‘Among Us’ Creator on Making the Animated Adaptation Accessible to Non-Gamers (Exclusive)

Among Us was a COVID-era sensation, challenging its online players to travel to space as armless astronauts and snuff out the “impostors” among them … or die trying. It was the perfect remedy for the malaise of the lockdown era, and now, six years later, it’s taking over the streaming scene, too.

Owen Dennis of Infinity Train and Regular Show fame created the series, which arrived in full on Paramount+ on Friday (June 5). In it, we here, we caught up with Dennis to talk about how he brought the quirky world of Among Us into scripted animation.

I heard this has been in the works for a long time. Can you just talk about the journey to this moment?

Owen Dennis: Yeah, I first pitched my concept of the show to Innersloth in, I think, 2022, because I knew that they were looking for maybe an adaptation to a TV show. So I pitched them my idea, which was basically adapting the Skeld map into a murder mystery show, and they liked it, and we spent a few days with some writers figuring out roughly what a plot could be, and that sort of thing, and they liked that too. So eventually, we partnered with CBS and started making it, and that took, I think, maybe a year and a half, two years to actually make it. 

There are a lot of ways that you could have done the show… Can you talk about how you landed on this being a character-focused journey?

Yes, I’m very much focused on character. I love anthology shows, I love sci-fi, I love fantasy, I love all those things, I love giant high-concept things, but I like them through the lens of a character because that’s how we experience the world. When people watch Star Wars or something, they’re watching through the lens of characters. I feel like sometimes people want to read an entire Wikipedia page about the world that the characters are in, but like that’s not how we experience life. We’re born, and then we slowly figure out how the world works as we keep going, and then every, you know, two years, a new documentary releases about something. You’re like, “What, that happened where? What?” And that’s how life goes. So, it’s important to me to do character-focused stuff first and foremost, and then reveal the world through the lens of character.

Paramount+

You also did a really good job, though, of winking to the biggest elements of the game itself — the little bones sticking out and then obviously the way that they move through the map. Can you talk about just throwing those elements in for those of us who were familiar with the game?

Every time you’re working on an adaptation, you’re basically working for two different audiences, which can be tough: people who are familiar with the adapted property, and people who are not. So you have to make something that can appeal to both of them, and so anytime I include a joke like that, where it’s like the zoomed-out view of them walking around the ship or something, anyone who hasn’t played the game can still look at that and go, “Oh, this is kind of funny.”  …So you make it a joke first and foremost, and then also people who play the game will get sort of another layer of that joke, and it’s fine. Both experiences are fine. So it’s important to me that anytime there is something that is a nod to the game, it’s something that does work for people who haven’t played the game as well.

Nice, I understand that you’re saying there’s a bifurcation of the audience that you’re dealing with, but honestly, that goes two ways, too, because you’re also dealing with kids who are going to be drawn to a cartoon show, but then also the adults who are going to have to watch along with them. I think you include quite a few adult jokes.

When I think about jokes and things like that, I just do whatever I think is funny, and fortunately, I sometimes think that jokes that are incredibly childish are quite fine … Look, I don’t think it matters how old I get; there’s still gonna be a point where I’m like, “That’s a fart joke, and it’s fine.” I’m convinced that the first joke that ever happened was a fart. I think that cavemen were sitting around a fire, and someone got surprised by a fart, and that was the first joke… I don’t think we have any fart jokes in this, but I want to make sure that there’s jokes in there that adults are going to get, and then teens are going to get, and that kids will get as well, and there’s all kinds of jokes in there. Sometimes we have a swear word or two, but I don’t want to lean on swear words, because if a joke has to swear, and the swear is the funny part, then it’s not actually a joke, which works… I think if you want to make a joke for adults, often there has to be a little bit of satire, a little bit of commentary. I think it’s something that adults will latch on to. For kids, they might not get those things, but they also can understand cadences of jokes, and they also will latch on to other things that you might not fully [get]… I remember in Infinity Train, there were a bunch of kids in the focus group for my show that latched on to one point when a character was writing on a piece of paper… yeah, it was sort of a joke, I don’t know, but the kids really liked it. That sort of thing happens.

Were all of these actors people that you had imagined for the characters?

We imagined the characters first, and then actors that fit them, and all of them were [great]. We loved them all. It was all our first choices. They were all great. Really happy with everybody that we had on the team. It was great. I love them all.

Among Us, Streaming now, Paramount+