President Curtis premiered last night, and the Rick and Morty spin-off already has a second season coming. Keith David voices the POTUS, with backup from David’s Community cohort Jim Rash as Secret Service agent O’Doyle and Stephanie Beatriz as Banks, Curtis’ chief of staff.
Ahead of President Curtis‘ debut, io9 talked with co-creators Dan Harmon and James Siciliano to learn more about their new series.
A president tasked with keeping America safe requires an unusually gifted staff; in President Curtis’ case, that means a hot-tempered half-leprechaun and a woman with a robot brain. The combination was somewhat Star Trek-inspired, Harmon explained, going back to Captain Kirk’s reliance on Spock and Bones for their different perspectives.
“I wanted to arrive at the strength of that at the core; I also didn’t want to just rip it off. We don’t want to once again do, like, ‘Oh, this one’s the robotic, logical, everything has to make sense person,’ and the other is, ‘I feel feelings all the time.’ So from there, it was just about nuance. I believe that’s the difference; she’s a robot that’s not a robot. She is definitely the less hysterical one. He’s more given to tantrums and is more ashamed of himself. These two are both—they’re very similar in a lot of ways. So we look at it like they’re like siblings under a foster dad that are kind of like learning about each other.”
Added Siciliano, “They also both gave us worlds that we could build out around each one of them. Don’t get us started on leprechaun lore. They both gave, in the Star Trek and X-Files sense, a different genre, so to speak, or a different circle for us to expand while also kind of maintaining that triangle around Curtis.”
If you watched the first episode of President Curtis, you no doubt picked up on the unusual theme music. It’s unexpectedly mellow, with definite ‘80s sitcom vibes—not at all like Rick and Morty’s sci-fi adventure tune.
“We knew kind of early on that we wanted to try something different with the theme song,” Siciliano explained. “Ryan Elder, who does the music on Rick and Morty, did this theme, and he did an incredible job with it. He gave us two options. He gave us one that was like, Marvel-y and had a little bit of West Wing in it too. And then he gave us this one, for which we had said, like, ‘We’re thinking about doing some sitcom ‘80s, ‘90s-style stuff.’”
Harmon elaborated, “Some of it is just old people being angry at Silicon Valley streaming TV, where you’re not even encouraged to have a title sequence anymore. So if you do have a title sequence, it’s fast and it’s full of energy. I’m just like, man, the Cheers theme is suicidally depressing. The Taxi theme is just like, you hear it and it sounds like someone is telling you to get away from your television; sadness and loneliness are happening; go to bed. You don’t even have to mention the MASH theme; literally, in its lyrics, it’s telling you to kill yourself.”
“But it’s the Hill Street Blues theme that really always [sticks in] my memory. It’s a workplace comedy, and the guy would say, ‘Let’s be careful out there,’ and then these maudlin, wonderful, minor piano chords would start. It’s about evoking that pure time where it’s like, ‘It’s time to go to work with the adults.’”
The series premiere features President Curtis’ one and only cameo from the stars of Rick and Morty. Harmon felt it was necessary to have them stop by, because it would “feel missing” if they didn’t.
“It was almost more there as an homage to the idea of spinoffs and what they really are, including Rick being, even for his taste, even more meta than usual, which is his right since he’s not even in his own show. It was really just sort of a—I don’t know, it was like making sure that there’s an orange slice in a Negroni. I think if it weren’t there, it would feel more like a Campari and gin with a little sweet vermouth in it.”
He joked, “Good metaphor; now it all makes sense,” but said he realized that if Rick and Morty didn’t show up, viewers would wonder where they were. “When [Curtis says], ‘I know a guy,’ and then you cut to Rick, and it’s like, okay. I’d knock it off my bingo card. It does something to soothe the brain. It’s like popping a plastic bubble.”
One of the ongoing themes of President Curtis is that American voters aren’t always supportive of him. He gets some criticisms lobbed at him along the way (one from the pilot is that the taxpayers are funding him to “play Batman”). Despite that, though, Harmon said he’s still widely well-liked.
“When we’re joining him in our spin-off, he is a popular president … I mean, it’s sort of like creating a fantasy world where it’s like, if only that were the criticism one would have of a sitting president, that he is being too cavalier and too much of a character and considering his job as leader to be too fun. His image problem starts and stops with people.”
Harmon continued, “The thing we changed about him going into the spinoff is that he’s not as he might have been in Rick and Morty, a numbers-driven guy, an approval-driven guy. He doesn’t think one thing and say another, because his goal is to be more liked than to actually do his job. So he actually is more like an eighth-grade boy becoming president. You don’t have to worry about him laundering money and trying to figure out how to [influence] the Supreme Court. If you tell him the rules, he’s going to follow them or try to bend them. But he’s going to fight vampires and try to keep America safe from evil robots and stuff.”
New episodes of President Curtis arrive Sundays on Adult Swim and the next day on HBO Max.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
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