The transition from sketch comedy—let alone the web-based variety—to feature films isn’t always pretty, but with the new Mystery Team, New York’s Derrick Comedy seems likely to succeed where others have failed. The NYU troupe’s story about a group of naïve 18-year-old former “kid detectives” suddenly caught up in a double homicide has two all-too-rare commodities for sketch-based films: characters worth caring about and a story that’s more than just a loose assemblage of vignettes. After warm receptions at both Sundance and Comic-Con, Derrick Comedy readies Mystery Team for a national run this October with a theatrical première at the Alamo Drafthouse tonight (a second Friday show has just been added), accompanied by a live appearance and two new sketches filmed expressly for Austin. Unfortunately, production on these meant that The A.V. Club couldn’t speak with the entire group as scheduled, but DC Pierson—who plays “Duncan, the boy genius”—gamely filled in, even pretending to be his fellow troupe members when it came time for individual questions.
The A.V. Club: Why did you decide to take a risk on all new characters instead of just playing it safe and doing Bro Rape: The Movie?
DC Pierson: When you’re a sketch group going into film, the biggest criticism you get is, “Oh, you’re just gonna stretch a sketch over 90 minutes?” We didn’t want to fall victim to that. We recognize that a sketch is very different from a feature film. You need a story, characters you care about—and a sketch doesn’t have those things, by design. Mystery Team had characters that we immediately gave a shit about, and we figured that if we executed it right, other people would too.
AVC: Did the rocky transition of other sketch teams to film—like Whitest Kids U Know’s Miss March—weigh on you at all?
DCP: Whitest Kids are friends of ours, and when we were starting to make this, Miss March hadn’t really come out. We all thought there was a lot to like about it, but when we saw the critical reception, we were turned off by how quickly people were like, “This is why sketch groups shouldn’t do movies.” But at the time we were making [Mystery Team], we didn’t have any forebears in terms of sketch comedy groups of our generation making an independent feature film. We just had the time and budget blocked out, and we really needed to make it happen. Just in terms of our own career, we had this one go at it.
AVC: Before you went independent, did you pitch it to studios?
DC: Actually, more than two years ago we came out to L.A. with this other script that we pitched around. But people weren’t all that into it—and at the time we weren’t that disappointed, and that probably should have told us something. So we went back to New York and decided to do something independently. Donald [Glover, castmate] had always wanted to do an Encyclopedia Brown-type movie, so he brought in the idea of kid detectives—these G-rated characters in an R-rated world—and we very quickly came up with the skeleton of Mystery Team. In that first meeting, there were lines and jokes that ended up in the final film. We had this initial burst of excitement, and it still hasn’t ended. We’re still really excited about these characters. We just filmed a new short with them for Comic-Con, and we were like, “We would happily do 20 more of these.”