Peacock's In the Know features some huge names like Mike Tyson, Finn Wolfhard, and Norah Jones.
How they landed those guests will surprise you. ClutchPoints spoke to one of the show's creators, showrunners, and executive producers, Brandon Gardner. He worked closely with Zach Woods, who created and also stars in the series. Woods reunited with the creator of the US Office adaptation, Greg Daniels, on the new show as well.
In this interview, Gardner talked about securing their A-list guests, In the Know's inspirations, and how they nailed the stop-motion animation.
Brandon Gardner In the Know interview
ClutchPoints: I haven't seen many shows like In the Know — the only thing that came to mind was Between Two Ferns. I don't know if there were any other inspirations, but can you talk to me about where this idea came from.
Brandon Gardner: I think the shows people have mentioned to us [him and Zach Woods] the most are Space Ghost Coast to Coast — because that was an animated show that did an interview, and then people sometimes would bring up the [It's] Garry Shandling Show as another sort of, at this point, old reference.
But as far as a TV show about making a TV show, and in our case about making a radio show, even though we like both of those shows, I don't think we were looking to them a lot when we were trying to make ours. I think the main thing we were excited about with setting the show in an NPR station is that it would give us a chance to make fun of people like us. [smiles]
So Zach and I are not very far away from the characters in the show and our friends are not very far away from the characters in the show. So it's more of a satire of us and our world of sort of progressive coastal people than it is about NPR specifically.
CP: When Zach was interviewing guests, were there ever times where he'd ask a question to one of these celebrities and they didn't know what was coming? Because the reactions do seem pretty natural.
BG: They never knew what was coming. So I would come on the Zoom with them first. And I would tell them, first I would thank them for doing this show [and] for being brave enough to do a show that didn't exist yet [smiles], “Pretend it's a real NPR show, and don't worry about being funny. You don't have to pretend to think it's funny or act offended or anything. Just act as you really would.”
And then an image of the Lauren puppet would appear on their screen and Zach would intro them to the show as if it was really happening. And then they would talk for an hour and we had no idea where it was going. We would research the guest and we would write questions so we'd feel prepared, but none of the guest responses are scripted.
The only exception is for the Fabian and Jorge Masvidal pre-interview. That was a scripted story.
CP: You guys got some really amazing guests on the show, so I was curious, was there anybody who was particularly hard to nail down? Because it sounds like you got them for an hour, and that's a long amount of time.
BG: Luckily, we were probably spared some of the drama of nailing them down. We had a great booker who worked for The Daily Show booking guests for years, so we really relied on her connections and I'm sure charm. And then she would just say, “Hey, they're in. Mike Tyson's in,” or “Roxane Gay's in,” or “Tegan and Sarah are in and just be grateful that they had said yes.”
I would say certain types of people would be hard to peg down. I think athletes for whatever reason were a little bit more leery of like, “What is the show?” and “Are you going to be trying to make fun of me or something?”
But most people were very game for it.
CP: In a hypothetical world, if you get a Season 2, is there anybody that you particularly want? Because it sounds like you handed it to your booker to get people. But if you could have your way with an unlimited budget and time, who would you want?
BG: I would say, we definitely gave our booker our dream list and she just was able to get them, which is amazing. Because we definitely wanted people [that] we personally found to be interesting.
We would say, “We don't want to just interview any boxer. We want to interview Mike Tyson.” We think he's fascinating.
But as far as as a Season 2, I think the fun thing about the format for us is that because Lauren is a puppet, all these famous people are going to have a different experience with the interview than they normally have having been interviewed hundreds and hundreds of times.
And that with each of them, it's an opportunity to show parts of themselves they don't normally get to show in interviews. So Roxane Gay, for example, is this great writer who often writes about really heavy things. But she got to be so playful in this interview. And so it was fun that we got to see that.
The main thing if we were trying to book guests for a second season is just trying not to repeat ourselves. For example, it'd be interesting if Lauren talked to someone with a military background, it's like, how would that work? because Lauren is such a particular type of intellectual, people who fall outside of that realm are interesting for Lauren to interact with.
CP: It sounds like the actors were in the studio. A lot of these characters have such subtle mannerisms that really seem so human. So did you watch them in the studio and then hear how they're enunciating things and base it off of that, or how did the stop-motion sequences get created?
BG: So the first step was writing the scripts and then we brought the actors into a studio and recorded them all. And then we had these radio plays where it was just audio. And from the audio, they did these things called animatics, sort of like real rough 2D animation. And from those 2D animations, they gave it to the animators who actually moved the puppets.
And so for the animators, they would first listen to it and be able to get a lot from the voice actors performance. And they would see the animatic and see how we had imagined it looking. And then they would talk to Zach and I as directors, [asking] like, “What's going on in the scene? What [are] the characters' motivations? What are they going through?”
And then they would just do it. The amazing thing about stop-motion and these brilliant people at ShadowMachine is you can't really do another take of stop-motion because it takes so long. It might take you a whole day's work to animate five or six seconds, and so 99% of what you'll see was the first and only take, which is totally different from live-action.
But they were able to be to put so much life into these puppets in their very first attempt at it that we were able to pull it off.
In the Know is on Peacock now.
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