Is The Detour the best comedy you’re not watching?
The show, which returned for its third season this week on the Comedy Network, is a breakneck comedy about the misadventures of the Parker family: mansplainer Nate (Jason Jones, who created the show with his wife Samantha Bee of the Daily Show and Full Frontal), his pragmatic partner Robin (Justified’s Natalie Zea, wielding a masterful deadpan) and their twins Delilah (Ashley Gerasimovich) and Jareb (not a typo played by Liam Carroll).
In the first season, the Parkers spend weeks driving from upstate New York to Florida as the righteous Nate tried to blow the whistle on a pharmaceutical conglomerate, finding disaster at every rest stop. In the second, Nate brings the family to Manhattan for a new job that immediately collapses into a Jenga game of betrayal, mail fraud and international espionage.
Season three opens with the Parkers hiding out in Alaska, trying to figure out how to resume their normal lives while being pursued by an obsessed United States Postal Inspection Service agent (Laura Benanti).
It sounds like a broad farce, and it is, with Jones and his writers (including longtime collaborator Mike Beaver, with whom he wrote the movies Ham & Cheese and Cooper’s Christmas) gleefully heaping all manner of torment on Nate. (You can catch up to the show’s first two seasons on CraveTV.)
But look past all the comic beatings, poisonings and electrocutions and there’s something else going on. Jones and I talked about that just before Christmas.
The Detour is a comedy about a squabbling family that takes family squabbles to an almost ludicrously exaggerated level. But it’s also, somehow, about the intersection of corruption and personal responsibility in today’s America.
You can’t put it in a box. People say “What’s it like?” and I go, “Well … nothing else, really. There’s nothing else to compare it to.” I find it difficult to compare it to any other existing show.
Seriously, though. The subtext of each season is as much about America losing its way as it is about Nate destroying himself and everyone around him. How did you get TBS to go along with that?
I think sometimes maybe they don’t see what we’re doing? [laughs] We sugar-coat it with enough jokes and vomit gags that they don’t necessarily hear the subtext that’s being yelled out.
But it’s clearly there.
Absolutely. I mean, we do a very exhaustive writing period and we all work really hard to come up with cogent points and sage wisdom to impart to our viewers, and then we coat it with some funny jokes on top.
So is there a similar message in season three? Is there another theme underneath the jokes?
There is. I’ll let you find it. I don’t want to give too much away, I don’t like to foist my thematic values upon people. But it’s there for the taking if you want.
Gotcha. So then, to the subject of the vomit gags. You’ve always been willing to do this stuff, you’ve always gone that extra mile. You filmed your own vasectomy for a field piece on The Daily Show.
Yes.
So how complicated is it to plan a gross-out moment, and how much are you willing to do for the show? Is there anything they haven’t let you do?
Yes. But a lot of times, it’s the standards and practices lawyers saying no it’s rarely the creative side. It forces me and the people I work with to come up with more creative ways to do the exact same thing. For example, last year in an episode where someone gives birth, I wanted to do a crowning shot with the kids walking in and seeing it. And they were like, “Absolutely no way you can show that.”
So we came up the idea of a reverse crowning shot from the baby’s point of view coming out of the birth canal, which reveals two screaming teenagers yelling at a vagina. It’s a much better shot that hadn’t been done before, to my knowledge. So sometimes it actually does force you into a better creative place.
This sounds like the most ambitious of the three seasons in terms of location and scope.
Oh, by far. [laughs] What we managed to do this season is pretty incredible. The first episode is really fun, it’s a nice welcome back – I don’t think we compromised anything – but it’s just a fraction of what we do. It’s so tame compared to what we do for the rest of the season, in terms of ambition.
You mostly shot in Calgary, right?
We didn’t shoot too much in Calgary proper because we were trying to mimic Alaska. We were all over Alberta – up in the mountains quite a bit, we were in Bragg Creek and Canmore. We shot in Beiseker – it’s on the other side, towards Saskatchewan, and it is depressing [laughs]. But it looks phenomenal on camera. And then then we did a week in Vancouver and a week in the Dominican Republic. Just bouncing around a lot.
As far as ambition goes, the concept was so simple in the first season. You could explain it to people even if you couldn’t explain the theme or tone. And now it’s spiraled into this incredibly complex narrative: there’s the indictment of American corporate culture, but also, emotionally, the family has become this angry octopus that won’t stop punching itself in the face.
Yes! I always wanted to cast as big a net as possible – to tell a very simple story but alluding to a much bigger story to come. That was not necessarily what the network wanted. With season two, the network was like, “What happened to the simple road trip? Where’s that gone?” I mean, there is a road trip [to New York] they just get there in the first episode. It’s much harder for them to sell to the masses, I guess. But I feel like we did a decent job [with] that first season of rounding up as many people as we can, and now I’m bringing along this net that I’ve snared them in. And they’re like, “What’s happening? I missed a week! I’ve got to go back and watch it again!” Because honestly if you do miss an episode you can catch up. It’s always better to have seen all of them.
And serialization makes us pay closer attention – which is kind of important for the number of callbacks this show drops.
That’s what I love. The Simpsons did it better than anybody, calling back something in season 25 that happened in season one. I just used to marvel at that detail. And that’s what I want to do in live action, really reward fans who pay attention. But also not alienate fans showing up for the first time.
Now that you mention it I can sort of see the similarities. The Detour does share a certain emotional honesty with The Simpsons. Both shows make it possible for people – husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters – to actually hate each other for 30 seconds before they get back to working together.
That was another selling point, in addition to the family road-trip plot line – the dynamic of the show was always honesty. And not honesty to the point of bluntness, necessarily, but just truth. When a question is asked, not sugar-coating anything and giving the right response to, say, how we would speak to an adult. Not infantilizing 12 year olds – which ultimately leads to our demise.
Nate’s compulsion to be the good guy – to do the right thing, or at least, what he believes is right thing in any given moment – has become this fascinating runner that just keeps going. He’s a moral arrow, but the world won’t accommodate him.
Right! Robin has this great line – which is actually stolen from my wife – that he would rather be right than happy, which is such a character flaw. You want to talk about a larger point, that’s what we’re witnessing in America right now – a man who would rather be right than happy.
Maybe that’s why Nate can still be framed as the hero of the show: unlike the other guy, he isn’t ultimately in a position to do any damage to anyone except himself.
Well, himself and his family.
It’s that Daffy Duck thing where he clearly states what he wants and proceeds to shoot himself in the face over and over again until he can’t get it.
Right. And we sort of have that in the physical manifestation of the amount that Nate gets hurt. As he takes an emotional bludgeoning it’s also manifesting itself in the physical world. He’s just like this Terminator, getting pummelled and getting back up again and again. Everything comes back to this guy wanting to do the right thing, forcing his will upon people, and that ultimately is his downfall.
The Detour airs Thursdays at 10 pm on the Comedy Network. thecomedynetwork.ca/Shows/TheDetour
