Adult animated comedies have come in all shapes and sizes, but none quite like BET+’s Lil Kev. The show is inspired by stories from Kevin Hart’s childhood in Philadelphia. The comedian, actor and BET Awards host provides his voice as the series gives some funny insight into his younger years. But it’s not just Hart’s star power that makes the show different.
Showrunners Michael Price and Matthew Claybrooks have extensive comedy resumes; Price previously worked on The Simpsons, while Claybrooks was part of Chris Rock’s prequel sitcom, Everybody Hates Chris. Both of them joined CBR to talk about bringing some of their past experience to Lil Kev, as well as what they wanted to do — and not do — with this series.
CBR: How would you describe working with Kevin Hart, and what were some of the challenges that came with adapting his life into an animated TV show?
Matthew Claybrooks: Working with Kevin was great. I remember Michael and I sitting down with him and him emphasizing his community that he grew up in — how it was a lot of challenges and everything, but how much love was there and how much support was there. The people were good people and helped him on his journey. So we wanted to show that. Show some of the challenges, some of the stuff he had to deal with, but also show the love and show the support and show how the community came together on some things as well. We got that from Kevin and ran with it.
Michael Price: This all comes from Kevin and his life. What he’s talked about in his book and in his comedy is that relationship with his family, especially between himself and his mom. We really wanted to focus the show on that.
We realized that through the history of adult animated comedy — starting with The Simpsons and all the way through Family Guy and even now Bob’s Burgers — the main comedy character was often the dad. They used to call [Bob Belcher] the «Fox Dad,» and they would call Homer [Simpson] that, or Hank Hill from King of the Hill, or Peter Griffin. And so we thought this was an opportunity, because the strongest character in Kevin’s life was his mom. She did everything she could to keep him safe and to channel him away from some of the negative stuff going on in his neighborhood.
And so we realized that was the selling point of our show…. Aside from Kevin, who’s the star of the show. The main adult character, and so much of the source of the humor, is his mom. We’ve never really had a chance to do that before.
Were there any anecdotes or ideas you got from Kevin that became particular favorites when you adapted them for Lil Kev?
Price: The one we kept coming back to was a story that Kevin tells… when he cursed for the first time. He cursed [at] a teacher based on a note coming home from his mom. It’s sort of how he found his voice. It’s a really, really, really fun story in his stand-up, and we really tried to make that work, to be kind of like our pilot story. For many reasons, it just never translated to [being] dramatized.
We kept trying to figure it out, and that we did — it turned into Episode 4, where he gets sick at school and pukes all over himself. His bully, Chin Check, is giving him a hard time, and it leads him to erupting into this Def Comedy Jam routine about him. That was our version of that. We finally figured out the best way to do that transformative moment for Kevin, when he really found his voice, and we figured out how to put it in our show. Hopefully, if we get a second season, we’ll be bringing in some more of that stuff from his life, too.
Claybrooks: He was really into swimming when he was growing up. We wanted to add that to the thread and the arc of this particular season, since swimming is important to him. We took a lot of stuff from his stand-up, some stuff from his book, and then we just let that be the essence of how we created stories.
Were there any stories or characters that were unique to Lil Kev and created for the show?
Price: We took a lot from our lives, some of our neighborhoods growing up. Matt grew up in Compton, so a lot of the characters are based on people in his life. Probably the most notorious White character on the show, Mrs. O’Lady, is based on some people I know, but I won’t name. [Laughs.] Kind of genteel, racist people who say racist things in the sweetest possible way.
The one character that I think we hit on pretty early that we really fell in love with is the principal, who yells with his bullhorn like Morgan Freeman in Lean on Me. Matt can talk to the hair salon people; a lot of those people are people that he knows. And the kids like Soupy and Gerald are like the kids that [he] grew up with.
Claybrooks: Yeah, Soupy, Gerald, Dirty Dante, and all the kids. And then some of Henry, which is Kevin’s dad, like his friends are kind of modeled after a couple of people, like my dad’s friends, so it was fun to build that out. I mean, the core of it and the essence of it is Kevin and what he wanted to show in this particular project.
But you have to when you’re building a show, you have to create a bunch of other characters and how they relate to each other. One thing we did was with Nancy, Kevin’s mom. She wasn’t a nurse in real life, but we wanted to depict and show how poor the healthcare system is and how it worked in this particular community. So we wanted to focus on that and bring her there because we felt like that would be more action, because I believe she worked more in an office setting. And we felt like that would bring more action and have more motivation for the community to come in, and any character could come into her workspace, and it would feel normal.
