You simply cannot hold One Day at a Time down. The beloved sitcom, which already beat the chances when it was saved by Pop TV after being canceled at Netflix, returns on Tuesday evening with an all-new episode, miraculously produced in the midst of an industry-wide manufacturing shutdown on live-action exhibits. The trick? The Alvarez household is getting animated. Titled “The Politics Episode,” the brand new half-hour takes a narrative the present was already planning to inform — the household prepares for a go to from their conservative family — and turns it right into a intelligent, colourful animated particular.
Chatting with TV Information, co-showrunner Mike Royce pointed to the mandatory deadline of the 2020 election — and the ingenuity of his fellow showrunner Gloria Calderón Kellett — because the guiding forces behind the particular episode. “We had written an episode that we had been very a lot wanting ahead to doing reside motion, referred to as ‘The Politics Episode,’ about speaking to your loved ones about politics,” Royce mentioned. “We had been afraid that we would not come again in time to have the ability to do it, and Gloria, ever the wonderful hustler who will hold One Day at a Time on for the remainder of all of our lives, had this nice concept that this specific episode was already written in a approach that was going to be shot in another way. It was already a departure for us. It already had lots of fantasy sequences in it. And so it lent itself to changing into an animated episode.”
However making that dream occur meant getting the episode off the bottom in a fraction of the time it normally takes to create an animated particular from scratch. Each showrunners mentioned it was a workforce effort. The important thing got here when government producer Brent Miller discovered Canada-based animation firm Smiley Man, who, in Kellett’s phrases, “thought they might work across the clock” to get all the pieces completed in eight weeks.
“We had been all very dedicated to shifting shortly,” Kellett advised TV Information. “There could be type of an e mail 9-1-1. Like, ‘We simply acquired an e mail. Everybody get on to approve it!’ Simply in order that no person was stopping the practice. The actors had been all extremely beneficiant about their likenesses and approving them shortly, and we simply moved at a speedy tempo to get this completed in time.”
One Day at a Time
Kellett additionally had a hand within the character design course of, sending Smiley Man a handful of animation kinds that she thought had captured Latinx characters effectively. “I despatched them three or 4 designs that I appreciated from the previous of how Latinas had been drawn, et cetera, they usually went with it and supplied one thing we simply actually liked,” she mentioned. She pointed to Lydia (Rita Moreno) and Schneider’s (Todd Grinnell) exaggerated hairstyles as two of her favourite parts of the present’s common characters in cartoon kind.
Along with displaying off the voice appearing skills of the primary forged, “The Politics Episode” welcomes again returning visitor stars Gloria Estefan and Melissa Fumero as Tia Mirtha and Estrellita, respectively, and provides Lin-Manuel Miranda to the present’s spectacular visitor roster. “We needed him endlessly,” Kellett mentioned. “He is a really busy, in style nationwide treasure.” However the manufacturing shutdown gave Miranda simply sufficient of a gap in his schedule that Kellett was in a position to make it occur.
“When this all occurred all the pieces was down,” she recalled. “I consider he was purported to be both prepping or directing his first function movie, and we had been similar to, ‘Why not give it a shot?’ So I simply texted him and mentioned, ‘Hey, what are you doing? You need to do that? You may most likely be completed in two hours.’ And he mentioned, ‘Positive.'”
Go away it to One Day at a Time to discover a solution to flip the manufacturing shutdown into one thing magical.
One Day at a Time‘s animated particular airs Tuesday at 9:30/8:30c on Pop TV and will likely be simulcast on TV Land. Examine again right here after the episode for extra from Royce and Kellett.
The primary three seasons of One Day at a Time are streaming on Netflix.
One Day at a Time Animated Particular