It took a village to shape Burr’s Netflix ‘Family’
F is for Family, but it also could be for the big four-oh.
When stand-up comic Bill Burr turned 40, “the kids I was performing to in college were 20 years younger than me, and they just grew up differently: Their parents were more emotional, they had play dates, they wore helmets when they rode bicycles. It wasn’t just sending kids outside like, ‘ OK, come home when the streetlights come on.’ ”
When he would perform bits about growing up in the early 1970s, “rather than laughs, I felt more concern and social consciousness. The jokes weren’t landing like they used to.”
So Burr took that material and turned it into the animated F is
for Family, a NSFW sitcom cocreated with The Simpsons’ Michael Price and premiering Friday on Netflix. In the six-episode series, Burr voices hapless patriarch Frank Murphy, with a cast including Laura Dern, Justin Long and Sam Rockwell as his family and neighbors.
While Family is semi-autobiographical, it also was influenced by other TV shows and movies. Burr shares those inspirations:
THE HONEYMOONERS Sitcom, 1955-56
When it comes to Family’s template, “a lot of people will be looking to other cartoons, going, ‘Oh, King of the Hill, The Simp
sons, South Park.’ It’s really The Honeymooners. The Honeymoon
ers was always the same thing where they were going to do something simple, like get a new refrigerator or Ralph was going to get a promotion. Then there was all this dysfunction and yelling and scheming, but it always ended with, ‘ Baby, you’re the greatest.’ I always wanted to end on that because, in my family, there were all these volatile personalities, but when the smoke cleared, you were sitting down having dinner that Mom or Dad made, or decorating the Christmas tree. But no one ever said, ‘Baby, you’re the greatest.’ No one ever expressed love — it was implied by actions.” JONNY QUEST Animated series, 1964-65 “What I liked about Jonny
Quest was that people actually died on the show — it’s the realism. In our show, if somebody falls off a cliff, they’re gonna die. Not saying that’s going to happen, but that’s what I always liked about Jonny, for whatever reason. It always struck me as, ‘This seems a lot more real.’ ” BARNEY MILLER Sitcom, 1975-1982
“A lot of movies and TV (shows) set in the ’70s, they make it look like everyone was walking around dressed like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever: There was a disco ball everywhere you went, everyone had a lava lamp. The ’ 70s that I remember was a lot of that early ’70s thing,” more akin to what you see in Serpico or
Barney Miller. “If you look at Barney, because it was of that time, there’s a lot of browns and yellows, and shirts and jackets and fatter ties. But they weren’t super, super crazy — that stuff was in style. So we didn’t watch stuff made about the ’70s, we watched movies and shows from the ’70s.” THE GOODBYE GIRL Movie, 1977
Frank’s guilty pleasure — a cop show called Colt Luger — pays homage to Kojak and Starsky and
Hutch, as well as this Oscar-winning romantic comedy starring Richard Dreyfuss and Marsha Mason. “It takes place in New York City, and there’s not one person in that movie who isn’t white, until the love interest (Mason), in broad daylight, is taking her groceries out of the car and out of nowhere, two Puerto Rican actors and an African-American actor show up and mug her. It was really shocking and so bad.” So with Family, “a lot of the social commentary, about where people were at in terms of feminism and racism and homophobia, we put it in the (characters’ TV shows), because I felt if we walked around having the characters doing that, it would be too much.”