‘Paradise PD’ Creators Explain Why They Went After ‘Asshole’ Elon Musk

It’s not all that common to come across a show on Netflix that’s so unbelievably crass it makes you question whether cancel culture even exists. Paradise PD, which often occupied the streamer’s Top 10 TV Shows list in 23 countries, is one of those titles. First debuting on the platform in August 2018, the animated adult comedy series brought to you by Waco O’Guin and Roger Black, co-creators of Brickleberry on Comedy Central, pushes every societal boundary imaginable.

Paradise PD centers on Kevin Crawford (David Herman), a young cop who joins the wildly corrupt police department of Paradise, a crime-infested hellscape. His father (Tom Kenny) is the chief of police, while his mother Karen (Grey Griffin) is the mayor. The rest of the unhinged department includes Gina Jabowski (Donna Jay Fulks), a violent lunatic; Dusty Marlow (Dana Snyder), an overweight lover of cats; Fitz (Cedric Yarbrough), who suffers from PTSD and might be a crime lord; and Bullet (Kyle Kinane), a drug-addicted dog.

If you’ve seen both Brickleberry and Paradise PD, you might notice some similarities between the characters. That’s because they’re essentially the same. Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos was a big fan of Brickleberry and after some discussions, the guys realized they basically needed to find a way to make a Brickleberry for Netflix without using its intellectual property. 

“After Brickleberry we were looking to do something different, so we came up with the pitch Farzar,” explains Black. “We tried to sell that to Netflix but they didn’t want to do any sci-fi stuff at that point. Brickleberry was a huge hit on Netflix. Ted Sarandos told us himself, he came to our pitch meeting prepared. We kind of realized that they wanted Brickleberry but without having to pay for it. They didn’t want to license it, they wanted to own it, so we basically made the same show but different.”

He adds, “Doing a workplace comedy with cops is similar [to park rangers] and we didn’t actually plan to use some of the same voices, but we auditioned hundreds of people for those roles and Dave Herman and Tom Kenny just did the best. We knew people were going to complain, but people are going to complain no matter what we do because that’s what people do, so we decided to just go for it. We figured we had built a fan base that would come over and they absolutely did. Paradise was a huge hit for Netflix, especially because it’s not an expensive show either. They were shocked how well it did.”

Between the time Brickleberry ended and Paradise PD began, O’Guin had been on an eye-opening ride-along with a cop buddy of his, an experience which birthed the idea for Paradise PD: “I knew a police officer and went on an insane ride-along where the guy gave me a loaded gun and said, ‘If I start getting my ass kicked I want you to use that gun,’ and I was like, ‘What?!’ I think he was messing with me because when I asked where the safety was he said there’s no safety on the gun.”

“Then he sends me into this crack house. He told me to go around back and ‘clear’ the back while he goes in the front. I assumed he was just messing with me and knew nobody was in there, but I didn’t know. It was kinda fun but I was also terrified and he laughed at me the whole time. So parts of that cop went into [the character] Gina Jabowski from Paradise — kind of a good cop just off-the-rails.”

The concept for Brickleberry was also inspired by a particular individual that was a lot closer to home for the comedy duo. “Waco’s father-in-law was an actual Yellowstone park ranger and he took his job really seriously,” says Black. “So seriously that I would make fun of him about it and call him a tree cop. Like, ‘Hey, you’re just a tree cop,’ just messing with him. One day at Waco’s wedding reception he had had enough of the tree cop stuff. So I say something to him and he grabs my thumb, does like a park ranger-hold, bends it backwards and drops me to my knees.”

Waco adds: “So we decided to base the main character Woody after my father-in-law, whose name is also Woody. He ended up loving the fact that we named a main character after him. He came to the premiere party and had a fake mustache that he put on so he hammed it up.”

In both of their shows, the guys have gone after tons of celebrities and political figures. “We’ve never been super into starfuckerism. If we’re going to have any celebrity, we’re not into casting them and rolling out a red carpet for them. We’re not like that,” says Black. “We don’t go to the parties. That’s probably why we don’t get invited to the parties. We’ve never felt like we’re in the inner circle even though we live [in Hollywood] and have four TV shows now, but that’s not like anything we ever wanted.” 

“It’s like the Howard Stern thing back in the day, where we’re all about busting celebrities’ balls as much as possible,” he continues. “We just think it’s way funnier to make fun of celebrities instead of having them on the show and kissing their ass, and also since they’re already rich, powerful, famous, they’re super-easy targets. Nobody’s going to really have a problem with it. It’s punching up.”

Long before Elon Musk purchased Twitter, rendering it a complete shitshow, the co-creators of Paradise PD were making fun of the fragile billionaire. He’s first introduced in the show’s sixth episode, “Meet the Jabowskis,” where he’s seen sucking his own dick while driving a Tesla (all Tesla owners in Paradise suck their own dicks while driving). He subsequently appears in a number of other episodes, including “The Brozone Lair,” as the show runs through every stupid thing he’s done, from calling a hero diver a pedophile to naming his son wingdings, and “Diddy’s Home,” which sees Musk engage in an ever-escalating feud with Randall, devoting all his resources to ruining him, before the two bond of their self-hatred and have sex with each other in front of the TV cameras.

