“The special came about because Discovery Media bought Warner Bros. and all its subsidiaries, which trickled all the way down to Adult Swim. So there was a shift—not just in the volume of global workforce that were employed, but also the priorities of any of these smaller subsidiaries at the behest of these much larger companies,” Green says in an interview with TheWrap. “All that to say, no one was green-lighting a new season of 20 quarter-hours. It’s just not happening. Everyone who would have said yes to us got fired and consolidated into a much smaller pinpoint on the graph.”
The vast majority of Robot Chicken over the past 20 years has come from 11 seasons of 20 15-minute episodes. However, the series does have a history of doing one-off specials, with its Star Wars episodes being particularly famous, creating a pretty strong precedent for Green’s alternative. “So we said, ‘Well, you guys still like some money, right? You still want your iconic legacy brands to have the opportunity to stay economically viable, right?’ And they were like, ‘Yeah, I guess so,’” Green says. “And we said, ‘Well, we should prioritize making standalone half-hours the way we’ve done in the past and just not concern ourselves with making a whole season,’ sort of what South Park has done.”
Of course, the reason South Park ended up in its special-oriented situation is a whole other, confusing bag of business worms, but it’s apparently something that’s worked well enough that Warner Bros. Discovery was willing to do something similar for Robot Chicken. “It does something better for all these companies because they’re able to observe their performance quarterly, which is exactly what they need the most, and they can also focus their marketing money or any of their capital spends on isolated incidents in the calendar year,” Green says. Though he maintains that “everyone was enormously supportive on this special from Discovery down” about the actual content of the special, the comedian adds that he has been playing the studio games long enough to say what he needs to say to get what he wants. “All of the companies, they think in widgets and they think throughout the quarters, but they don’t understand why anybody’s buying the things that they’re buying. They just don’t get it,” Green says. “So, you know, that’s where we come in — we curate all of that stuff.”
You can check out what Green has been curating when Robot Chicken: Self-Discovery Special runs on Adult Swim Sunday, July 20.
