If you’re from a big family with a lot of siblings, then you know all about the trials and tribulations of finding your own voice in this world. Have you ever been forced to wait by yourself because somebody forgot to pick you up from practice? For some people, you’re just happy when anybody finally responds to you in the family group chat. But for others, you’re not just siblings, but you’re also best friends who talk all day everyday. For sisters Wendy Molyneux and Lizzie Molyneux-Logelin, they’re more than just a pair of siblings, they’re collaborators on two of the funniest animated shows on TV.
Not only do Wendy Molyneux and Lizzie Molyneux-Logelin work together as writers on the long-running hit Bob’s Burgers, but they also teamed up to create The Great North, which is now in its fifth season on Fox. The show follows Beef Tobin, a single dad living in the fictional town of Lone Moose, Alaska with his four children Wolf, Ham, Judy, and Moon. Together, the Tobin family attempt to get by and be there for each other as they get into crazy and unpredictable adventures.
Bubbleblabber sat down with the sisters to discuss the benefits of working together, the thrill of finding a voice for their show, and why Alaska was the perfect setting for their brand of humor.
Matthew Swigonski: How well do you two work together on The Great North? Is there one sibling that argues the most?
Wendy Molyneux: [laughs] I like it. We’re getting right into it. Well, listen. I don’t think we argue that much because, all in all, there were five kids in our family. I’m the second oldest, and Lizzie was the youngest. There’s a two sibling buffer in between us, so we didn’t have anything to really fight about. We would scrap with our siblings that were closer to us in age, so I think that’s why we can work together because we didn’t have a fighting base. We were like buddies, you know?
Lizzie Molyneux-Logelin: Yeah, I think when so many people find out that we work with a sibling, the number one question is like, ‘How do you do it? I can never work with my siblings?’ But again, there’s a lot of siblings that are so close together. And I think over time, a lot of people become friends, you know? Once you get out of those younger years. But working with someone is difficult, no matter who it is. I think for us, it just clicked. And so far it’s been a pretty smooth process. Sorry to not be able to give you a more dramatic and salacious answer.
Wendy Molyneux: I used to babysit Lizzie, so I still make our parents pay me four dollars an hour in 1990s rates for any time I spend with her. I still do expect to be paid.
Matthew Swigonski: I have a few siblings. I would never even bother to try and work with any of them. We’re close, but to work with each other? I mean, kudos to you two. [Just kidding, siblings. I love you.] But can you possibly explain your creative process? How do you bounce ideas off each other?
Wendy Molyneux: We don’t try to always be in the same room, which I think has been good. When you’re working with a partner, you might feel like, ‘Oh, man, am I getting my words in? Am I having a feeling of agency?’ We write for The Great North and Bob’s Burgers. If we’re writing a script, Lizzie will write Act One, she’s our Act One specialist. So she writes Act One.
Then she passes it to me. I rewrite Act One and write Act Two. Then it goes back to her, she rewrites One and Two and writes Three, and so on and so forth. So we’re always kind of touching each other’s work up, but also getting to write something that we call “fresh powder.” Like where you get to just write it by yourself for that time when you have it. And then we’ll go in the room together, put it up on a screen and go through all of it together. I think that way, it’s a nice balance of collaboration and independent work that helps keep it feeling good for us. So, you’re not always feeling like, ‘Oh, man, I didn’t get my way today at all,’ or ‘I have to do it all.’ It’s kind of somewhere in between.
Lizzie Molyneux-Logelin: I think it’s always helpful for us to be in the same room when we’re trying to iron out the details. That’s the part where I feel like it’s almost the most collaborative piece for us. When you’re breaking down the story or when you’re figuring out the Acts. We do tend to figure out the roadblocks along the way. I think that’s when we’re truly most collaborative, and then when we get into the writing, it’s more of what Wendy was saying. Where we do pieces on our own and then we do end up coming back together toward the end. It’s a nice balance. I think for everyone who gets into writing, there’s something nice about having that time where you’re like, ‘I’m just alone writing for a day.’
Matthew Swigonski: Is there a focus of trying to create a distance between Bob’s Burgers and Family Guy with The Great North? Or are you more focused on creating your own show in your own space?
Wendy Molyneux: When we started The Great North, there was no gap between us working on Bob’s Burgers and us working on our show. In fact, we still write for Bob’s Burgers right now. So, we work on both. I think at first, it was hard to almost unlearn having people on The Great North sort of accidentally talk like characters on Bob’s Burgers.