Price: a fun irony that we ended up playing to in the first episode, the pilot, that she spends her whole time at work like caring for these people and taking care of them and being sweet to them. But then when she gets home, she’s tough. She’s a hard-ass mom. And Kevin has that moment where he’s like, «how come you can’t be nice to me like you are to those people?» So that felt to us like a really fun, clean way of demonstrating the difference between them and the difference between the way she is as a mom and the way she is as a nurse.
Did you find issues in making more serious moments have a bit more levity, and if so, what was a strategy to navigate that?
Claybrooks: Yeah, I mean, we wanted the show to be real and grounded and have real stakes and people can really get hurt to show what Kevin really went through as a kid growing up in this type of community. You know, growing up in Compton, that was it. We had great fun. We laughed all the time. We played basketball, but there were a lot of dangers, and we had to learn how to navigate them, go around them and make sure we were people that we could depend on and trust.
Price: So it wasn’t just striking a balance. And what’s great about the process of creating animation, unlike, let’s say, if we were doing like a sitcom, like a standard kind of three-camera sitcom where you shoot it all, and then you edit it, we had lots of opportunities over the course of all the episodes, the whole season to like fine tune and find a moment here. And, you know, Matt and I would sit with Musa Brooker, our director and the rest of the animation people, and like really go through the animatics and the storyboards, like finding that right tone and when’s the right time to make a joke and not, and especially in that, we did feel like that opening first episode was the where we had the chance to sort of strike that tone.
So that moment that you’re talking about, when Dante comes in shot, was really, really important to us to make sure that there was room for it, but also that there was comedy around it, but also that we could play the reality of it. So I can’t remember exactly, but I’m sure there was stuff that we cut that would make it too silly for that moment. And we wanted to really find, and then, of course, at the end, we get through that, and that last scene with them together in the house is very sweet, and the way she’s singing to him and hugging him.
And then we had what, you know, what you might call a treacle cutter of Henry showing up, you know, dancing around naked in front of the house. That’s sort of like saying that’s our statement, like a pilot. I always feel like a pilot of an episode is sort of like your statement of like, this is what the show is. So it was important for us to sort of say like, it’s very, very funny. There’s really silly stuff in it. Like when the Rocky statue comes alive and punches a guy in a wheelchair, you know, a cat and a dog are fighting with knives. But also this character comedy, and like realness and warmth. So we wanted to make sure it was all there. Like, if you watch the first episode, you would go like, «Okay, I understand what the show is.»
Claybrooks: We try not to shy away from moments because, in life, there’s moments, and I’m a really big Pixar fan and in every Pixar movie, it’s like, there’s a crying moment. There’s a moment there that’s like a hilarious movie. But this is real life and real life is not all laughter. I think comedy should be everywhere. But when there’s a moment, I mean, Coco, the movie Coco, I cried more at that movie than any movie in my life. It took a while to get that area and the show right because it was like, we don’t want to take away from it. We didn’t want to hit people over the head too hard, but we wanted to be just right. I think we nailed it.
Price: And I think every episode has one of those, hopefully every episode has at least one or two of those moments. Like I’m thinking of the second episode where Kevin has to babysit the two little kids. And so that’s the main story and there’s a lot of fun there. But then the sort of B story or a C story almost, because there’s Nancy going to her poetry slam, which is fun too. But then Richard with his buddies and the whole episode is all this comedy about this guy still living in a jail cell and like, it’s all this silliness, right? But then it comes down to that moment of Richard confessing that he almost wishes he could go back to prison because he doesn’t know how to live outside of prison. And he’s afraid of what it means to be a father.
And that moment always hits me really hard. And that’s why I think Richard was one of our favorite characters because, and Deon Cole does such an amazing job voicing him, that he very easily could be a one-dimensional kind of thug guy. And we do a lot of those jokes where he’s talking about things like killing snitches or whatever in prison. You get all that, but he’s a real person too.
And he’s going through some real stuff. And it opened up that character in a way that led to other things. But now he’s finding love, and he’s got this girlfriend, and he wants to be a father, and it just was making that episode work. I think for us, it was almost as important as the pilot in terms of like, okay, we’re opening up and finding those moments where characters are revealing themselves to be more than cartoons.
