The Harvey Girls are back for Season 2 of the popular DreamWorks Animation series, now streaming on Netflix. Executive Producer Brendan Hay and Supervising Producer Aliki Theofilopoulos discuss the bigger, bolder new season, starting with a title change.

Jackson Murphy: The show was called Harvey Street Kids for Season 1. Now it’s called Harvey Girls Forever. Why did you decide to do this change?

Brendan Hay: Weirdly, the change actually goes back to what the show started as. The project began way back, about six years ago. An executive at DreamWorks, Beth Cannon… was in love with the old characters of Little Audrey, Little Dot and Little Lotta and was like, “Oh – there’s a show here. We can do something with these three girls and group them as the Harvey Girls.” She saw the potential… and a few weeks later, she found a writer, Emily Brundige, who had a really good take on it all. They worked together and developed the show. Emily had to step away before we moved forward into production, but that’s when Aliki and I came in. And we ran with it. The whole time – all through development – all through Aliki and I producing the first season, we were “Harvey Girls”.

That was always the title of the show. But somewhere along the lines, for some marketing reasons, it became “Harvey Street Kids”. As they rightfully pointed out… even though we have three female leads, we also have a diverse array of other kids. So we want to make sure we highlight all of them. There’s also a Judy Garland film from the ’40s, we learned, called “The Harvey Girls”.

JM: That’s right.

BH: So we wanted to try something else and we thought of “Harvey Street Kids”. And thankfully it was just a case of Netflix stepping in and saying, “Specifically we want to highlight the girls. We love these three characters. They are the heart of the show. If you guys want to go back to the original title, you can.” They made that offer to us after the first season, so we were very happy to embrace that and run with it.

JM: And what were some of the goals heading into Season 2 – things you learned from Season 1?

Aliki Theofilopoulos: What’s fun about Season 2 is expansion: expanding out the world. Now that we had fully grasped who these characters were – to just lean into that even more. And then building on some ground work we laid in with the Boy Band stuff: really getting to pay that off in a really fun way – showing the girls’ friendship that way. We have fun with fan fiction. It was really about digging deeper and paying off a lot of the ground work we had laid in Season 1.

JM: You really dig deep into the Boy Band aspect: Joey Fatone, Nick Lachey, Joey McIntyre and Shawn Stockman voice the members of Crush 4U. You give equal appreciation to four different, iconic bands by getting a member from each one. And they totally seemed game.

AT: Absolutely. They couldn’t have been more fun to work with. All of them were such a delight; really great actors, super super funny. And Brendan and I were completely blown away by how well they can sing. I know it’s like, “Duh. They’ve been doing this for years.” We’ve seen them in the bands they’re in, but to spotlight them and hear them sing and come in and just nail it, it was really a joy for both of us to experience that.

BH: Aliki and I are both big music geeks… and we get as excited about pop music as indie rock. This was a lot of fun for us on every level. Not only were they incredibly nice and easy to work with, they also had a good sense of humor about everything. We’re coming at this with love. We love boy bands – our characters love boy bands. But they also were totally game for parodying themselves to some degree and just having fun. There was never any kind of ego involved on any of that. It was such a good time.

JM: And because you worked with these four music legends, was it pressure to come up with the right songs for them to sing?

BH: Not really – we might’ve had the songs before them. This started as a one-sentence joke in the first season… and it just kept growing as Aliki and I and our writers (one of our writers, who’s also a musician, Mike Yank) we all kept running with the joke and adding to it. By the time they came in, “My Heart Hearts Your Heart” had already been written… and also maybe “Your Book’s Overdue to the Library of My Heart”. And we knew that this is the tone of the band that we’re going for, which helped because then the guys who we were reaching out to knew what it would be, and they thankfully were on board from the get-go.

JM: With their central episode this season, “I Wanna Crush Your Hand”, you have a nice little aspect with the meet and greet experience, but also the bodyguard element, which I really like.

BH: The writer’s room and the board artists fell in love with Blaze Trickle, who’s a one-episode joke character in the first season. So we kept looking for any reason to bring this character back – who’s a faded, ’90s action star. It was not an easy thing for us to figure out how to bring this guy back. But… for the boy band episode, we were like, “There’s obviously going to be a bodyguard for the band.” And then it was like, “Oh my God. We can bring back this character we’ve been trying to find a way for.”

