Dream Corp LLC is the latest in what has become a very distinct brand of comedy midwifed into the world by Adult Swim. The show is a strange and pleasing trip, equal parts live-action and animated dream sequences, centered on a wild-haired dream therapist named Dr. Roberts (Jon Gries) and the staffers at his semi-futuristic warehouse medical facility.
The structure of each 15-minute episode is ostensibly straightforward—Dr. Roberts sees a patient and, with the help of a team of technicians (including a robot voiced by Dream Corp executive producer Steven Merchant), goes inside the patient's dreams and cures them. This being Adult Swim, things usually go off the rails pretty quickly, and it often doesn't really make any sense, even when we feel like we're in familiar territory. To play up the psychedelic effect, the show makes use of rotoscoping, a technique in which live-action footage is traced over, frame by frame, by animators.
The pilot, which aired Sunday, begins when a young man comes to the center for help with impotence. In a rotoscoped sequence of the patient's dreams, Dr. Roberts, the patient, a woman in a frog costume eating spaghetti (the patient's girlfriend), and Dave Coulier sit around a restaurant table before Coulier turns into a Legolas-like elf after having sex with the patient's spaghetti-eating girlfriend/frog. The good doctor's prescription? A job at Dream Corp LLC.
Showrunner Daniel Stessen is an accomplished music video and short film director who won best short animated film at the 2014 Berlin Independent Film Festival for a project called The Gold Sparrow. He is also a former roommate of John Krasinski (another Dream Corp executive producer). I recently chatted by phone with Stessen about his new show, highbrow dick jokes, and the singularity.
VICE: How do you explain Dream Corp to people?
Daniel Stessen: It's dream therapy. How I normally pitch it is that traditional therapy can take months or even years to get to the root of an issue. In this case Dr. Roberts puts you under and then he drops into your subconscious with you and guides you to the root of your issue. So he can, in real time, wire the issue that you're having. In the pilot, it's impotence. In one episode, the Academy Award–nominated June Squibb comes in to quit smoking. Another is couples therapy, another OCD. But it's not always so straightforward.
Where did the idea for the show come from?
For a while I got really into singularity and the concept of living forever inside of a hard drive. Our idea of the future is always so clean and beautiful. No one's ever touched on how we got to that place. There's the Zach Morris phone . Now there's the iPhone 7, but there's also the Zach Morris phone that we all look at and laugh. So I'm trying to explore the first generation of the technology that's still in its beta stage, that's just filled with kinks and still needs to be worked out.
But in real life, dude, when I was young I had bad night terrors. When I was 11, I woke up in my next door neighbor's house, in his parents' bedroom, screaming, "They're coming! They're coming! They're coming!" And this is not the first time that dream had happened, so I ended up being scared to go to bed for a while. My father sent me to a therapist to figure out what was going on. There was a whole bunch of other shit that was going on, but we went to the child therapist and he helped me. I'd go there a play with building blocks and he'd help me figure out what my dream was about.
When I started reading this singularity stuff, and I had this personal experience that this stuff really works. This therapist helped me figure out what was going on in my dream and I never had it again. And now add in living cyborgs. Why don't we go into the dream instead of talking about it? And that's Dream Corp.
Did you make the show for Adult Swim?
Yes, we pitched it to them first. The Gold Sparrow was doing well, and I had also done the farewells for The Office, and that was nominated for an Emmy. So I wrote something specifically for them. And in reality, Liquid Television and Adult Swim have shaped who I am as a filmmaker from a very early age. It's always been a dream and a goal to work with them. They funded the first pilot that we made in 2014. It tested in focus groups for the next couple months and then they said, "OK, good job! But can we do it a little more like this?" And we went back to the drawing board. They ordered a rewrite of the pilot.
