When you look at Michael Cusack’s work, “order” is not the first word that comes to mind. Both “YOLO,” which premiered its third season on Sunday, and “Smiling Friends” exist in worlds where anything can and does happen. Night clubs open in the beds of oversized interstellar trucks, and outdated video game mascots can become depressed clients. But when it comes to his aggressively random and vulgar worlds, Cusack has a surprisingly strict understanding of what is and is not allowed.
“You do this for as many years as I’ve been making ‘YOLO,’ and they become almost like daughters, in a way. You become very protective over them,” Cusack told TheWrap about Sarah (Sarah Bishop) and Rachel (Todor Manojlovic), the stars of “YOLO: Rainbow Trinity.”
“YOLO” has always been a show about two hard-drinking young women jumping from weird to weirder party. But even that conceit comes with rules. For example, an early draft of one episode featured the sweet and soft-spoken Sarah showing “a bit of ass crack.”
“No fault to any of the animation team, they were just throwing it out there for fun. But I was like, ‘Oh no, you would never see ass crack from Sarah. No, no way,’” Cusack said, laughing at himself. “You get these these subconscious rules with them.”
The more TheWrap spoke to Cusack, the more these unspoken dos and don’ts came to light. “YOLO,” by virtue of following its two Australian protagonists so closely, is more infused with “Aussie tropes or weirdness” than “Smiling Friends.” Though “YOLO” plays with its animation style in Season 3, showcasing scenes inspired by anime and rubber hose animation, any major mixed media departures will always be reserved for Cusack’s other Adult Swim show, “Smiling Friends.”
“Me and Zach [Hadel] love to challenge ourselves for new mediums of animation,” Cusack said, referencing his co-creator and noting that he would be interested in experimenting with claymation and stop-motion. “In ‘YOLO,’ I dip into it sometimes, but I never want to take that spirit away from ‘Smiling Friends’ because that’s where it’s really been established.”
It’s this dedication to always pairing the bizarre with the grounded that consistently makes Cusack’s work feel so distinct. One of “Smiling Friends’” strongest and funniest episodes completely ignores the conceit that anything can happen in animation to instead zoom in on a disarmingly accurate argument over a poorly planned vacation. “YOLO” may feature Rachel somehow raising a family with a husband she has made of bones and trash, but it also honestly shows how toxic Sarah and Rachel’s codependent friendship is.
“If it gets too weird, you can find audiences getting a little lost,” Cusack said. “It is nice to be able to have a grounded, character-driven drama … Otherwise, it’s just strangeness for the sake of it, and you cannot really relate to anything.”
Though it has been five years and three subtitles since “YOLO” first premiered, the process for writing it has largely remained the same. Cusack, along with writers Nina Oyama, Greta Lee Jackson and Michelle Brasier, brainstorms different ideas at the start of a season. “It’s good because they are Aussie girls and they can throw out certain scenarios that obviously I would not experience or know about,” Cusack said. After that stage, he picks out his favorite bits and starts to turn those ideas into scripts along with his assistant, Amber Gibson.
But though the process for making this series has remained largely the same, Cusack has had to learn how to delegate better and depend more on his department heads and directors. “You can really build a community around you of artists that care about this stuff. Sometimes I feel like more I’m curating it,” Cusack said, noting that he never wants to fall into the habit of insisting he knows what is best. “I’m very open to ideas on how to execute these things. It’s growing into a big, fun cartoon community.”
At the moment, Cusack is doubtful anything will happen with “Koala Man,” the Hulu original he made alongside Justin Roiland before the allegations were made about the “Rick and Morty” co-creator. But he and Hadel are currently hard at work on more episodes of “Smiling Friends.”
“We are really having a very fun time writing Season 3. It’s going well,” Cusack said.
New episodes of “YOLO: Rainbow Trinity” premiere Sundays on Adult Swim at midnight ET/PT. The series is also available to stream on Max.
