Animation offered endless creative possibilities for the team behind ‘Kevin,’ but as co-creators Aubrey Plaza and Joe Wengert and executive producer Dan Murphy explained, one of the biggest priorities was ensuring the series always maintained an authentic emotional core amid the chaos.
“Animation is so fun because you can literally do anything,” offered Plaza.
“It’s a comedy show, so jokes and having things be funny was important, but it’s also an emotional thing that the character is going through and going through a breakup and trying to find your home and where you belong is serious,” says Wengert who co-created the show and serves as a showrunner.
“We were trying to keep the real world of the show very grounded,” says Murphy.
In conversations with Aubrey Plaza, Joe Wengert, and Dan Murphy, the creative team behind ‘Kevin’ tell Awards Focus how the animated comedy grew out of Plaza and Wengert’s real-life breakup and shared custody of their cat, evolving into a funny yet emotionally resonant story about relationships, identity, and belonging. The trio explained how they balanced absurdist humor with authentic emotional stakes, drawing tonal inspiration from projects like ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’ and classic ensemble series such as ‘The Golden Girls’ and ‘Taxi.’ They also reflected on the challenges of establishing rules within the show’s animated world, the vulnerability brought by the voice cast, and their hope that audiences ultimately connect deeply with ‘Kevin’ and the ensemble of rescue animals navigating love, loneliness, and self-discovery.
Loosely drawing from a real-life breakup and the cat left between two former partners, ‘Kevin’ follows a lovable feline whose world is turned upside down after his humans split. Forced to start over at a pet rescue in Astoria, Queens, Kevin finds himself surrounded by an eccentric group of rescue animals who help him navigate love, identity, and the search for where he truly belongs.
Co-created by Plaza and Wengert, who also serves as the showrunner, the voice cast includes Jason Schwartzman, Plaza, Whoopi Goldberg, John Waters, Aparna Nancherla, Gil Ozeri, and Amy Sedaris.
The first season of ‘Kevin’ is currently streaming on Prime Video.
Awards Focus: It’s so nice to meet you today. How are you doing?
Joe Wengert: Good.
Aubrey Plaza: How are you?
AF: I’m doing well. The premise of a cat deciding to break up with his humans is both instantly funny and emotionally specific. What was the original genesis behind ‘Kevin’ and the world of the series?
Joe Wengert: Well, it was coming from a real place in that we used to date and we adopted some cats together and then broke up afterwards. It’s a situation I’m sure a lot of people have to go through of what do you do with the pets after the fact? We first had the idea to set it in a world where pet adoption isn’t just a one-way street. It isn’t just like, I want that cat. The cat has to go, well, what’s your deal? Do I want to go with you? And then from that, thinking about our real life experiences, we thought it would be funny that when we broke up, Kevin also breaks up with us and is like, I’m going to go see what else is out there and play the field.
In real life, he was stuck with me. For a couple of years, I was like, is he bummed out that he could be Aubrey Plaza’s cat again? He’s in my studio apartment with me.
AF: The show operates in a space where absurd comedy and very recognizable relationship dynamics coexist. How did you approach establishing the tone early on and in what ways did it evolve throughout the process?
Aubrey Plaza: I think, well, one thing that was really helpful is we’ve all known each other forever. Obviously, Joe and I were together, but I’ve known Danny since I was 16 and then Joe since I was honestly 19. Well, 19, really, but our sense of humor and a lot of the writers that we hired were friends that we had also known coming from the comedy space so we all had a very similar, at least, starting point for our sense of humor. But I think we had a lot of discussions early on about the tone and how we wanted to make something that felt more grounded in the animation space, but also funny, obviously. But we tried to hone in on a very specific tone from the very beginning.
Joe Wengert: It’s a comedy show, so jokes and having things be funny was important, but it’s also an emotional thing that the character is going through and going through a breakup and trying to find your home and where you belong is serious so we were always trying to balance those two things. And yeah, I think our writers’ room had a good mix of like people that I worked with on ‘Big Mouth’ and then people that we knew from UCB so there was a shared sensibility right from the start.
Once you get in there and you start writing the scripts, things change and you start coming up with rules and what can happen in this world, what can’t happen in this world. I think also our actors—we were really lucky in that they brought a lot to the table as well in terms of the choices that they were making in playing these characters.
Jason Schwartzman brought a lot of vulnerability to Kevin. Amy, I feel brought a real energy and a meanness to Brandi that we were really having fun leaning in with of how mean she is to everybody.
AF: Were there any visual influences that helped shape the look?
Joe Wengert: We talked about trying to get as much of a cinematic look as you can in animation. We were talking about some old 70s movies. There’s a movie called ‘Panic in Needle Park’ that Aubrey was talking about a lot as we were starting out working on the show. The Wes Anderson New York of ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’ was another touchstone that we talked about.
Aubrey Plaza: Yeah, we thought a lot about framing and about Wes Anderson, for example, his very composed shots—very deliberate placements of characters and depth of field and stuff. We talked a lot about different movie references that we loved.
Joe Wengert: A big thing we had to figure out early on because animals are smaller than us is, are they going to be on all fours or are they going to be bipedal? They’re a little bit bigger than cats and dogs normally are because we didn’t want every shot to have that weird eye line because we knew we were going to do a lot of scenes where they’re communicating with humans.