Like, ‘Oh, this would have been a Gene kind of joke.’ Because we’ve been so immersed in it for a decade. I think as The Great North has gone on, it’s differentiated itself, more just by nature of having the writers up here. A little more separation of church and state. I think the first and second year would be like, ‘Oh, Bob’s did that, Bob’s did this. But Bob’s has so many episodes now. That’s like saying, ‘The Simpsons did it.’ There’s so many sort of baked-in differences now that we don’t feel like we have to work to differentiate it. It sort of began to differentiate itself on its own.
Lizzie Molyneux-Logelin: I think what Wendy said totally covered it. I think the first season on any show you do not want to be like another show, you’re sort of not really sure what your show is yet. It takes time for those things to sort of fully click into place.
Wendy Molyneux: I think as opposed to Family Guy or Bob’s Burgers, I think our show has these sort of unapologetically rom-com story lines because we have Beef, who’s a single dad and the internet often calls him a hunk and says they’re very thirsty for him. And I think it’s something that we love. And also, we love more of the hard comedy, you know? Wild stuff that we get to do in animation. But we are also huge fans of what people might dismiss as more like female entertainment such as rom-coms.
We love baking that in because some animation shows might feel more off-putting to women. If the female characters are just there to be made fun of or they’re less well-rounded. I think we always try to make sure that women or non-binary people in our show have the kind of well-roundedness that makes them feel real. Their comedic areas can come from things that we’re not mocking them for. They’re just funny because of who they are, and then leaning a little bit more into those rom-com elements, especially for Beef because he is a hunk. Let’s face it. He’s not real but he’s a hunk. You don’t have to be real to be a hunk, and that’s the lesson we want people to take away from all this.
Matthew Swigonski: So why Alaska?
Lizzie Molyneux-Logelin: When we were first thinking about The Great North, we obviously were coming off of Bob’s. And it has this specific sort of seaside East Coasty type feel community, and we know we wanted to do something different than that. We knew we wanted to do that father-daughter relationship between the characters that eventually became Judy and Beef. It felt like a father who’s a little bit more grounded and the daughter who once had sort of big dreams and big aspirations. It is only natural that she’d be in a smaller town. And then I think I had recently gone to Alaska to visit. It had that sort of small town feel, but also, it’s such a different place than anywhere I’d been in in the US. It’s just so vast.
There’s so, so many, beautiful landscapes. Like, you sort of get up and walk out of the airport, and it’s these amazing mountains covered in snow. And there’s moose everywhere. It was a very beautiful place and in so many ways, that’s great to do with animation because you can create the world and you don’t have to necessarily fly up there and shoot it. Once we landed on Alaska, we kind of felt like it was a fit. It then helped us develop. You know what kind of person and what kind of character Beef was.
Matthew Swigonski: The Great North has gone from being a newcomer to being one of the veterans of Fox’s Animation Domination. How does that feel to be so established now?
Wendy Molyneux: It feels great to be in the fifth season of The Great North. We made Seasons One through Three almost entirely in isolation during COVID. So in some ways, I’m always like, ‘Oh, we’re on Season Five, but it feels like we’re on Season Three because we haven’t gotten to be together that much.’ And there’s so much to be said for this line of work in being together and kind of collaborating. It’s weird to be in the fifth year.
It feels like we’re earlier than that. I think there’s a strong feeling amongst all the artists, all the directors, all the writers that this is the year where we feel like, ‘Oh wow, we really get it now, and we could make this forever.’ And that it got better by leaps and bounds for Season Five. We’re just hoping that even though we’re a little bit seasoned now, that in some ways it feels like something that we could keep going on forever with the sort of the way the stories and the visuals were executed this year. In isolation, we were still finding it a little bit, and I think we found it.
Matthew Swigonski: So, what can fans expect for season 5? Is there anything you can kind of tease without giving anything away?
Wendy Molyneux: Oh yes, let me pull up my little list so I can tease things. [ed. note She literally pulled out a list by the way.] Well, we already know that they got a new boat, so that’s old news. Now that was the first episode. Wolf goes on a reality show. Ham finds himself in a romantic pickle. I’m saying these in the most corny promo type ways…
Oh, there’s a creature feature horror episode for those horror fans out there! Now, I’m not going to tease that one because that’s just giving it away. We’ve got a rom-com involving Alanis Morissette. We’ve got a Noir mystery set at the school. Octogenarian Aunt Dirt gets into Dungeons and Dragons. Judy gets her first starring role and then Beef gets himself caught up in a Coen Brothers type adventure where he may or may not kiss two women at the same time. For all those triple kiss fans out there. We’re finally serving you something, you absolute freaks. That’s what we’re offering this year. Please write that down. We’re offering something for the freaks. I want to make it clear we’re freaks ourselves. I mean, we came up with it, so we’re not judging. We’re serving.
You can catch The Great North every Sunday on Fox at 9 PM.