Weirder, Better, Realer: Talking Season 2 of “Bless the Harts” With its Creator, Emily Spivey

 

FOX has built an incredible reputation over the pedigree of its animated programs that have gone on to define its Animation Domination programming block. Many series that have been born there have gone on to live for over a decade and in many cases it’s a guarantee that the show will become entrenched in pop culture. FOX has struggled to find a new winning animated series after the success of Bob’s Burgers and nothing seems to have been able to connect with audiences, but the renewal of Bless the Harts marks an encouraging change in that downward trend.

Bless the Harts taps into a simpler sensibility as it depicts the humble and realistic Hart family from Greenpoint, North Carolina. The series has been touted as a spiritual successor to King of the Hill, but this high praise feels justified as the animated program focuses on a family where the majority of the humor stems from how they’re such a well-defined example of this sub-section of America. At the same time, Bless the Harts is able to make these stories feel universal and the power of character-driven stories with strong scripts has helped the show earn its second season, which is set to premiere this month. Emily Spivey, the creator of Bless the Harts, kindly takes some time to discuss what to expect from the Harts in Season 2, why these characters have been able to resonate with people, and not being afraid to push the show into weirder and more ambitious territory this season.

 

Daniel Kurland: This season of Bless the Harts has double the amount of episodes than the first. Are you excited for people to see so much more of it and get a better feel for the show?

Emily Spivey: Oh my God, yes. This morning I got up and there are already Halloween commercials on TV and immediately I was excited over people getting to see our Halloween episode this year. We really expand the world so much and have gotten a better chance to know the characters more, even for ourselves. So I’m super excited for people to see what we have in the coming season.

You mentioned Halloween, which you also had some fun with back in Season 1. Why is Halloween a holiday that you’ve liked to return to with this show and could it become a yearly tradition for the series?

Well for one it’s a big night for that line-up of FOX cartoons, which is nice, but I think a lot of it also comes from me. I truly, truly love Halloween, almost more than Christmas and Thanksgiving. It’s just my favorite time of year. I love when the seasons are changing and just that snuggly, chill vibe. It’s also just really fun to do Halloween episodes in animation because you can do all sorts of amazing things that you wouldn’t be able to do in a live-action show. It’s just fun.

Something that I love so much about this show is that the Harts actually feel like a real family. Is that something that you try to keep in check and not get too far out there when writing scripts?

Yeah, we definitely want them to be funny, but also very relatable. We try to make sure that each episode has a lot of heart in it and because the show is so personal to me, I feel like I know these people. I want to make sure that I’m respectful of these kinds of people that I grew up with. I’m even quarantined in North Carolina right now. I want to infuse the family with as much love as possible because I care about them! I still think about Bobby Hill all the time. I swear, sometimes I’m just like, “I wonder what Bobby Hill is doing,” because they become a part of you. So we’re very conscious of making the family feel realistic.

King of the Hill is one of my favorite shows of all time, so it’s very satisfying to not only see the Mega-Lo-Mart in Bless the Harts, but that this feels very much like a spiritual successor in terms of its tone and stories. Why did that feel like an important guiding force here?

The one thing that I loved about King of the Hill and part of why I loved working on it so much is that it had such a humanity to it. Mike Judge was so careful to just have respect for those characters. Much like me here, he grew up with those people and knows them. I always just loved how funny it was, but also so humane. There was so much care and love for those characters. I’ve worked on some shows and at times it can almost feel like they have disdain for the characters and I just don’t get that. So that’s really what appealed to me about King of the Hill.

The fact that Jesus is a character in this show is definitely one of the more its more outrageous elements. Is he still a big part of Season 2?

There’s going to be more of him. He might actually get to come out into the world a little bit and there also might be another character that sees him. So yes, there will be more. We just love Kumail so much.

After only one season Bless the Harts has already been able to put together a really fun cast of supporting characters as you’ve fleshed out the community. Does that get to build more this season and do supporting characters get more of a focus?

I think for sure. We have a lot of characters that really popped for us, so we started to do more with them and we’re hoping that the audience feels the same way. There were just these side characters that we got obsessed with and so there will be a lot more of Greenpoint’s peripheral characters, too.

As a big writer nerd, I’ve noticed that you have a lot of writers doing voices, like yourself, Andy Bobrow, John Solomon, and Rich Blomquist. Can you talk a little on that?

Maybe just because I’m such a frustrated performer, I really like it when writers get a chance to perform a little bit. We also all sort of came from backgrounds like the Groundlings and SNL, so these are funny people. Nobody makes me laugh harder than Andy Bobrow and John Solomon, so if they’re doing funny voices and bits in the writers’ room and we can get away with them doing it in the series, then I want them to do it.

The show gets around Greenpoint pretty well, but are there any pockets of the area that you’d like to get to explore more in episodes?

Well we’re going to get out in the sticks a little this season because we find out that Wayne comes from a very, very country part of North Carolina that’s kind of just outside of Greenpoint. Also, my hometown of West Point is literally the furniture capital of the world, which I’d love to be able to dig into a little more, but it can be hard to articulate.

There have been certain moments where the show skews more towards absurdity, whether it’s a song and dance routine, or just something extremely unexpected. Do you like to be sparse with these moments, or does the show experiment a little more in this area in Season 2?

Yes, we do. I like to get into the more surreal aspect of things. I mean that character of Jesus is all about that. With animation you can also just do whatever you want, so I like when we can take advantage of that. So we’re experimenting with things like dream sequences, flashbacks, and all sorts of different stuff.

You also seem to have a lot of fun guest stars showing up this season, too.

It’s the most fun ever. In some ways it’s been a nice way to even catch up with people, too. That’s been a lot of fun and because it’s just so easy to step into the studio we’ve been able to get a lot of really fun people to come in and record. Ken Jeong’s character Doug is really popping and we’ll definitely be doing more with him. He’s from Greensboro. He and I grew up in the same town, so hearing him do his Greensboro accent was like heaven on Earth for me. Just ear orgasms. We were laughing so hard.

My dear, dear old friend Natasha Lyonne is coming in as a small claims court judge from New York. Chris Meloni is on as this hard-boiled detective from Greenpoint and God is he funny. I just watched that animatic and he’s so, so good. And then also Kristen Schaal, Rich’s [Blomquist] wife, is going to be in the Halloween episode as a creepy mallrat named Stacey. It was real fun getting to work with her.

Bless the Harts is the only animated show on FOX to get a second season since Bob’s Burgers. It’s definitely deserved and that’s such a vote of confidence. Is that exciting? Intimidating?

It’s all of it. I feel so grateful, but it is a lot of pressure. Never in my wildest dreams did I expect to be in this line-up on this night, so it’s a real honor. I just hope that people continue to get on board and watch because this season is so much fun. We all need some fun right now in 2020.

Finally, if you had to be quarantined with any character from the show, who do you think that it would be?

Brenda and Betty because they’re not going to judge me for how much I’m eating or drinking, or staying up late. It’d be a feast of hedonism.

 

Season 2 of Bless the Harts premieres on Sunday, September 27^th at 8:30pm and Season 1 is available on Hulu