Claybrooks: We fought against stereotypes. You know, unfortunately, some people think just doing a show about these types of communities is a stereotype in itself. I disagree with that wholeheartedly. Richard Jr., convicts, a lot of Black men go to prison. 10% of our Black men are in jail. So we wanted to really not be cliché with this character and not just have the «drop the soap jokes» and stuff like that. So one of our writers we hired spent some time in jail, and he had some real good insight into just the psychology of being a prisoner or the insecurities you have about dating when you get out, about your kids, about other people.
I mean, I think a lot of people would just see a guy like Uncle Richard Jr. and if he doesn’t want to spend time with his kids, you think, «Oh, he’s a dead beat. He’s a loser. He hates his kids or doesn’t care.» But you’ve got to get a little glimpse into why, and he’s scared his presence in their life is going to hurt them, and he doesn’t want that. So, you know, that was very, like Michael said, that was very important to us to nail that. And I think we nailed that as well because, you know, in testing Uncle Richard Jr., maybe our highest-rated character, people just love that character.
So, you know, starting with Michael, animation is something that you’ve been in for basically forever, I would say, and you’ve done a lot in your career. And with something like, how was something like working on like The Simpsons helped you with Lil Kev?
Price: Well, I mean, everything I know about animation I learned from being on The Simpsons. And I did some stuff before this. I worked on the PJs, great show, also set in a Black neighborhood before Simpsons. But that was almost like a Simpsons spin-off in a way, because the people who ran that, Steve Tompkins, and so many of the people involved in that, came from The Simpsons, and it was kind of run like The Simpsons and had a very Simpsons and a similar attitude.
Yeah, I mean, it just enabled me by working on The Simpsons for so long and then I very luckily was very lucky to help create and show run, F is for Family with Bill Burr on Netflix. Just to learn a system of like a great way to put together a writer’s room, how to develop stories, how to encourage writers, and then also how to go through the process of scripting and directing the actor’s storyboard.
Just by the time I got to be able to work on this with Matt, I felt like I had a pretty good idea of how to put a show together. And then just to be able to do a show about a whole different kind of thing, like the show is completely different from Simpsons. It’s its own thing, but in the same way, a lot of the building blocks of how you put together a writer’s room, what you’re looking for in writing, what you’re looking for, the kind of jokes were similar. Like, one of the jokes that I really love is a Simpson-style joke where it’s when Nancy takes the gangster rap CD away from Kevin, and she gives him the Marvin Gaye record, and she says, «Marvin Gaye never sang about violence one day of his short life that ended when his father shot him.» Like that is a line that I could see Homer saying.
That’s a kind of a self-ironic kind of line. That’s like a very Simpson kind of line. So I love real life, that kind of stuff. But then, like having these amazing voices, like Matt is talking about, like all the writers that we brought in from the world of standup and the world of living in these, this culture, and these kinds of neighborhoods, just infused everything and made it also different and fresh. So it doesn’t, in many ways it feels similar, but in every other way it’s its own unique thing.
So Matt, same for you. You have had the unique luxury of not only working on this show, but also working on Everybody Still Hates Chris. So you’ve gotten to work on two shows adapting the lives of famous comedians. And I got to ask, how is working on a show like that similar or different to working on Lil Kev? Like, was there anything you could take from that to the show?
Claybrooks: Yeah, I mean, I worked on that. I worked on the original Everybody Hates Chris. That’s where I met Chris. And I’ve worked with him in standup and kind of really know his voice. Working on Everybody Still Hates Chris was my first time in animation. So I got a lot from it. And our showrunner, Sanjay Shah, he empowered us by giving us a lot of responsibility on our episodes. So it felt like, you know, you’re running your own episode. You’re in editing, you’re giving notes, you’re doing all these things, you’re coming in to record as far as like the actors coming in when they do their voice work.
So it was the perfect training ground that was almost like a boot camp for me to get it all in. And go, «Oh, these are the things now.» We don’t do it exactly the same on this show. We had less time with our writers than that show. But we brought on a lot of that. I mean, just the knowledge helped me understand the aspects of the process. And that showrunner just opened up kind of the vault and let me see how all the inner workings work. I was able to come here with way more confidence because this is also my first time co-showrunning a show.
So before this, I was a little anxious about the whole thing. So I set up a bunch of calls with showrunners and just like pick their brains, you know, and just over time talking to them, I was like, «You know what, I think I’ll be OK.» You know what I mean? And I got less scared and having Michael there being like a veteran that has so much more experience, helped me a lot.
