Q&A: Phil Lord, Chris Miller on 'Zorn,' 'Last Man,' new Han Solo
"I think we were asking ourselves, 'What would be the hardest possible show to make?' "
That's how Chris Miller jokingly approached Fox's Son of Zorn (Sundays, 8:30 p.m. ET/PT), a live-action/animated sitcom he co-created with Phil Lord. The mythical mashup is one of three comedies that The Lego Movie duo has on the network, joining Will Forte's The Last Man on Earth (Sundays, 9:30 p.m. ET/PT) and next year's Making History, starring Adam Pally as a time-traveling professor who tries to change the past and improve his present.
Lord and Miller are now in London, where they're in pre-production on a Star Wars spinoff about a young Han Solo (Hail Caesar!'s Alden Ehrenreich). While neither would divulge much about the galactic smuggler's film, they talked with USA TODAY about their current TV ventures:
How Chris Miller, Phil Lord pulled off Fox's 'Son of Zorn'
Q: What did you learn from making The Last Man on Earth that you may have applied to these new shows?
Lord: The main lesson is that the audience is hoping for us to take risks. The biggest surprise of testing on Last Man was that people's appetite for it being strange was much higher than anyone anticipated. We all kind of said, "OK, if (viewers) can just get through the first two episodes, the show will get more normal and everybody will be fine," but then it turned out the opposite was true.
That's what's driving us to make shows like Making History and Zorn. We often talk about how we want to fail. I don't want to fail by being conservative; I want to fail by doing something no one has ever done. It was conventional wisdom when Chris and I were first working in television that you couldn't challenge the audience very much, and we just found out in this era that we were totally wrong.
Q: You initially envisioned Last Man as a movie before it became a show. How difficult is it to sustain these high-concept series beyond their original premises?
Lord: Having to top yourself is a good problem to have. It's so satisfying to look at an early cut of something and ask people to be more ambitious, and try something that seemed unthinkable four episodes ago. Zorn goes to some pretty ridiculous places, but the real comedy is coming from these little observations about life that are not as outlandish as some of the bigger moves in the story. This is a guy who has magical relics and fights weird monsters, and is also dealing with very basic work and family things. Trying to balance the tone has been the real challenge and success of it.
Forte says he would be helpless 'Last Man'
Q: How far do you typically map out future story lines and seasons?
Lord: Each of these shows have great people guiding (them). With Last Man, a lot of it is from the mind of Will Forte and his unique sensibility. I'd say this season is my favorite, it's really surprising and found its groove. But I wish I could say there was a grand master plan and we knew what was going to happen for the next six seasons of Zorn. I think the writing staffs like to write themselves into a corner and have to figure a way out.
Q: So with Making History, will the first season be set during the Revolutionary War and then jump to another era for the second?
Miller: They've mapped out the whole season and there's more times that they travel to than just 1770s New England. I'm not sure how much we want to spoil this early, but the possibilities are endless. Our philosophy is to go slowly, try to pick as much low-hanging fruit of the ideas that are already there, and slowly develop into an even crazier show.
Q: You officially introduced Alden as the new Han Solo this summer. Was there something he said or did in particular that convinced you he was the one?
Miller: That guy pretty much went through an audition pentathlon; it was like an acting steeplechase. He went against a lot of very strong competitors and was very consistently the guy from minute one. He was the first person who auditioned out of thousands, and just out of the box, made you believe that someday he'd grow into the character we know.