Interview with "Krod" Creator Peter Knight: "I'll Never be Conan"

Subscribe via: RSS EMAIL

Categorized | Featured, Interviews, Latest, TV

Tags : BBC, Comedy Central, Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire, Matt Lucas, Peter Knight, Sean Maguire, TV

Interview with KROD Creator Peter Knight: “I’ll Never be Conan”

Posted on 06 April 2009 by Brent Hartinger, Editor

Peter Knight (right) and Brad Johnson

As anyone who’s ever worked in Hollywood knows, the process of a creating television show can be long and maddeningly frustrating — especially one as different as Comedy Central’s new fantasy-comedy, Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire (Thursday, 10 PM, 9 C).

How did this particular show come to be? The story is part perspiration, part inspiration, and part collaboration.

“The great thing about this series,” says British comedian Matt Lucas, who plays the show’s villain Dongalor, “is that the writers are on-set all the time, and they sort of encourage the actors to contribute.”

Recently we sat down with the Krod’s creator, Peter Knight, to the hear the story behind the story, right from the very beginning.

TheTorchOnline: First, I love the title of the show, the double umlauts, the redundancy of it! So tell me how the idea for the show came about.

Peter Knight: I had done a few different cycles of development, developing different types of sitcoms sort of in the conventional, multi-camera family. I think they were really good. I had had a lot of fun working with [20th Century Fox's] Brad Johnson who was in development. We worked very well together and we developed for a couple years in a row and we hadn’t gotten anything made, but we always really enjoyed the experience.

In our last go-round, we had a sort of a heartbreaking disappointment with a script that we thought was great that didn’t go. And you find yourself going, “Well, next year I’m going to really try and find out what they want.” And that is really like trying to nail water to a wall. It’s such a moving target. Whatever it seems like they might want exactly when the development season starts has shifted radically, so you have to have a little bit of wizardry or better luck than I was having.

TTO: So you’ve done all this work on an idea they no longer want? Is that it?

PK: It’s just that you’ll write something, and in a lot of cases you’re getting your notes on a day-to-day basis, or on a draft-to-draft basis, from, for instance, the head of comedy at the network. And the head of comedy is somebody who in a lot of cases, that’s not a job that lasts forever and you don’t know if they’re still in the good graces of the higher ups at the network, and you don’t know whether they know exactly what the people above them want.

So in addition to it’s a moving target, you’re playing a game of telephone to get the coordinates of where your target is. I did find that hard, and I didn’t have a lot of luck hitting the target.

In the post-mortem after of what I thought was a really good script that Brad and I had worked really hard on, I kind of said, “All right, I’m not going to try and figure out what they want.” And I really just kind of asked myself, “What did I want to see?” And I really kind of wanted to find an idea that meant something to me, and I had, a month before, in a really rare case of how the process happens for me, I picked up a Dictaphone and I said, “Middle Earth A-Team with a band of incompetents,” and then put the Dictaphone down and picked it up ten minutes later and said, ”And the guy has a girlfriend, a pig and he’s tortured by that relationship because she’s kind of promiscuous and sort of uses sex as a weapon.”

And I set the Dictaphone aside for a while, but I kept coming back to that idea, and I started to pitch it to some friends of mine over lunch one day, the way writers will do. And they said, “You shouldn’t write that. It’s so out there. You need to write it.”

And I said, “Fair enough. That’s a great idea.” And I just kind of locked myself away for five or six weeks and didn’t tell anybody.

TTO: So at this point did you envision it for a cable network or a broadcast network ?

PK: That’s a good question. I don’t know exactly what I thought. I mean, I will say this, I’m now convinced Comedy Central is really the only place where it makes sense, but I wasn’t convinced of that when we were pitching it to the broadcast networks because I was convinced and I remain convinced that as odd as it is on it’s face, it really plays on main street. I’m no interested in viewing something that’s so esoteric that only my six, most well educated friends can enjoy it. I wanted it to be mainstream.

You know, my fondest hope is that it could do what The Simpsons did so effectively. Which is to say there are jokes in there that your more sophisticated viewer is going to appreciate, but then there are also, you know, Homer does something stupid and anybody can enjoy that. And I’ve watched episodes of The Simpsons in really mixed rooms in that regard and you get little snickers in one corner and little snickers in another corner and everybody’s laughing at something. They’re always laughing, but it’s often at something different. I hope to do a little of that.

