Hot Streets comes from Brian Wysol, whose previous credits include Rick and Morty and Robot Chicken. Wysol channels those same chaotic, creative sensibilities here and he’s able to turn this supernatural FBI show into a series that immediately grabs the audience’s attention. Adult Swim is only acquiring more content and as a result it’s very easy to get lost in the shuffle between their many new programs, but Hot Streets feels like something that it’s worth making the time for. In honor of the show’s premiere, we touched base with its creator, Brian Wysol, to talk about how this twisted series came to life and where he hopes Hot Streets is headed. BRIAN WYSOL: I had made a bunch of these shorts for Dan Harmon and Rob Schrab’s Channel 101. I had made two shorts in particular that I really liked. One was called Hot Cross Buns and another one was called We Solve the Crime. I was trying to come up with ideas for a TV show and I really liked the characters from We Solve the Crime, but I wanted to put them in more of a science fiction setting. So I kind of merged the sensibilities together between both of these smaller ideas. The original conceit was a cop show with supernatural elements. When I met with Adult Swim they felt like the cop “case of the week” angle held back the show a little bit. So I changed it to where they’re FBI agents and I think that was a really great thing that opened this world up. They don’t have to investigate a crime, so to speak, they can just deal with the supernatural. BRIAN WYSOL: The characters from the shorts are definitely different from the characters in the TV show. But the idea for the characters within the show never changed. The idea of having this stoic, dumb character and then the overly emotional and intellectual partner was always in its DNA. Jen sort of helps ground the show and has a lot of personal space. When creating the show she was a new addition. The show is so crazy that I felt that it needed someone who can bring a sense of reality back to it all. Then there’s Chubbie Webbers, the “mystery dog.” A “mystery dog” is a dog that would appear in series from the ’70s and ’80s like Scooby-Doo or Brain from Inspector Gadget. It’s that dog who’s sort of a wild card. Sometimes he helps, makes things worse, or is just a punching bag for the team. A character like that is really useful in terms of throwing wrenches into storylines. BRIAN WYSOL: From the very beginning, before I had even pitched the show to Adult Swim or before he had attached himself as an executive producer, I asked if he would voice this character and he said that he would. So I sent over an animatic that I had made where I played Chubbie Webbers and did this sort of canine noise. When he sent me something back it was that weird voice that’s in the show and it was just so different than what I had given him to start. I was dying with laughter and it’s just perfect. It also certainly changed how we would write the character because he made him sound a lot more pathetic. There’s something just sad about everything that he does. Since there does feel like there’s some overlap in terms of what both this show and Rick and Morty cover, how are Hot Streets stories different than Rick and Morty ones? BRIAN WYSOL: Well coming from that writers’ room I definitely use a lot of the same storytelling techniques. Dan Harmon notoriously uses a circle to structure his stories, which we also do on Hot Streets. Being different from Rick and Morty is definitely something that we talked about a lot. One of the things that we try to avoid—A lot of shows like Rick and Morty or South Park will do pop culture jokes so well that I didn’t feel like we had anything to add in that category. So one way in which we try to differentiate ourselves is to try to limit that as much as possible. In the third episode there’s a bit of a Superman homage, but we’re not really referencing pop culture in the dialogue. We also try to avoid meta jokes as well because Rick and Morty also really excels in that area. So those are some ways in which we’re trying to find our own voice. This show gets into some really insane things like mummies, aliens, and a whole lot more. Is there any territory that you’d say is too out there for the show and something that you couldn’t see meshing with this world? Is there a street too hot for Hot Streets? Do you guys talk at all about the “rules” for this show’s universe at all, or do you keep things pretty loose? BRIAN WYSOL: Well one of the very first shots in the pilot is a car being driven that has two steering wheels. So I think right from that it gives us a lot of leverage to embrace the absurdity of this world. That being said, we do have an overall story that we’re trying to tell and by the end of the tenth episode there’s serialization that pays off. So there are things that happen in episodes that are important. It’s not like our characters die at the end of an episode and then just magically come back for the next one. There’s a history to what’s happening and it does affect the overall arc. BRIAN WYSOL: We had this episode, episode seven, and it was the hardest to break because we had set up a scenario where Jen is trapped underground. She’s solving these problems and it was just so boring. We stayed up really late trying to fix this and at one point someone mentioned a character that just storms in and beats everyone up. It made us laugh so hard, it solved the problem, and it’s now one of my favorite gags of the whole season. It’s this random dog character and the beauty of how just creating one new character can really help get you out of a corner. You also do the music in this show, which is really great. Talk a little about the synth-y score and why you wanted the show to have this sort of music. The show’s animation style is crude, but still quite complex and elegant. Why did you want this particular look for the show and did you consider any other styles? BRIAN WYSOL: Going from pilot to series, you’ll probably notice that there’s a big visual change. For the pilot we did this experiment where we used CGI assets that we were rotoscoping. That dimension was such a nightmare during the pilot process that I knew that we wouldn’t be able to make it work for the series. Would you like to do anything differently on the show’s second season? Do you know what that might look like or how things might change? BRIAN WYSOL: Yes. In a hypothetical second season—if I were lucky enough to get that—is that in season one we set up a bit of a hidden overall arc that gets solved by the end. I like having that larger arc so in a season two we would definitely have another season-long arc where any new mysteries would be solved by the end of the season. Also, I would like to further explore the characters because one of the challenges of a 15-minute show is that they move so fast. I’d like to dig deeper into some of these characters and get to figure out their history and backstories.
