacDonald at all, and I certainly didn’t know Mike Tyson. So I knew it would help me as a writer and producer of the show if I had some allies in there where I could be honest and go like, “Hey, this isn’t working, let’s play around with it until it does…”

But once all of those different voices were together, it was perfect. Jim provided a sort of feminine counter-energy to Norm’s straight-laced nature. This started to make me realize that we could just write more of the bullshitting around the house scenes. Those were always so funny and they could end up carrying the show. So the great thing about that is that when the show was starting and it seemed like this bullshit high-concept show that was just a riff on Hanna-Barbera cartoons while being vulgar—which is not something that I was interested in doing—it eventually became something that was just much more fun. I think it’s like a fantasy for some people to be a part of a comedy where it feels like you could just watch the characters interact all day long. There’s no scenario that you could put Mike Tyson in, no matter how banal—in fact, the more banal the better—that he wouldn’t be entertaining in. Let the vulgar jokes take a backseat and just let him be himself.

Then the whole show benefitted from Adult Swim not mandating that we turn in some sort of formulaic episodes. There was talk at first, during the earliest stages of things. Like how in a James Bond movie you always need the scene where he gets the cool gadgets. By the time the executives are saying that you need to have some sort of scene in something, you probably don’t need to have it. If everyone is saying you’ve got to have this thing, there’s going to be nothing surprising or fun about it anymore. So we quickly got away from it being any sort of Hanna-Barbera parody show. It doesn’t feel like it’s getting old at all. it’s just the most fun.

The characters are great, but one of my favorite things about this show is just how all over the place its material is, whether it’s dealing with Chupacabra, Cormac McCarthy, or even the chess rematch between Garry Kasparov and Deep Blue. How do you finalize your story ideas?

All of those things—for whatever reason—have some personal resonance with one of us. Everything we write does. One time I was reading an article in The Economist about a dam being built in Nicaragua and we put that into an episode. It’s just crazy to not put some stuff in. There are also very few shows where you have the luxury of just taking crazy stuff from real life and putting it into your show and being able to write about it. If you wrote for Modern Family you wouldn’t be able to tell the same sorts of stories that we do. Maybe you could hide it in like a B- or C-story, but you wouldn’t be touching Chupacabras. And that one was just based on the fact that I was trying to find a Cormac McCarthy interview, found this thing about him not being fond of the press, and then warped it into a story.