Creators Bart Batchelor and Chris Nielsen talk about the long journey their Canadian adult animated comedy series about a paranormal detective agency took to arrive at Adult Swim, where it now streams at midnight.
“The premise of Psi Cops,” says co-creator Bart Batchelor, “is basically [The X Files’] Mulder and Scully, but replaced with two morons.”
Whether this was in fact the way he and co-creator Chris Nielsen actually pitched the show is uncertain, but clearly they did something right. (Not that it happened overnight – see below.) The Canadian adult animated cartoon, which premiered on Adult Swim Canada in 2023 as its first original animated series, received a commission from Corus Entertainment for a first season of 24 episodes. And now, with Psi Cops’ July 7 premiere on Adult Swim, what had previously been available only to those lucky enough to live in the northernmost latitudes of North America can be enjoyed by residents of the USA.
The aforementioned morons are CFFs (coworker friends forever) Kydd and Felixx, top detectives at a paranormal investigation agency, who – under the supervision of true believer Chief Beef (Tina Grant) and aided by a rag-tag group of "experts” – investigate witches, swamp hillbillies, snake gods, aliens, and voodoo dolls, among other supernatural mysteries. Or, as Batchelor puts it, “It's just packed with every paranormal entity and thing you've ever seen.”
As shown in this clip:
…and this trailer:
In addition to writing and co-directing all the episodes, Nielsen and Batchelor also provide the voices for Kidd and Felixx, respectively. This multiplicity of creative hats is a direct outgrowth of their early work together.
“We both got our start making cartoons on YouTube,” says Nielsen. “In addition to our day jobs in advertising, Bart and I were creating stuff where we would do all the voices, all the writing, all the animation and everything.”
“At the core, Chris and I really are a comedy duo, before we're animators,” adds Batchelor. “We make comedy in a lot of different forms. And because the comedy comes from our voice and us, it's kind of a no-brainer for most of our shows that we're going to also voice them.”
Another determining factor in their approach and execution is the discipline that was instilled in them at their aforementioned “real” jobs. Working in the advertising space taught them about the importance of both clarity and conciseness.
“Our 12-plus years in advertising were slightly painful because it's an intense industry,” Batchelor shares. “But there's probably not a single part of Psi Cops that wasn't touched by stuff we learned in ads. The biggest thing that's constantly punched into you is clear messaging. So, we're always trying to make the joke as clear as possible, the scene as simple and readable as possible.”
Their work on YouTube gradually evolved into the series World Doctors, which ran from 2014 to 2016, and chronicled the third-world misadventures of two medics named James and James. One of the fans of the series was David Alpert, co-founder and CEO of Skybound Entertainment, who was interested in working with them, but needed a show that would fit Skybound’s brand.
“It was kind of a brief, actually,” Batchelor recalls. “He came to us and said, ‘I want something like World Doctors, but it has to be genre.’ And we ended up pitching a few ideas, and then of course landed on Psi Cops, because it's just got infinite stories to tell in the paranormal space.”
The show’s look, while bearing a family resemblance to the minimally animated 3D stylings of World Doctors, is considerably more kinetic, as well as having a decidedly 2D aspect that invokes more traditional animation.
“I think Bart’s and my main goal from the beginning with Psi Cops was to come up with something of our very own that we could put out there,” Nielsen says. “World Doctors was janky 3D on purpose – this kind of uncanny valley that we played with. But it definitely had a PlayStation 2 sort of graphics vibe to it. And we wanted to find a way to have both at the same time – the weird uncanny valley of 3D but unified in a way that would come off as a comic-booky, Archer-y, 2D style of show, and give us that sitcom-ish overlay. We still had the full ability to break out all our characters, our full 3D models, so they could do all those action scenes and stuff. So it was a fun sort of hybrid. We had to force a bunch of people to learn a bunch of programs they'd never heard of in their lives.”
Like the already legendary Archer, whose superlative writing and character-based humor drove the show more than its sometimes laughably minimalist animation (which grew more and more sophisticated over the show’s 14 season run), Psi Cops’ emphasis on comedy and character allows for a lot of wiggle room in the visual execution. While Nielsen clearly recognizes the contribution of the animation, and is quick to credit the efforts of the animators, he points out that it’s usually pretty clear early in the creative process whether something is going to work or not.
“The animation is an important part of our show,” he says, “but really our comedy is driving it from the beginning. If you're not laughing at the script and if you're not laughing at the animatic, then it's not going to be funny in the end. Everything's got to work at that level, at that sort of minimal clarity level, and then the animation is something you can put on top and explore.”
Asked what the biggest challenge has been for them in their long journey from YouTube cartoons to international distribution, they both agree it was the length of the journey from YouTube cartoons to international distribution.
“Number one was making the U.S. sale,” Batchelor affirms. “I mean, it was a long road. It took six years from the point that everyone decided we liked Psi Cops to getting the greenlight to make it in Canada. Then, because we finished the show right when Hollywood kind of imploded [the pandemic], it was really challenging to find our way. We wanted it to air in Canada, but Canada's got a small audience. We really wanted it in the States, and especially wanted it on Adult Swim. Anyway, we're so happy that they picked it up and they're airing it.”
“I'd just double down on that,” says Nielsen. “Not to say that making the show wasn’t hard. There was a point when we were animating three episodes while we were writing two episodes and we were voicing two other episodes. It was compact. We were doing a lot at once. But that was also thrilling. A lot of waiting went into this, it was just a long gestation. Event after event – a pandemic happened, I had a kid. So, it's been a long journey. I think patience has been the most difficult part of this.”