I worked that over and over until I got it right. And that's when I brought Stephen Merchant on as an executive producer. When I was stuck with the rewrites, I bounced some ideas off of him. Really, his biggest thing was when he told me to just watch the pilot of House. He goes. "I've never seen it, but I bet that it's going to help you."
Stephen Merchant told you to watch the pilot of House but he had never seen it?
Yeah! And he was totally right. When I watched—the thing about House is that everyone is there for a reason. With Dream Corp, the original pilot was more of a visceral experience. Once I realized that we needed to define the characters a little bit more, it cracked the job wide open.
He knows what he's doing.
I've learned so much from him and Krasinski. Every single round of notes. Every single edit. They've been so amazing every time. So supportive the whole time. They're making suggestions, but they're also saying, "Do it how you would do it." And so does Adult Swim. They've all given me the freedom to do my thing, but it helps when you have rules.
It does feels like a very Adult Swim type of show, but sometimes it's hard to articulate why that is.
One thing that I heard someone say, "If it would fit on any other network then they don't want it." They don't want it to be able to play anywhere else. And that really made sense to me.
What do you think influenced the feel of Dream Corp the most?
Everything on Liquid Television.
I'm not familiar with that.
That was the first Adult Swim. It was on MTV.
Aeon Flux started there. There was another thing called The Head, which was a pretty epic and mind-bending thing that when you're in eighth grade you feel like, "Oh my God, I shouldn't be watching this." But you absolutely should be.
And early Adult Swim: Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law; Venture Brothers. These are things that really excited me as a writer, first and foremost. And British television. There's a show called Peep ShowPeep Show. That's a huge influence. Steve and I would talk a lot about that show. I use a lot of POV in Dream Corp, and that's influenced by Peep Show. I just love British humor. The fact that nothing matters, that's what's funny for me. On Dream Corp, we try to play it so serious, because these people are real people. But the stuff they're saying, everything can be thrown away, everything is disposable, and that's really funny. The lines and the patients are disposable. I feel like my goal is to make something that is Magnolia meets Airplane!
That's the dream.
I don't understand why comedy isn't in museums. Why is a funny painting not in a museum, but a sad painting is? I'd like to make high art highbrow dick jokes. One of my friends told me that he thinks that Dream Corp is highbrow DIY. And that's really cool, too. That's a big compliment. It's tricky, the concept of walking into someone's dream—it's something we've all thought of doing.
"Why is a funny painting not in a museum, but a sad painting is? I'd like to make high art highbrow dick jokes."
It sounds like you're really interested in infusing different strains of things into what can be found funny.
Absolutely. You don't need to—although getting punched in the dick is funny, it will never not be funny. But there's a way, and it's all in the character development, and the amazing actors we're working with, the humor can come from new, stranger places.
Explain rotoscoping to me.
So the nuts and bolts of how it is: You film the actor, and we're usually in a huge warehouse. You light him or her exactly how you want, and then costume them how you want, and then we take that footage, do the whole scene, edit it together, and then send it to animation and they draw it over each individual frame.
So all that's being filmed is the actor's in an empty warehouse?
Yes, as well as anything they are touching. So it still has that flow. If you're not holding a cup of coffee, and you try to draw a cup of coffee in there, it won't be part of the same illustration. So all you need is that cup, and then one of our animation teams will build an entire background, floor to ceiling. Another one will just do the characters, which is the roto aspect. I think that this form is really beautiful.
How does shooting a scene work?
It's like having an imaginary friend. A lot of time I'm running around telling them what's happening while it's happening. "You're coming in on a helicopter, the wind is blowing, it's freezing, you're on a side of a mountain. It's a very heroic moment." I make sure I can paint the whole scene for them verbally before we even get in there, and then we'll play with it once we're in there. Acting in an empty space is hard, a lot harder than you would think. Every scene is tricky. But, really, it's just feels like playing with your friends on a playground.
Cody Wiewandt is a writer living in New York.
Dream Corp LLCairs Sundays at 11:45 PM on Adult Swim.
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