While we may never know what Stephen Glover and Donald Glover’s scrapped “Deadpool” animated series for FX would have been like, Stephen said Thursday morning that the goal was to give ‘Rick and Morty’ “a run for their money.” That’s big talk, but according to “Atlanta” writer and producer Stefani Robinson, Dan Harmon’s Adult Swim cult hit was exactly the direction they were going for.
“I know that ‘Ricky and Morty’ is something that we were all heavily influenced by,” Robinson, who was a writer on “Deadpool” and inked an overall deal with FX last October, told TheWrap Thursday. “And maybe not necessarily in tone specifically or what type of jokes they were telling, but I think that we were sort of influenced by — the show takes really big swings, and it has such a broad crazy universe and the show is hard to nail down you know? Every episode you don’t know what you are going to get.”
“The stories are all over the place in a really inspiring way,” Robinson added. “That’s my relationship with the ‘Rick and Morty’ of it all. We were heavily inspired by it. We watched it a lot. And we were excited by creating a show that was similar in how it took risks and had a big broad universe.”
Robinson says she is “not super privy” to the “creative differences” that led the Glover brothers and FX to “part ways” with Marvel Television last weekend. She also didn’t see Donald Glover’s mic drop of a fake “Deadpool” script until everyone else did on Wednesday.
“I had not read [Donald’s script] before,” Robinson. “It sort of went up and I’m scrolling through Twitter and I was like ‘Oh, okay. There’s that.’ I thought it was funny. I think you know, Donald is incredibly creative and just genius. I think the script was a testament to that. I thought it was a very interesting way for him to express himself for sure.”
And what about the script’s quips about the series possibly being canceled due to racism, and Stephen Glover’s tweet Thursday morning stating the show “wasn’t too black”?
“Just being a writer on the show I don’t really know sort of what they talked about. So I can’t really speak to that. But I just thought that we wrote a show that was enjoyable to us. And we are black people, you know? So that definitely factors into our perspective. I can’t really say if it was too black, too not black. We just wrote what made us happy.”
Oh and that Taylor Swift episode that Stephen Glover said really existed and was “hilarious,” is just one example of how they were planning on making us all happy.
“I mean the show as a whole, I think we did a really good job of touching on just pop culture and without getting into details… overall I think we had a really funny season,” Robinson added. “We didn’t shy away from the ‘Deadpool’-isms that are so loved in the comic books.”