Ancient Greece animated comedy Krapopolis debuts with a one-hour series premiere Sunday September 24th at 8pm on FOX. Rick and Morty co-creator Dan Harmon’s latest show joins this fall’s Animation Domination lineup of long-running The Simpsons, Bob’s Burgers and Family Guy. Executive Producer Steve Levy and Supervising Director Pete Michels believe Krapopolis will become as much of a fixture as those other programs, thanks to the writing, the cast, the look and confidence from the network. (This Animation Scoop Q&A was edited for length and clarity.)

Jackson Murphy: I watched the first three episodes. This show has been a long time coming. How does it feel that it’s finally here and not only that you’re already renewed for Season 2 but also Season 3?!

Steve Levy: (laughs) It’s a relief that it’s finally coming out. We started making this show in the very beginning of COVID. We’ve been living and breathing this show every day since the beginning of COVID. Getting the additional season pickups speaks volumes about FOX’s support of the show and their belief that this is something really special, which helps fuel us on the creative side, pushing the boundaries of what we’re capable of doing — both in animation and in the writing. And pushing FOX S&P to let us do a little more than what they’re typically used to. Hopefully we get a Season 4 pickup maybe even before the show airs! That would be fun. We would love to be able to continue making this show for as long as we can. And we’re psyched to see people become fans of it and react to it.

JM: I can tell there are so many possibilities of what you all can do with storylines down the line. I got a poster at NYCC last October. I know, Pete, you were at SDCC last year promoting the show. How was the initial buzz and getting fans interested and excited for “Krapopolis”?

Pete Michels: Last year at Comic-Con, FOX had wraps on elevators and buildings in downtown San Diego. It was everywhere. We were everywhere. So the buzz was getting started then. This year at Comic-Con, it was scaled down a little bit more, but we did do a screening, and it was great to see the show screen with a live audience. You usually don’t get to see that when you work in television. It was really fun to see a live audience react to it. We had to turn people away. There were not enough seats.

JM: Wow! The excitement is there for “Krapopolis”. It’s a comedy about a dysfunctional family in Ancient Greece. Steve, I can tell that at this show’s core is this mother-son dynamic. Tell me about this core.

SL: Yeah. I think Dan [Harmon] wanted to draw a little from his own life. But the idea for the show really started with, “What if this was a workplace comedy where we have a character who wants to push civilization into progress rather than keep it in the Dark Ages?” He’s fighting against the craziness of the times. You have cannibals and constant war. People don’t know how to cook. Nothing has really been invented yet. There’s no sewage system. You have one guy who’s not an inventor himself but a visionary who’s really great at communicating and trying to push the world into the future. We started with that character, who became Tyrannus.

The mother-son relationship came out of, “What if his mother had a foot in that old world where they don’t want any of that progress?” You set-up a dichotomy from the start. Back then, the gods controlled the world. Progress threatens the gods. Philosophically, we were building the world based on the ancient religion of the Greek gods vs. humanity and how technology and progress and intellect can start to fight the idea of the gods. We made Deliria, his mother, a goddess. She’s kind of ousted from the gods, like a C-list god. It’s a relationship I’m really excited for everyone to interact with. Deliria is a mother who doesn’t want to give any sort of praise to her child. She’s disappointed in him. He’s a failure in her eyes. And he hates his mother. She’s overbearing. She does whatever she wants and doesn’t believe in what he believes in. And it creates a lot of conflict throughout the series. But ultimately, at the end of the day, they both kind of still love each other, whether they’re willing to admit that or not.

JM: It’s comedic conflict, with heart. And there are such specific visual designs of the city, the buildings and the clothing. Pete, did you study Ancient Greece? How detailed and thorough did you want to get in your research?

PM: We did. We actually did a lot of research as we were designing the show. We knew we wanted to make it look different than other shows on FOX, and we wanted to make it look different than “Rick and Morty”. We wanted to make it stand out. We were building a civilization that never existed but could have, so we wanted to make it look believable and realistic enough to make you think, “Oh there really was a Krapopolis” just north of Crete or Minoa or any of those ancient civilizations. A lot of the wall paintings and frescoes are motifs taken right out of archaeology discoveries over the years. With the technology, we’re limited to the Bronze Age, so it’s early Bronze Age. They do have metal but their tools are made of stone and tools, a little bit of leather and sheep guts. We wanted to make sure the clothing didn’t look like Rome.