We talked a lot about finding those moments where they go into their animal nature and they do go on all fours. Usually, if they need comfort or if they’re scared or something, they revert to how animals act in our world.
AF: How did you approach building the group dynamic of the animals at the rescue, both on the page and with the cast?
Joe Wengert: I mean, on the page, I always have a North Star for myself in thinking of an ensemble, and that’s the show ‘The Golden Girls.’ So honestly, we were trying to think of those four characters as archetypes to surround Kevin with. Also, ‘Taxi’ was a show in the 70s about a bunch of cab drivers that all wanted to be doing something else. I feel like I was thinking about that a lot as we were trying to build the ensemble. Danny DeVito played this guy, Louis DePalma, who is the boss there, and the Brandi character came out of that.
And then in making the characters, yeah, we were just trying to think of different perspectives of people who are living their life outside of a traditional relationship that could give different perspectives that could be given to Kevin and building the characters from the inside out that way when it came to Armando, Cupcake, and Judy.
Dan Murphy: Yeah, I think all of our characters aren’t specific ages in the show, but you feel that Judy’s the baby and Kevin’s in the middle somewhere. We have solder characters that feel like mentors that have lived very different lives, but also bring that life experience to the way that they’re guiding Kevin to figure out who he is and what he wants. I think once the cast was in place, you really felt that mentor relationship with them.
AF: Were actors primarily recording individually, or were there opportunities to record together?
Joe Wengert: We were mostly doing individual because we were writing the show in LA, but a lot of our actors were on the East Coast. We would do table reads and we would have the actors join over Zoom if they could, and that would really help inform things. But for the most part, when we got to recording, people were doing on their own.
We have a really great voice director, who’s also a writer on the show, named John Reynolds, and he’s a great actor as well. He was able to act with all of our cast and it was a lot of fun to watch him sort of play against all the actors and play all the other characters in the show, basically.
Aubrey Plaza: Did the ants record together?
Joe Wengert: No.
Aubrey Plaza: They didn’t.
Joe Wengert: There’s this popular podcast called Dough Boys, and we had already had Mike Mitchell on the show as Dan. We cast his co-host from that podcast as the other ant in that episode because we were trying to draft off of the dynamic that they have on their show.
AF: Aubrey, how did you approach Dana specifically, and were there elements you brought to the character that weren’t originally on the page?
Aubrey Plaza: I wasn’t sure I was going to play her right from the very beginning so it wasn’t always meant to be me. But then—I don’t know. I think I just liked the idea that Dana was kind of this hard ass, super motivated, not afraid to say what’s on her mind kind of character.
I think we just thought a lot about the dynamic between her and Dan and just kind of, I mean, I think, yeah, I don’t know. I feel like once I decided to play it, there’s aspects of me from that time in my life in New York when I was just so hungry to climb my way up and always working in these weird office buildings and doing stuff. I feel like unconsciously, I thought about that a lot when we talked about Dana.
Dan Murphy: But yeah, I think when we first were starting the show, and the Dana character was was much more focused on her job and her career, and she was very career-oriented in getting ahead. I think the way that she came out when Aubrey started playing her was, you really feel a lot of the emotion between her and Kevin in their episodes that she really cares about him and is really affected by this breakup. I think that’s kind of how it’s evolved since she started.
AF: What was the biggest creative or tonal challenge in bringing the series to life?
Aubrey Plaza: Did you say tonal challenge?
AF: Creative or tonal.
Joe Wengert: Hmm. I think I’m glad that we’re stuck on this question because that tells me that we have a great experience.
Dan Murphy: Yeah.
Aubrey Plaza: Well, I will say, early on in the writer’s room, we did have—animation is so fun because you can literally do anything. I wouldn’t say it was a huge challenge, but one thing that we would always have to monitor is, how crazy are we getting? Because we could come up with any idea, because you can make anything in animation happen, but it was always a recalibration to go, okay, well, not every inanimate object can talk in our world or coming up with the rules of the world was a thing, but a good challenge to be specific about how far can we go in this show. Because once you break certain rules, then it’s game over. Anything can happen so you have to ride that line in animation.
Dan Murphy: Yeah, we were trying to keep the real world of the show very grounded, but we had the opportunity in some of our fantasy sequences, like in the dream sequence, to explore breaking the rules, but able to keep it in a dream or a hallucination or something so that the real world that we had set up still felt very grounded.
Joe Wengert: It’s always a question of, you want to justify why is this animated? Why are we doing an animated show? The talking animals aspect of it is doing a lot. But then, yeah, it’s finding that balance between having a cool or visual moment happening, but having it always come from a place where it’s connected to the character’s emotions.
AF: What do you hope audiences take away from watching ‘Kevin’?
Joe Wengert: I hope that they’re rooting for him and they’re invested in where he’s eventually going to end up. I hope that people are thinking about their own relationships with other people and with animals on a deeper level.
Aubrey Plaza: Yeah. I hope that people just fall in love with the characters. My favorite shows of all time are always those kind of shows when you just are so in love with the characters, you don’t care what scenario they’re in, what’s happening. You’re just happy to go along for the ride and to be with them. I hope that people feel that way about the characters we created.
AF: Thank you so much.
Joe Wengert: Thank you.
Aubrey Plaza: Thank you.
Dan Murphy: Thank you. We appreciate it.