In a world where Two And A Half Men rules, it doesn't seem like a brilliantly satirical show like Reno 911! should have lasted this long. But the improvised fake-reality show, which follows the bumbling officers of the fictional Reno Sheriff's Department, debuted on Comedy Central in 2003, and it's still going strong, with three seasons now on DVD and the big-screen spin-off Reno 911!: Miami debuting in theaters this week.
Creators Ben Garant, Kerri Kenny, and Tom Lennon all cut their teeth on MTV's mid-'90s sketch-comedy show The State, and on Viva Variety, The State's stranger, short-lived spin-off. Reno 911!'s ensemble has a real improvisational chemistry, and the characters are surprisingly sympathetic, considering their often-disturbing antics. Like Borat's Sacha Baron Cohen, Lennon and Garant have done all press for the film in character, as Lt. Jim Dangle and Deputy Travis Junior, respectively. But for the first time, they broke character to talk to The A.V. Club about the film, Reno's surprise success, punching up movie scripts, and Lindsay Lohan's breasts. Their alter egos pitched in to discuss law enforcement in Reno here.
The A.V. Club: Why do you think Reno has caught on where your previous shows didn't?
Tom Lennon: There's a widely misperceived notion that The State was canceled, which is not true. Actually, MTV wanted to renew it, what I heard, for a minimum of 65 more episodes. We were very, very badly advised at the time. [Laughs.] We never really heard about that offer until much later. We had been advised to try to do these specials for CBS, which seemed like a big opportunity. But had it been up to MTV—to exonerate them somewhat in history, they actually did want to do many more State episodes, and in hindsight, it probably would have been a good thing to do. We were just hitting a stride. But it's fun to be The Police of sketch comedy, who couldn't keep it together. [Laughs.]
Ben Garant: When we were doing Viva Variety, we knew, "Boy, this really cracks us up, but this is not for everybody. This is a little weird." [Laughs.] In sketch comedy, people had characters that they loved and characters that they didn't love, but the characters never came back. But for Reno, I feel like we've stumbled on characters we really like. It's still basically a sketch show, but you have these main guys—you can pick a favorite one and grab onto and watch, so I think that's a big part of it. Sketch shows change gears so drastically every two minutes. I think sketch shows are for sketch fans; they're not really for everybody. I think Reno combines what we do, which is sketch, but makes it into a situation comedy so people can tune into their favorite guys every week.
AVC: On a related note, what have you learned from your friends' shows, like Stella and Dog Bites Man, that didn't catch on?
BG: Honestly, if Stella had been on longer, it probably would have found an audience. We found an audience gradually. Stella should have been cheaper; Stella was twice the budget of our show—and honestly, it's that simple. If they had shot it at a production model more like their shorts that they did on the Internet, it would still be on.
TL: You know, it's really, really hard to keep a show on the air, and honestly, I think the formula we've figured out for Reno—"have characters that people want to keep seeing what's happening to them"—is totally by accident. Honestly, Reno was not ever supposed to have that. It was supposed to be just a sketch show in the Cops format, where we played both the cops and all the perps, exactly like a Python film. But we accidentally added this sort of soap-opera aspect to it, really not by choice. It just sort of happened. [Laughs.] People have always been telling us, "You've gotta have characters people wanna see, that people are going to want to hear their stories." And that worked. We play eight stereotypes, but very, very sincerely.
BG: If we keep it under budget, [Comedy Central doesn't] give us notes. We didn't get a single note on the comedy. As long as we stay under budget, we're totally under their radar, and we can do anything we want.
AVC: So Comedy Central has never put the kibosh on the racier material?
BG: No, the first season before we had aired, we had to iron out what we thought the sensibility was, and what they thought the sensibility was. We had a lot of gay stuff and a lot of very dark stuff, which at first they were a little reluctant to do. Now they can see that our characters are basically likeable guys, even though they're doing stuff that's really off what most people would think of sitcom-y characters. It took some convincing, but now they let us do what we want.
AVC: You don't work from a script on the show. Was the film the same way?
BG: No, we have outlines. We know basically the beginning of the sketch and the end. We know we're going to walk up to a whale because we think it's a topless beach, and then when we get there, it's not topless chicks that need help, it's a whale. We're gonna try and push the whale around, and then at the end, we're gonna blow it up. But we don't write dialogue, and we don't rehearse it. We get an outline, and that's it. The outline is really for production purposes, so that we know the whale's going to take a long time to build, we've got to trigger it to blow, we need the hottest topless chick we can find, she needs to speak a foreign language so it gets us to the beach not knowing there's a whale there. But we don't rehearse. We just hire people we know are going to be funny.
AVC: When you watch the first season now, do you notice changes in your improvisation skills?
TL: Oh my God. When we started with the first season and the pilot, our improv skills were zero; we'd never done it, ever. Everything we'd done, we'd spent a lot of time on the scripts, rewriting. We never really riffed on them ever. So it was pretty much on-the-job training out of the gate, although our format of the improvisation is directly against the traditional "yes and" format. We just tell people "Stop," which means, "Keep doing what you're doing." Luckily we're doing a very easy kind of improv. [Laughs.]
AVC: Did you approach the film as a feature-length version of the show?
BG: Well, we knew we had to do a couple of things. We knew we needed to have a bigger plot. We knew we couldn't actually solve the mystery at the end, because that's not really what we do. But we knew we had to have some kind of big, overarching, unfolding plot that would keep people watching for an hour and a half. As a fan of sketch movies like [Monty Python And The] Holy Grail—there's a point 50 minutes into Holy Grail where you start to get a little bored, even if you really like it. So we knew that, and we knew we had to show the characters doing things that we've never done before on the show.
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