CHRIS GETHARD: Yeah, it has in a couple of cool ways. First off, I think it’s actually allowed us to take a deep breath and get back to our roots, comedically. TruTV is a comedy network, after all, that is interested in great comedic shows. Fusion was so good to us and kept the show alive. They allowed us to have a budget for the first two seasons. A lot of their network was focused on things like social justice work or documentaries about issues, for example. They wanted us to tie a lot of our programming into that. So there were some hoops to jump through back then. But the idea that we can now just bust out some paintball guns and get back to our public access roots without having to tie our programs into anything larger is one of the really great things about truTV.

The other side of it, as far as budget goes, is that we’re a bigger budget show now. I’m really proud that I’ve been seeing a lot of old school fans commenting that this feels like public access with a real budget. To me, that’s the experiment. To take something so niche and weird and then do it on this mainstream scale.

I heard that Tru were also the ones that proposed returning to the live format, which is super awesome. Has it been nice to return to doing the show live and recapturing that energy of the cable access version?

Yeah! I was blown away by that. They took me out to lunch, asked me that, and I kind of couldn’t believe it. Marissa Ronca, one of the executives over at truTV, I told her that I was almost feeling guilty over that sort of setup. I said to her, “Look, full disclosure, if it’s a live show then some of them are going to be trainwrecks. They’re not all going to go well.” Her response was, “Yeah, we actually think those are the ones that people are going to respond to the most.”

That blew me away. I was like, “Wow, they actually get it.” They understand how experiments like this work. All of that has me feeling like I’m in extremely safe hands. They’re really letting us take a big swing with what we do and if it fails, we can at least walk away proud and knowing that it was on our own terms. It can still be a little hard to wrap my head around though.