But together, I feel like we’re the right combination. I really work well with Michael. I’ve worked with a lot of people. I’ve been paired with a lot of people. And this worked by far better than any pairing that I’ve ever had. And I appreciate working with somebody so experienced and so laid back and not. I mean, you know, you have Michael’s resume, you could be arrogant and pompous or whatever, but I feel like he’s not that way. And so when the showrunners are super cool and open and like, «No, just say anything,» we don’t want to shut down the creativity.
It just opens the writers up to saying anything. We don’t hate anyone for saying anything. We have a safe space. So it’s like if you go too far, that’s OK. You know, because we want, we just want the door open for creativity. And if you start shutting the door, you’ll shut out some good stuff as well. So I feel like, you know, that’s how that helped me. The whole process of me getting into this situation.
Price: I’d worked with a partner years and years and years ago when I first came out here. And I’ve never worked with a writing partner since. And I’ve heard stories of other shows, some famously, or some not. It started with people putting together to run together, and it didn’t work out, because they were arguing all the time. But that was never the case with Matt. Like we got along just from the go. And, you know, it worked in such a way where, you know, when we were running the writers’ room, I was also still working on The Simpsons.
So there would be certain times during every part of the day where I couldn’t be in the room. And when I wasn’t there, Matt was there. And when Matt wasn’t there, I was there. I’ve been in some other shows where the two showrunners have to leave and go into a room for like an hour to argue about a joke, while the rest of the writers sit around, twiddling their thumbs. Like that was never us. If we disagreed, maybe we’d talk about it. But like we just were always in tune from the beginning, and we always had each other’s backs. And it was like the best possible pairing I could ever imagine.
Matt, now that you have gotten into the world of animation, and you’re still fresh in it, how do you say it feels versus live action? Would you say that it is more integral with people involved, and what were some of the differences?
Claybrooks: To be honest, absolutely the same. Because growing up, I always was fascinated by puppets and cartoons and all this. And I used to see them as real people. So when you see them as real people, you don’t see any difference between like writing for a live-action sitcom, multi-cam, single cam. It’s the same to me, the writing process and the story process is the exact same. So, I mean, I love it. And it’s even better, I think, in animation, because you get to correct stuff. You know, where I’ve worked on live action sitcoms, you know, you go, you know, a joke’s not going to work. It doesn’t work on the floor. You huddle up, you pitch jokes, you change it. They do it. We get it right or get it OK. You find we didn’t fail it.
But in animation all the way up to the sound mix, where everything is supposed to already be animated and everything. And we’d be in a sound mix and go, «There’s a little hole here.» We can have a person yell at Kev from, and then we would look through all the archives of everything that we have and from that particular episode, and we’d put something in there and when you think you have no more bites at the apple, we would average three or four or five new jokes, new laughs. And you can’t do that in live action. So I feel like as a joke guy myself, just having more opportunities to make jokes work and add more jokes. Anytime I do that, that’s always the best process for me.
Price: Yeah, I would agree. I say if you’re a perfectionist, there’s no better place to be than in animation, where you can literally worry over every little thing. And I remember one joke we had at the very end. It was close to the end in the episode where Kevin and his mom helped the old lady get down the street, and we had this thing about how she had those candies. She had these kinds of candies that she gave to Kevin that were like racist candies. And then, when they got to the house of the guy who she thought was her son, she went, «She’s always giving me these racist candies.» So it used to be just a line. But then we realized, «Oh my God,» then at the last minute, we added the shot of her holding it up again. It was a different kind of racist candy.
We were able to add that with it, like, you know, with like a week to go before the show had to be finished. So that’s the kind of stuff that you can always call, like adding value, jokes, and moments, and stuff. We have an amazing editor named Joe Gressus, who is one of the greatest picture editors you’ve ever met where we’d be in that final edit, and we’d realize like, «Oh, oh, if only we didn’t have that shot, if only Kevin’s eyes were like shifting to the left, that would make it much better.» Right. And if this was live action, we’d maybe have to go and reshoot it, whatever, but he could just sort of like manipulate the animation program to make that happen, or he could change your mouth to another mouth. So there’s so much we could do throughout the process that I think would be very difficult to do in live action.
Do you see this series as long as it’s allowed to continue, which I hope it does, growing into seeing Kev kind of grow into like his time when he finally does decide to pursue comedy, or would you want to keep it more in the space of him being a kid?
