Zach Woods got his start at the Upright Citizens Brigade (UCB) doing improv. Brandon Gardner followed a similar path, eventually shifting to playwriting and sketch. The two continued to share work and support one another as they moved from New York to Los Angeles. 

For their latest collaboration, In the Know, where they’re listed as co-creators with Mike Judge (Office Space, Silicon Valley), the story follows Lauren Caspian (Zach Woods), the third most popular host of an NPR-like interview series, who happens to be a stop motion puppet. 

As improv veterans with similar taste, the collaborative writing process somewhat follows the classic “yes, and” structure. “I think it’s easy for me to think where it can go positively before I’m critical,” says Gardner. “It’s not a partnership where I’m nervous to have an idea.”

The casual and polite interaction can go one of two ways. “I’m very trusting of his taste. Do you like this? If he says ‘yes,’ I’m 100 percent confident in the idea. If he says ‘I’m not sure,’ then I’m also confident in knowing there’s another way.”

The writers describe the UCB approach to improv as “playing everything to the top of your intelligence,” continues Gardner. “Why is the character doing that? It’s not to be funny. To them, it makes sense, so how do you treat the character respectfully?” (Paul Rust made a similar point in the interview for Love). 

Woods adds, “Even if I have an idea that doesn’t feel right, if we have divergent impulses, neither of us wants to win. We want to figure out where those impulses intersect. We take each other’s reservations and confidence very seriously.”

Calrl (Carl Tart) Photo by PEACOCK

The ‘Non-Structure’ Structure 

“For a while, when we started out, we tried to do index cards and structuring,” says Woods, “the way we had seen it in screenwriting books, but it was fairly miserable and deadening,” he jokes. “It might be an artifact of our improv background, but we like to write in a way that’s impulsive and desire-based.” They feel the writing is more of a discovery this way and not so “overworked.” 

As for the audience, they also think of their improv days. “It’s interesting when you’re improvising, to what degree do you want to be aware of the audience? In one way, it’s a theater where you get an immediate response. But I also think there’s something where you can’t give in to the audience too much. You have to trust what you find funny.”

“For the most part, whether we’re writing together or with the other writers in the Writers’ Room, if we all find this funny,” says Gardner, “I trust the audience to find it funny too. Or, at least there’s somebody out there who will find it as funny as we do.”

Brandon Gardner

Woods adds, “I’ve got a friend who does stand-up arena shows. He says if you’re performing to [thousands] of people, he will pick maybe seven people in the front rows and perform to them sort of like proxies for the arena, because it’s impossible to play to ten thousand people, but you can play to seven people as the delegates. We treat our collaborators as stand-ins for a larger audience. You don’t want to be codependent with your audience.”

Creating In The Know

Because of their relationship from Silicon Valley, Mike Judge reached out to Zach Woods with the basic idea for In The Know. “Would you ever want to do a stop-motion NPR show — and also I love Space Ghost?” They kicked the idea back and forth, then discussed Brandon Gardner coming in to flesh out the world. 

“In the very beginning, I think we thought it was going to be a much higher percentage of interviews. There would be a bit of world around it, but not very much. But as we fleshed it out, we became more interested in the [stop-motion] characters and Peacock was interested too.”

The original ratio was perhaps seventy percent interviews and thirty percent world, but the actual version is nearly the opposite. Logistically, the first option would have been tactically easier as the guests — people like Mike Tyson, Norah Jones, Ken Burns, and Hugh Laurie — are not animated. 

The guest questions come from research. “We try to be respectful to the guests. We try to do the normal NPR host research. We watch other interviews they’ve done, not just funny things, but smart or interesting questions. Then, Zach is armed with those questions like a typical NPR interview.”

As for the response, those are unscripted. “I would be in the recording booth with an iPad,” says Woods, “and Brandon would be Mission Control. He could write things on the iPad, like questions or jokes, which would be helpful if I ever got lost.” 

A great compliment from the guest might be that they appreciate how informed the questions were. “I’m only probably going to get to talk to Mike Tyson for an hour, once in my life,” says Woods. “I want to ask what I want to ask him. It’s not just an opportunity for jokes. We didn’t interview anyone that wasn’t fascinating.”

Interviewing in Character

Since Woods’ actual personality is much different than Lauren Caspian, he had to play the character while thinking on his feet — not unlike Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report or Martin Short as Jiminy Glick – but these were not performances he studied for the role. 

“I didn’t study like Colbert, or Jiminy Glick, or Triumph, or anything like that. It was more like studying Ezra Klein, Terry Gross or Malcolm Gladwell.” Then the editors had the difficult job of cutting down the interviews to find a balance of funny and interesting. 

Thanks to many years of work, Woods says he felt confident in the role. “This is a weird part of being almost forty. It used to be that if I got a callback for a Life Safer’s commercial, I would be so prepared and nervous and whatever. If you told the frantic, white-knuckle insomniac then that I would be able to go into interviews with people I admire and just sort of feel freedom and playfulness, I would be shocked.”

Zach Woods

Gardner adds, “Sometimes I worry that if I’m not nervous, maybe I’m not appreciating it enough or not taking it seriously enough.” In comedy, this loose feeling is crucial. “I’m definitely a better listener when I’m less nervous.” 

Flexibility = Confidence 

“I found there’s a direct correlation between confidence and flexibility. The people I know with the heaviest resumes, who could easily be autocratic, and say every comma they write is sacred, those are the ones who say, ‘This is a suggestion — take it or leave it.’”

“The smartest, most talented directors are the ones who invite the gifts of the people they are collaborating with.” In an effort to mimic this in their own work, as one example, they directed the puppeteers as actors rather than technical executioners. “We gave them emotional direction as opposed to whatever the animated version of line meetings may be.”

Zach shares a message from an early acting teacher, “Characters are also a much wider road than we think. You put someone on this incredibly narrow one lane road, but if you think of any one person, they’re a six-lane highway and they serve all over the place.”

“Your idea of the scene is the enemy of the scene. So if you’re an actor it’s a sad scene so you act sad, you’ve charted it out in your head and you’re not receptive to what’s actually coming at you — so there’s not the same degree of life on camera, which is all you want.”

“It’s important to act in a way that doesn’t just reiterate the writing. Sometimes, you could act in a way that underlines and highlights what’s there, but your job as an actor is to figure out what’s not there. On The Office, Gabe was loathsome, so it was my job to figure out why he felt so fragile or scared, even if he’s behaving unsavory. I had to make it lovable to me.”

This interview has been condensed. Listen to the full audio version here.