When quizzed on his elevator pitch for quirky AMC+ series Ultra City Smiths, creator Steve Conrad doesn’t really have an answer, and after watching five minutes of the bizarre and enthralling stop-motion effort that follows the investigation into the mysterious disappearance of a famous magnate, it’s easy to see why.
“I’ve been asked that question about our other television show, Patriot, which is also has a complex tone,” he tells.
“There is no such thing unless you’re in the Sears Tower or the Empire State Building; it takes forever, but essentially the pitch that I think got me over at AMC was, I said, ‘I wanted to create adult entertainment for former children.’
“And they understood that to mean I was going to take the textures and some of the voicings and aspects of the stop-motion and animation of our youth, like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Frosty the Snowman, and make an R-rated version of life on earth with that art form.”
The show has such a unique aesthetic, utilising repurposed baby dolls alongside its stop-motion format.
“The aesthetic was created by one of the co-creators of the show, Jeff Dieter, and our mutual friend, Tom Glenn, who were longtime Chicago artists,” Conrad explains, “and Jeff was just collecting baby dolls and then costuming them into thousands of different iterations of adult looks, like high school principal, cheerleader, radio DJ, and the list goes on and on and on.
“And somehow he was able to take this frame of a baby doll and superficially create the adult that this baby would become. And when I saw them for the first time, I thought, ‘Man, you see the baby in there.’ And when you have it out with any of your loved ones in adult life, it’s not long before they start to act like babies; they get loud and they throw temper tantrums and quit and run away. And I thought, ‘Well, maybe we could use this look to say a lot about the way adults behave.”
As for the inspiration for the show’s story, Conrad has always “always loved a closed-door mystery”.
“There’s a murder somewhere that has a finite number of suspects,” he says. “It’s a Murder on the Orient Express or Knives Out – the doors are closed. So, the 12 people in your field of suspects, it has to be one of them.
“That depends on really nifty writing to pull off. So I’ve been looking around for one of those, but I always thought we’ve seen a million of those. Like, what’s a way to sort of make this a little more invitational to someone who’s not coming to see that exactly, but who might be up with some other kind of fun. So, we put that together with this aesthetic and it seemed to really click.”
And click it did with an A-list cast signing on to voice various characters in the show, including Kristen Bell, John C. Reilly, Alia Shawkat, Jimmi Simpson and stacks more.
“These are generally people that I’ve worked with before… I think, ultimately, when you see someone who comes back or actors who work with directors more than once, you’ve established some sort of recognition about how to treat each other – a real partnership.
“And I think we provide that on our series and these actors and fellow artists become more than just cast members to us – we’ve become this collective that keeps things interesting, in my opinion… we spend a lot of time trying to stay friends, so there’s a lot of society on our shows.
“This one was weird because it was all virtual and we weren’t able to hang out. But on the other shows, we put just as much into what we’re going to do on the weekend together as what we’re going to do during the week. And it’s a pretty tight group in that respect. So, I think they came to Ultra City because we we’re happy just to see what each other is up to next. Like if Jimmi Simpson calls me and asks me to rewrite something or direct it, I just say ‘yes’. And I think he does that for me… that makes it really easy.”
Overall, Conrad hopes that viewers “appreciate how hard it is to make something look simple”.
“And then they dig that and they like the extent to which we went to make somebody laugh,” he adds. “Like one of my favourite comics is Robin Williams. And if you watch his performances, there’s so much ramp up and energy and then there’s the punchline. And all of it meant something to the smallness of the joke, and that’s what I hope audiences take away from [Ultra City Smiths], that a bunch of grownups went to a really great extent to make little jokes.”
Ultra City Smiths is exclusively on AMC+, the new streaming bundle available via Amazon Prime Video Channels and Apple TV Channels.