Claybrooks: So we see him as being 12, but we, at the same time, like in Episode 4, where he uses humor to get a bully off him. We will see comedy come out of him and see those glimpses of who Kevin is going to become, you know. Then hopefully we reboot the show later, and he’s older, and then he’s starting comedy. [laughs] And like Everybody Still Hates Chris. And when the original Everybody Hates Chris, he starts off in junior high, and in Everybody Still Hates Chris, it starts off in high school. So he is 17 and everybody still hates Chris. So he was able to kind of stay the same age and, in live action, you can’t stay the same age, but he was able to play in a kid’s space in the first show and then the second show, be a little older, wiser, you know, that kind of thing.
Price: I think we’re in that sweet spot where, and this was always a discussion when we first started the show, was like, because there’s two different kinds of animated shows, or maybe three, but, but like with The Simpsons famously, every episode is interchangeable with any other. So like Bart has been 10 years old since 1990. And then in F is For Family. Uh, we deliberately chose not to do that and to have each episode build on the next in a serialization. So even though we did like 46 episodes of that, it took place over the course of like two years. So, if we had kept going forever, then they would get older and older and older and older.
And, um, so I think we’re not going to probably not do that with this. Like, like Matt said, we keep Kevin 12 and there’s some light kind of serialization, light arcs, but, but we just love the whole process of making every episode about itself. And we don’t want to get tied down and feel like, «Oh, we have to have a cliffhanger to sit up the next one.» So I think that’s what we prefer. And it sounds like the network is happy with that too. Like keeping an episode stand alone by itself, but also, there’s Richard’s pursuit of the teacher, Miss Green, is sort of like an arc that goes on throughout the first season. But I don’t think we’ll end up doing like big time, like cliffhangers. I mean, serialized arcs and, you know, he’s growing older, and we’ll keep everybody in that same frame.
Claybrooks: And we don’t feel like you have to watch them in order. You can watch, you can enjoy, even if you don’t see Episodes 1 through 5, you can enjoy 6. You know, and we didn’t want it to be limiting. A lot of shows, I don’t start watching because I don’t have the time to, to invest for all the episodes, you know, but if I knew I could pop in and pop out without being lost or anything, skip. If I want to skip, then it would probably make me watch newer shows more.
What do you guys hope audiences take away after watching Lil Kev?
Price: I just hope that they take away that it’s really funny. Uh, it’s very full of a lot of family emotion, a lot of stuff that families can watch together, even though, you know, it’s kind of R-rated in dialogue and things like that, but it’s really, really funny first. We were so happy with how it looks.
And one of the things that we started when we first started this was we wanted the show to have its own look, and we didn’t want it to be lumped in with this kind of look a certain amount of primetime animated shows have a certain look to themselves, similar to Family Guy in a way, you know, and we really wanted it to be its own, its own person, its own thing. And Musa and Amanda, our director, did such an amazing job with it. And we’re so thrilled with that. And that it’s just a really fun, funny show that also celebrates community, celebrates family, and gives insight to, you know, how this amazing guy, Kevin Hart, became Kevin Hart.
Claybrooks: And we want to shine a light on different things that are happening in the Black community, how the school system works, having Kevin in Junior High and his brother in high school and his mom working at the hospital and Uncle Richie Jr. having gone to jail. There are a bunch of institutions that are in the Black community that we wanted to explore and really bring stuff out of and yes, make jokes and different things and make light of certain things, but also to uncover some stuff, to show some things that may not be shown in other shows. And we want to show how, no matter where you’re coming from, if you have that thing, that optimism, and, and you work hard, you can get like Kevin is so inspirational.
Like Michael said, I come from Compton, and it was a pretty rough city when I grew up, and I visited North Philly just to see how Kevin grew up, just to see the neighborhoods, hopefully walk around. I walked up to his school. It was closed at the time, but I looked around, and I remember going right in front of his house where he grew up, like his place. And I remember it being like it just seemed really dangerous, where it made me feel uncomfortable getting out of the car at the time. And I’m from Compton and I felt that. And so it just gave me just so much more respect for somebody like Kevin, who worked so hard and believed in himself and had so much faith to get out of that situation and become the number one biggest standup comedy on the face of the earth.
He is a comedy rock star and to see where he grew up was so insightful. And it was like, that’s what this show is. And so I don’t want people to go like, oh, it’s another show about the hood. Okay, it’s the hood. But should we change the fact that Kevin grew up in the hood? Like, if we’re going to tell his story, to not make it seem stereotypical, should we make him rich? He grew up how he grew up and the joy of him coming out of that becoming who he is is very inspirational. So that’s what we want to show with this show.
Lil Kev is streaming now on BET+.