JM: I think you pull that off. It made me think back to looking at my history books when I was in school. Steve, I want to go back to the character of Deliria, with Emmy-winning “Ted Lasso” star Hannah Waddingham voicing her. She’s so good as Rebecca on that show. And on this show, Deliria always thinks she’s the center of attention all the time, with a smile. How was it bringing-in Hannah Waddingham?

SL: A dream. I had just seen “Ted Lasso”. It had just come out. When we were casting the characters, I kept saying to Dan, “We need to go out to Hannah Waddingham. She would be amazing.” And he was like, “I don’t know who that is. I haven’t seen ‘Ted Lasso’ yet.” FOX was all about it. They were willing to play ball. And the first day we recorded her, Dan went, “Holy moley. She is the one. She is crushing it! That is the character.” She elevates everything we write for her. She is so open to work to find the right read. She always comes into the booth with so much energy and she’s so freaking funny and so warm and an absolute blast to work with.

JM: Cool. And she gets to sing a little bit!

SL: She does!

PM: And from an animator point of view, having her voice to draw to, it gives you so much to work with. It’s all there and you really want to grab onto that and make that pose really accentuate with her performance.

JM: And that’s a perfect segway into my next question, Pete. Tell me about the character designs because they are visually interesting looking characters. And you also have tons of background characters, like in the second episode, which is at a sporting event.

PM: We went through a lot. I think we had something like 80 different versions of Tyrannus that we went through. He had a beard at one point, like a goatee. We wanted him to be iconic so that the Tyrannus outfit and his whole look was immediately recognizable, so you could recognize somebody at Comic-Con, “Oh, there’s Tyrannus.” Something that was right up there with Homer Simpson and any iconic cartoon character. But to get that and get that essence, it did take a while. Stupendous is half-Cyclops and a hulking character with incredible strength. We wanted her to be feminine and a strong woman and not too cliche. Getting her look and giving her a soft side. Hippocampus was also a challenge. He’s in a bowl. He’s part fish! Our design team knocked it out of the park.

JM: One of the key aspects of the show is the modern flare — the dialogue and the idea of people inventing certain things. Steve, how did you want to seamlessly incorporate the modern dialogue and references into Ancient Greece and make it work?

SL: We’re not trying to write Shakespeare, where it’s old English of what they would’ve said at the time. We want it to still be funny and relatable. But we certainly weren’t going to use any terms or phrases that wouldn’t make sense based on the technology they had or events that would’ve happened in history. A lot of thoughts went into the guard rails of what can and can’t be said in this world. We wanted it to really feel like Ancient Greece. Even the score we have is derived from old ancient Greek music and instruments.

JM: It’s funny to hear modern references within all of this but it works because it’s clever and there are more meanings.

PM: There’s a challenge there too to make certain things relatable to modern audiences. They didn’t have cell phones. How do you get that point across without cell phones or the internet? We have the ancient Greek equivalents of those.

SL: The biggest challenge is they don’t have written language. So we can’t have signs. We only have pictographs. It’s all drawings. They’re so far from what we have today, but that’s the point. It seems like they’re a lot different but really they’re just like us. We’re all human, except for the monsters, but even the gods and the monsters on this show have a little bit of heart. We’re just as stupid in a lot of ways as they were then, and we certainly feel the same emotions as people in Ancient Greece.

JM: Pete, what do you think “Krapopolis” being a part of this iconic group of FOX animated shows says about Animation Domination today?

PM: Animation is alive and well, especially primetime adult animation. Just the fact of the timeslot that we’re in says volumes about the show. We’re between “The Simpsons” and “Bob’s Burgers”. You can’t ask for a better timeslot than that. We really think that show has got some legs and is gonna take off. And the network is behind us as well. Animation Domination will really support that, and we could see “Krapopolis” for 30 years. Who knows?

JM: That would be fun! “The Simpsons”, “Krapopolis”, “Bob’s Burgers” and “Family Guy”. What a Fall lineup. Where are you in production right now? Are you really already thinking about storylines two-plus years down the line?

SL: I think so. With Season 1 we’re in the final mix on the last couple episodes. With Season 2 we’re in production and post-production on those episodes. Some are still in the animatic phase, while others are coming back in color, so we’re doing post on those. And Season 3 is more than halfway written. So we’re still writing episodes, but also Season 3 is in production. We have animatics coming back in for Season 3 that we’re doing edits on. We’re really in the thick of it across the board. Jumping back and forth everyday between all those different seasons. It’s hard to keep track of something like this. (laughs)

PM: We’ve already started boarding on the 10th episode of Season 3, so we’re well into it.

JM: Wow. And you gotta keep those secrets for a couple years, but they’ll be worth the wait!