TTO: I think all the arguments you could make against this show succeeding, you could literally make against The Simpsons or any of the breakout shows of the past. And I don’t know why the message is never do something different instead of let’s repeat whatever the last different thing was.

PK: Well, there is that, but I’m going to save that kind of talk until I get to take a victory lap if we doing well, but until we’re proven, I’ll just say that is my fondest hope.

TTO: This isn’t the first show you’ve done, is it?

PK: No, I did a show called Big Wolf on Campus that my friend Chris Briggs and I had procreated. It ran on Fox Family Channel and on ABC Family Channel. We did 65 episodes. It was sort of a forgotten show that sort of – it had a small, but loyal fan base. Every now and then I’ll go to this website, BigWolfonCampus.org, the show’s been off since 2003, I think. And they’re still kind of chatting about which is the best episode. And I’ll go into the chat room, whenever I’m feeling blue and lonely.

I think Krod could be a smashing success and certainly my fingers are crossed for that. But if it isn’t, I do hope that we have that small, potent handful of fans that just love it do death.

TTO: So the fantasy genre, where did that come from in your life? Have you been interested in this all your life? Were you a D&D player?

PK: Well, let’s not let that get around, but yeah, I did play a little D&D at summer camp and got all the books and got very into it for a very short period of time and realized that maybe it wasn’t for me, or I didn’t find the right dungeon master or something like that, but I had some figurines and a pouch of dice and everything else, but I never quite felt like I was playing it right.

I’ll tell you one of the things that really connected for me. One of my best friends growing up in third grade had this giant, four-inch thick fantasy book, which I don’t even know what it was, whether it was one of the classics, whether it was A Song of Ice and Fire — I just knew that this was a gigantic book. I’m looking at my fingers, probably a two-and-a-half, three-inch thick spine.

But I was a terrible reader, and it was around that time in the barbershop in my town where I stumbled onto a stack of Conan the Barbarian comic books from the Marvel run of the 70s and 80s and that really hooked me in because it was everything that I was looking for that was on the cover of that two-and-a-half inch thick novel, but it was meant for me and I could read it and I could understand wench and taverns and flagons of mead and all of that.

They really appealed to me that this sort of muscle-bound guy wasn’t really a superhero, but he just sort of got his way. And then as I got older, I realized how unlike Conan I am and was just sort of destined to always be not like Conan, but I thought what if you took that and you kind of put the modern morays and sort of a little bit of my own outlook on it and sort of the troubles with life, the things that prevent you from getting what you’re hoping for and the things that stand in your way of your satisfaction and kind of graft that onto the sword-carrying warrior.

TTO: Do you see Krod sort of as a satire of some of the more hackneyed fantasy conventions, or is it you’re just trying to be funny? Or is it a bit of both?

PK: I would say this; I’m not trying to skewer anything. That was never the intention. We didn’t say, “Let’s really let ‘em have it over at Aragon,” or wherever the thing is. But the word “spoof” is an easy one to kind of hang on Krod and I’m not resistant to it if it has to come down to one word, I guess that’s fine. It’s just that “spoof,” its definition has been changed to encompass Scary Movie, Date Movie, Epic Movie, where character has been utterly abandoned. You’re dared to care about the characters as you go for the gag. And when you’re living gag to gag, sometimes you find a great gag, and that’s great, and I’m sure a lot of those movies, which, by the way, tend to be very successful, they find an audience and people like the gag, but when the gag is over, you don’t care about the character. [But] that’s the antithesis of the type of writing that I strive for. I really like memorable characters.

TTO: Well, I think that even when you look at something like Monty Python, everybody remembers the sort of far out, over-the-top stuff, but in the really successful movies they had a straight man, usually Graham Chapman, as a real actor who took the character seriously. A lot of people are making the comparison, saying this is really Python-esque. Did that hang heavy over your head, that people are going to compare this to Monty Python?

PK: It’s funny you ask that, because I have I think probably a very odd answer to that question. Monty Python and the Holy Grail, it just might in the grand scheme of, when all the statistical analysis is done on my life, I may have seen, from start to finish, Holy Grail more than any other movie ever. All of it between sixth grade and ninth grade. I would kind of come home from school on a Friday and, on any given weekend, three or four times, you know? I just watched it over and over and over. And then after about ninth grade, I just kind of went I’m just sort of done with that. It’s not that I thought it was any less brilliant, but I just sort of, that was around the time when people were quoting it and you couldn’t get away from people who were quoting it.

