There's nothing like being on a hit television show. There's also nothing like being on a cancelled one. Over the years, Rob Corddry's been part of both. But today, even when the Hollywood gods frown upon him, Corddry gets the last laugh. The writer-actor's immensely popular Adult Swim show Childrens Hospital launches its sixth season tonight at midnight and promises more medical spoofing and face-painted hysteria. As part of our TV Reboot Tournament, Corddry hit the Esquire offices this past Monday to reflect on his television career's ups and downs, and chronicle the road to Childrens Hospital, which may not even exist if certain shows had taken off.

As told to Matt Patches.

The reason I had the idea [for Childrens Hospital] in the first place is because I had just left The Daily Show to do a network show on Fox, Seth MacFarlane's first live-action show, The Winner. It lasted six episodes. I found myself in L.A., no prospects, and in the beginning of the [WGA] writers' strike. So I spent six months being productive and learning about productivity. I would spend eight hours a day, sit and learn different styles of productivity, generating, maintaining, motivation. Get Things Done, by David Allen, was what stuck with me. My Dad is a big [Andrew] Carnegie guy. His book was all about strong handshakes and keeping your arms akimbo. That's not really what I was looking for. What I was looking for was a system that would, basically, let your "To Do" list be a slave to you, rather than the other way around. It caught on with me. Their thing is about cleaning garbage out of your head to make way for innovation. I came up with Childrens when I felt free. I cleansed of worry and the things I had to do were filed in a cogent way.

Every time I go through something like [a cancellation], I learn about the reality of the business. The younger you are, the more hope you have that someone is going to discover you at the [New York] Port Authority Bus Terminal… and turn you into a star, girl! I've gotten comfortable with failure and the whole rejection aspect of the job.

[With Childrens Hospital,] we were talking to Warner Bros. [Studio] 2.0, which doesn't even exist anymore—a ghost of a logo card at the end of Childrens Hospital. But we talked to them about doing it. It was easy at that point. It was the writers' strike and they were looking for content. This is all we were allowed to do, per the strike. They were treating it like free development. I had no plans to turn it into a television show—and would say so very publicly. Until Adult Swim called. And I realized right away that Adult Swim is like the internet of television. It's creator driven. It seemed like a great fit. We had a very low stakes bidding war between Adult Swim and Comedy Central and Adult Swim was always the perfect fit.

Childrens Hospital is largely due to my influence from guys like The State. David Wain is an executive producing partner with me. He's taught me a lot about the kind of comedy that makes me laugh. I basically built the cast and show about good times. This is a show that, who knows how long we'll be able to do it, so why not get people we love together and do it for fun? In season three, we portioned off $14,000 of our budget in order to go to Brazil and shoot a 15-second scene. It was scene about nothing. It would have been the first scene cut in the editing room. But we were walking the streets of Brazil, which is ostensibly where the hospital is located in the lore of the show. That was the biggest "fuck it" moment in Childrens Hospital. Why not? No one really knows that we did it. Which is kind of the success.

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

I think that, luckily, there was a movement afoot in response to this old, tired network model of making TV shows. A lot of networks are putting the creator first. Louie [C.K.'s] golden ticket deal with FX went a long way. They get creators to do their own thing and they don't get in their way because they're not driven by ad dollars as other networks are. They're willing to explore other models. I think Adult Swim is one of the first networks to allow themselves to do that because, compared to the other Turner stations, it's got a lower profile and they can experiment. It has a lot to do with Mike Lazzo, the guy who runs it. His sensibility is exactly like the people he hires. Lazzo is—and I preference this by saying that I consider Lazzo more a friend than a boss—but he has a urinal in his shower. You think, 'Weird, right?' I think it's because it's fun. You go to his apartment and he loves old books, he collects old books, so you're talking about old books then peeing in his shower. You walk out thinking there's no other way to live, like I'm doing it half-assed.

I do everything [in my career] at the same time as Childrens Hospital. When I did [2011's Little in Common, a pilot with Kevin Hart], I was undecided as to what I wanted to make my future look like. I think I was probably still entrenched in the old model. "This is what we do during pilot session." We could carve out Childrens Hospital on contract, then we get on a network show, then we buy a pool. The more I experienced it, the more I watched my friends drive themselves crazy experiencing it, the more I came away not wanting anything to do with that dead model. That realization comes with this movement of networks that just want to help creator create. It's weird. They're calling it the "Golden Age of Television." This is more than gold plated, it's heavy… like gold. You can't pick this age up.

I take every season [of Childrens Hospital] as its own separate entity, because the format allows. Last season we went to Japan, supposedly. We can do it. We get an average of 1.4 million viewers. People who watch, live. That's better than network shows. As long as that number hovers around a few points, I'll keep doing this until I die. If I start to get the message and people are over it, we'll kill it. But in season eighty, I'm 124 and still alive. By then, we're all superheroes anyway, so the sky is the limit.

Childrens Hospital season six premieres at 12:01 A.M. on March 21. Corddry will also be seen on HBO's upcoming football series Ballers.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io