Kit Boss, "Creature Comforts," "King of the Hill," "Carpoolers" executive producer, writer: Mr. Media Interview, Part 1
The confounding thing about seeing your friends become successful is that while you’re obviously happy for the good things that come their way, a tinge of jealousy and envy is not unusual, and that certainly captures my feelings about today’s guest.

Most of you won’t know this man by name, but when you hear his credits, I think you’ll agree with me that he’s accomplished an awful lot, and you will probably understand why I greet him with a touch of envy, at the very least.

Kit Boss was a gangly young kid when I met him more than twenty years ago in the Clearwater Bureau of the St. Petersburg Times. He arrived as this year’s intern, joining the staff for a time in search of real-life newspaper experience. Kit was an instant hit with the staff, funny, self-effacing, and extremely talented at capturing life’s special moments in a way that the best journalists do.

When he later joined the Seattle Times as a TV beat writer, Kit participated in a few critics’ press tours in Los Angeles. He met several men and women who wrote for TV and started thinking, “Hey, maybe I could do that.” And eventually, he did.

So where, you’re wondering, have you seen Kit’s work? Well, his first job was writing a season for “Bill Nye, the Science Guy,” and he won a couple of Emmys for it. His next noteworthy gig was a big one, getting a story credit on the final season of “Seinfeld.” That led to a staff writing job on “King of the Hill,” which was then in its third season. Over the next seven years, he rose to executive producer on that show.

When “King” was briefly cancelled, Kit moved on, eventually landing a job on HBO’s sitcom “Lucky Louie,” starring comedian Louis C. K. When it ended after just after one season, he was asked to adapt the British series, “Creature Comforts,” for CBS. And “Creature Comforts” begins a limited run on CBS on Monday, June 4th, at 8:00 PM, which is why Kit – the show’s executive producer – is here today.



BOB ANDELMAN: Kit, welcome to Mr. Media.

KIT BOSS: Thank you, Bob. Thank you. Your voice is just dripping with jealousy. It’s such a pleasure.

ANDELMAN: Well, and unfortunately, Kit, that introduction was so long, we’re out of time.

BOSS: Oh. You failed to mention my hot wife, Bob.

ANDELMAN: Well, you’ll send me a picture, and we’ll post it and share with everyone.

BOSS: It’s really good to be here.

ANDELMAN: Well, that’s great. I’ve been doing Mr. Media now for a couple of months, and no one has ever mentioned a hot wife before, so I’m going to be completely distracted for the rest of the interview.

BOSS: They’ve got them. I’ve Googled those guys, and they’ve all got hot wives.

ANDELMAN: Well, Kit, tell everybody about “Creature Comforts” and explain, if you would, why our mutual friends, Tim and Bridget, are really squeamish about its debut.

BOSS: Oh, gosh. Well, it’s such a cool idea, and I can say that because it wasn’t mine. It’s easy for me to say that. It’s sort of a hybrid between animation and a reality TV show but more like an old style documentary kind of show where we start with documentary audio that we gather from interviews conducted with just ordinary Americans all around the country, and then we take the audio, and we animate it coming out of the mouths of plastocene animals that are done in stop-motion animation, like “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer” or “Gumby” or more germane to this discussion, Wallace & Gromit. The same studio that does the Wallace & Gromit movies is the studio behind this show. They’re the ones who first did it, Nick Park, the guy who’s won a few Oscars. He was the one who came up with the idea and did the Academy Award-winning short in I believe it was, God, no, I’m blanking, I think it was in the late 1990s that he won an Oscar for that, and that led to a British series of the same name, “Creature Comforts,” and now it’s crossing the pond, and we’re trying to do our version of it for CBS.





ANDELMAN: I need to point out in the interest of total disclosure that if it wasn’t for “Creature Comforts,” there probably wouldn’t be a Mr. Media today, because Kit actually hired me as a field interviewer for the show more than a year ago, and that forced me to invest in a digital audio recorder, and when that assignment ended, I started thinking of other uses for it, which led to this interview series.

BOSS: Wow, I had no idea.

ANDELMAN: Yeah, so it all comes back to you, Kit. Everything comes back to you.

BOSS: Well, that’s a weight off my shoulders. I hope your listeners or listener, whatever the case may be, appreciate that.

ANDELMAN: I hope so. Well, you know, journalism, you gotta disclose everything these days.

BOSS: What was that experience like for you doing those interviews?

ANDELMAN: It was hysterical. This is a little inside, but I wound up interviewing friends of ours from the newspaper business, Tim and Bridget, and they were perfect for it. Of course, now you are interviewing me.

BOSS: That’s true. It’s the old newspaper reporter in me. I just don’t like answering questions. I’d much rather be the one asking them.

ANDELMAN: Well, it was great, because I know that there was a whole platoon of interviewers….

BOSS: More than 40 across the country.






ANDELMAN: Was it that many?

BOSS: Yeah.

ANDELMAN: You guys were great in that you gave us a Web site to look at or some discs to get familiar with the style and the way to do it, and I knew having watched that when I sat down with Tim and Bridget, for example, that they were going to be gold, because they have interesting voices, and they interact with each other, and I would be interviewing them, and I could be picturing in my mind that these two could be animals. In a nice way. We love them, but….

BOSS: Well, it was a really interesting, kind of slippery process, because they have great voices, and that’s kind of where it starts.

We want voices that are filled with the kind of character that an animator can listen to them and just kind of imagine what a creature might be doing, because we never see, none of us ever sees the people doing the interview. Everything that comes after that is sort of invented. We invent what animal they are, we invent the situation that they are in, we invent their body language.

And if you start with a great voice that has a lot of character, and I can quite honestly say, it’s pretty rare, it’s a hard thing to find someone who has a voice like that. I certainly don’t have it. Most announcers, most journalists don’t have it, because they’re trained to kind of take the edges off, but Tim has this great, kind of southern Indiana drawl and a ton of attitude. You know, he had opinions about things, and Bridget, too, and despite that, the really interesting thing is, we only used one clip of their voices in the entire series. That’s how much good stuff we had to choose from.

ANDELMAN: Oh, that’s great. That’ll put them at ease, too.

BOSS: Yeah. They’ll only have to worry about that one. That one’s really, really embarrassing. Fifteen seconds.

ANDELMAN: Well, it was a great concept. My daughter, who is now ten, would have been nine, I guess, at the time, watched over my shoulder as I was watching sort of the training videos for how to do it and the kind of thing we were looking at, and she and my wife just thought it looked like it would be hysterical.



BOSS: The original show, the series, not just the Oscar-winning short, which was ’89 was actually when Nick Park did that. That’s when he won the Oscar for the short film, the series was just hilarious. One of the biggest challenges for the British show was getting across the idea to the viewers that these are real people. They are not scripted responses. They are not actors in a sound booth somewhere recording lines like every other animated show. It’s just people who are spontaneously answering questions, and it’s hard when you see the show to imagine that none of this stuff was invented. It was just people kind of speaking from the heart.

ANDELMAN: And God bless each and every one of them. It’s funny.

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© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

"Creature Comforts" art and video © Aardman Studios.

Labels: Creature Comforts, King of the Hill, Kit Boss, Louis CK, Lucky Louie, Seattle Times, Seinfeld, St. Petersburg Times, The Simpsons

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