But in conceiving of Krod and the actual sort of going forward writing of it, it was nowhere in my head. It didn’t even register to me that people would say that, which we hear often. So I definitely love the Pythons. Foundationally, on the DNA level, I’m sure it’s in there, but it was nowhere in the kind of foreground, whereas for instance, Get Smart was sort of in there where it served in some ways – it did to an extent on my old show Big Wolf, where when you go to commercial, Max was in trouble.

I think on Monty Python there really wasn’t — the stakes didn’t quite feel as important as the delicious, absurd comedy nuggets.

TTO: Did you know that Sean was in a Monty Python movie?

PK: Sean Maguire was in a Monty Python movie?

TTO: Sean was in The Meaning of Life when he was seven years old. He sings in the “Every Sperm is Sacred” scene. I thought that was a nice connection.

PK: Oh, my god. And I thought I knew all there was to know about Sean. Yeah, that’s great. There was talk about at one point when we were sort of fishing around for who was going to be our narrator, a couple of times in our sort of internal discussion we thought wouldn’t it be great to have a Python? Just because I certainly bow to the Pythons in every way.

TTO: So this is a co-production with the BBC? Is that because of Matt Lucas? Are the episodes different?

PK: I’ll tell you how that happened. In the early goings, comedy Central came on board and they said, “We like this. We would probably need to find a way to make this . . .” – because there was a scope to these episodes that Brad and I had written and they were quite large, and Comedy Central knew they would need a partner to share the financial burden and so we partnered with a company called Hat Trick, based in London, and they took it to the BBC and so the BBC pays a hefty license fee along with Comedy Central. And so because those two were able to pony up, each of them, it’s an original run for them. It’s not what you would call an acquisition, acquiring an American show. It’s a show that they have developed and likewise, Comedy Central is not acquiring it from somewhere else. And the beauty of it, because it’s set in this world, [we can do it]. I mean, if this were a domestic sitcom, for instance, or even an American workplace comedy, you could never really do this. But once you’re in the fantasy genre — fantasy as a genre tends to take on a kind of quasi-medieval feel.

The British episodes are longer. Their running time is about 28 minutes and 30 seconds, somewhere in there, give or take a minute, whereas the Comedy Central airing, with the exception of the premier, which will be an hour long, they will be 21 minutes and 30 seconds including titles and credits.

TTO: So you had to write longer scripts and shoot longer episodes and then edit it down for the two different versions.

PK: Yeah, it’s a funny thing because I thought that well, you know, the British episodes will always be better to me. But that’s not the case, because , there are certain episodes in the British run where I kind of go, you know, as much as it hurts to make the cut at the time, I think we have a leaner, better episode in the Comedy Central one. But likewise, there are episodes where I think that the sort of definitive episode in my mind would be the BBC one. And it’s really about, and funnily enough, sometimes it’s in between. Sometimes I think well, that one in the British version is a little too long, and that one in the States is - but if we had just kept this bit of it, it would have been perfect. I actually think, miraculously, that the British ones don’t suffer from padding and the American ones don’t suffer from extreme cutting.

TTO: So I have to ask about the gay guy and about Aneka because I watched the pilot with a group of gay and lesbian friends, and we were all sort of disappointed in the stereotypes of gays and women.

PK: Here’s my answer to that. The number one objective that I have – judge me on this – is Bruce funny? And if he’s not, then we’ve got a problem.

But secondarily, in the characterization of Bruce, a couple of things were important to us. I actually do have some very good gay friends, including a guywho introduced my wife and I. But one of the things that I remember that he said one time when we were talking, he kind of recounted the pain of seeing, when you would see gay characters, in the few glimpses that you would see them, always tortured, always sort of morose or poor, or plagued as if by disease and how that made him feel as like a 15-year-old guy watching that, how it kind of made him feel worse about himself.

That was in the back of my mind and at the front of my mind and something that Brad and I – Brad is no homophobe either – we were thinking about like, well, if you’re watching this guy Bruce and you’re a closeted 15-year-old guy, are you going to love him or is he going to make you feel bad? And I hope that the idea of this out and proud character at a time when – I’ll never write a great, incredibly compelling, steamy, hot, gay romance show. Like that’s never going to be where I’ll succeed. But hopefully I can get you thinking about a gay character as just one of the people that you really want to be around who’s just funny and proud and off-the-cuff and liberated.

Read our review of Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire, and also our interview with its star, Sean Maguire, where he talks about appearing in a Monty Python movie at age 7.