AT: And that was something fun about the show. There’s times in the show where a character just speaks to us, and we lean into that character and bring them back for more fun.

JM: And when it comes to the concert scenes, did you draw inspiration at all from your experiences at concerts over the years?

AT: Brendan mentioned we’re both super music geeks. We love, still to this day, going to shows and concerts. One thing that makes me so happy, especially with the real boy band fans online and on Twitter, they keep saying how honestly we portrayed the feeling of being a fan. And that just comes from, I think, our personal experiences of being fans of music and musicians and going to see music ourselves.

BH: My biggest musical hero is Paul Westerberg from “The Replacements”, and I got a chance to meet him at an in-store signing in 2002. But literally, I can remember waiting in line and could not have sweat more. I must’ve had a trail of water following me on this line. In the episode, Lotta has a list of questions. I actually did start generating a list of possible questions. I remember trying to figure out what I would say by doing a list of it. So Lotta gets that from me.

JM: One of your voice actors I really enjoy watching and listening to is Atticus Shaffer, from “The Middle” and “Frankenweenie”. He’s back as Melvin. How did he come on board for this show?

AT: We just did the normal audition process looking for that right actor. From very early on, as soon as we heard Atticus, we were like, “Oh my God. That’s our Melvin.” He was one of the first people cast on “Harvey”, actually. He was the character so perfectly and so delightfully that it just had to happen.

BH: Melvin is the closest we get in our core cast to an overt, occasionally mean guy or bad guy. But Atticus just keeps such a warmth and goofy charm to that character no matter what that you never really hate him, which I love. He keeps him a real kid first.

JM: So you consider yourselves music geeks. I also think you could call yourselves movie geeks because every title of every episode of this show is a movie title pun: “Raiders of the Lost Park”, “Boy Story”, “The Fandom Menace”. You guys must be movie fanatics.

BH: That is also true. We are pop culture omnivores, Aliki and I – and I think a lot of our crew. Everybody brought a reference to something they love. That’s kind of what “Harvey” is made up of: everybody brought their passion, and that extends to their favorite movies… or a really good pun. One of our writers, Rachel McNevin, definitely gets credit for a bunch of those excellent titles. With her ideas, here’s the 2-4 sentences of what an episode might be, and here are the 8-16 possible titles for it.

AT: Our crew was really close. We have these Monday morning meetings, and part of our time together was talking about movies. We would talk about what movies we saw over the weekend. We would reach back and talk about old movies we liked. It was something we did to connect with people on the crew, and it ended up being something that found its way into the show, too.

JM: That’s my kind of crew! And especially if a DreamWorks animated movie came out the weekend before, I’m sure you had to talk about those on Monday mornings.

BH: It was that or, some people on the crew would be like, “I didn’t get to it… yet.” (laughs)

JM: All 13 episodes of Season 2 debuted all at once on Netflix. Do you find this more exciting for them to all be posted at once, as opposed to a once a week strategy?

BH: I personally have grown to really like it. I think it definitely took some getting used to, but the nice part of it – the first weekend that it’s out, you go on social media and get such a wide range of reactions because everybody’s seeing different episodes at different times. But it’s nice that you’re getting it all at once vs. having to wait a little bit. The great thing about Netflix is that it’s always there. Once it debuts, you’re getting feedback on it forevermore. It’s always there, and people are always watching them.

AT: I came from Disney before with Phineas and Ferb. There was a new episode every week. There’s something exciting about looking forward to that new episode. However, what’s exciting about doing these bigger drops is that there ends-up being a little bit more of something for everyone. Different people have different favorite episodes. Of course, there are a lot of people [on social media] who like the boy bands, but there are some episodes that are really speaking to somebody that may not speak as much to somebody else. But it gives us fuller conversation in a way that an album drop does, as opposed to releasing just one song.

JM: What do you two think about Season 3? Are there already ideas on what you want to do?

BH: Very much so. We have a lot of plans. Hopefully we’ll have some good news on that front sooner than later because we’ve been kind of working on it a little bit already because we sort of know where we want to go.

AT: I think that’s a very exciting cameo that we dropped at the end of the final episode – a new character that we introduced. It brings some excitement… potentially… hopefully.

BH: Hopefully he’ll open up our world a little bit and we can introduce some other characters. We really want to run with him in Season 3. So we’re excited.