DEN OF GEEK: I was a big fan of Totally 4 Teens and this show is obviously very much an extension of that. How would you say that these shows are different and is there anything that you learned from the Totally 4 Teens experience that helped here?

DERRICK BECKLES: You’re right, the shows definitely share some DNA. Totally 4 Teens and The Eric Andre Show, myself, and Eric, and all the writers involved with those programs really helped shape what they’d become. The network always loved Totally 4 Teens, but they passed on it and so we just kept kind of making other stuff with them. I always kind of wanted to re-visit Totally 4 Teens and now it feels even more relevant.

Let me be clear though, the show was never designed to make fun of—even back to my TV Carnage compilation videos, I hate it when something is just making fun of a generation of people. So Eric and I were very clear from the start that this is not meant to be a lampoon of a generation. It’s more about corporate desperation and how every generation is like the one that everybody becomes obsessed with and it feeds into the world. With millennials, social media, and all of that stuff it just becomes this perfect storm of people not knowing what to say, or think, or do. It’s like three-dimensional TV Carnage. That’s what we’re living now. I don’t even know how you could do something like TV Carnage now because just everything is so ridiculous. There’s too much.

What I learned from Totally 4 Teens is that none of that goes away. The stuff I was saying ten years ago in Totally 4 Teens is still relevant today. It’s something that Eric and I celebrate, both together and individually, but it’s this sort of obsequious desperation. This need to be cool, to make money off of what’s cool, and how that can be embarrassing a lot of the time. Anybody that was part of any generation loved laughing at adults trying to be cool. But a lot of thought goes into all of the elements that we throw together rather than just a base level, “millennials are dumb!”

Your work with the TV Carnage compilations, Hot Package, and this show all tie into this idea of parodies of entertainment variety shows. Why does this subject interest you the most?