“We didn’t know when we wrote that episode that Elon was gonna go buck wild buying Twitter, then starting to say some weird stuff on Twitter, so we were like, oh man, this is even better than we expected,” says O’Guin “What we just released [making fun of Elon] was written two years ago. If we would have known about his Twitter purchase, all that would have been in the episode. We had already had plenty of material just off everything he had already done just acting like a child. Back when we wrote that episode he wasn’t some right-wing darling, he was the dude with the electric car that really did some great things.”

When Musk started to receive backlash from Twitter users after banning a number of journalists who were critical of him, O’Guin set out on a mission to get blocked by Musk himself, but to no avail: “The only thing I’m disappointed about is that he hasn’t blocked me or banned me from Twitter because I was sure what we did to him [in the show], especially if I kept tweeting him, would get to him. Either he didn’t see it or he held back his impulses for once.”

As for why they’ve chosen to go after Musk out of all the terrible celebrities out there, well, it’s because of his cringe-worthy sense of humor. “He thinks he [has a sense of humor] but it’s just bad memes and dad jokes. ‘Let that sink in?’ I mean, come on. Did you see that picture? He walked into Twitter with a sink,” offers O’Guin, adding, “He just seemed like an asshole, honestly. I mean, after that cave diver comment that came out of nowhere I was like, ‘What? This guy’s not a serious adult.’”

If you recall, back in 2018, Musk came under fire after calling a British diver who helped rescue 12 boys and their football coach trapped in a flooded cave in Thailand a “pedo” on Twitter, and then doubling down. “He’s so petty. He has this submarine and says he’s going to send it down to save the day and the guys are like, ‘It won’t fit through the cave dude,’ and he calls him a ‘pedo,’” says Black. “These guys are risking their lives trying to dive through here to try and save some kids and they’re a pedo? Then the dude sues him and I don’t think he won but she should have won. If a billionaire calls someone a pedophile for no reason, they should at least get a million dollars.”

“I also thought it was hilarious that all these shows do love letters to Elon Musk, like The Simpsons, a whole episode just kissing his butt, just fawning over Elon. I bet those writers are now kicking themselves and can’t even watch that episode after what he’s done because you know they’re all a bunch of liberals… Everything going on with him is [super cringe]. The weird thing is, it went from right-wingers parking in Tesla spots to block the Teslas from charging to now they’re in love with him. It’s so strange. Just like that. All he had to say was ‘prosecute Fauci’ and he became their king.”

Black and O’Guin remain cagey on whether they themselves are right- or left-leaning, saying they’re equal-opportunity offenders: “Look, we make fun of both sides. Both sides do dumb stuff. And we kind of thought we were making fun of the left when we hit Elon but it turned out to be flipped,” says Black. “We don’t want to alienate anyone, really.”

“When we did Trump we didn’t really hit him that much because the stuff he was doing was already ridiculous enough,” maintains O’Guin. “We did an Obama episode on Brickleberry and we just thought it would be funny, since he was such a nice squeaky-clean guy, to make him a complete jerk on the show.”

If you’ve ever wondered why Paradise PD or Brickleberry haven’t come under fire from the thin-skinned Twitterati, O’Guin has a theory. “I think people put us in the same category as South Park, like, ‘Those dudes are insane, we’re not gonna fix them, so if we don’t like it let’s just ignore it’ kinda thing.”

“It’s the more normal shows that do something just slightly crazy that [get canceled]. We’re doing insane stuff over here just slipping under the radar. I think the fact that it’s animated helps. But comedy needs to push the line and the line does change over time, but it still needs to push it or it’s just kinda boring.”

The key to getting away with it? Just don’t be a jerk, argues O’Guin. “As long as it’s not coming from a mean place, it’s OK. Our goal is to make people laugh and to help them forget anything shitty going on in their lives. We get so many messages saying ‘this show helped get me through a dark time’ and that’s really the goal. We’re never trying to make anyone feel bad.”

As for what the guys have planned for their next project, they’re mulling a bunch of ideas but seem to be focused on reviving Brickleberry, which featured comedian Daniel Tosh as the voice of a ridiculous bear character named Malloy. “Tosh came back to do the crossover so we’re still in touch with him and we’d love to revive Brickleberry, that’s what we’re talking about right now, and Tosh said he would be on board. We think it has a lot more life left. Brickleberry could have gone 10 seasons but was cut short by Comedy Central.”

Although they have no idea where the revival, if greenlit, would end up, they’re willing to make it for almost any network or streamer that would have them. “It’s a little complicated because it’s now owned half by Disney and half by Comedy Central, so I guess it could go to Paramount+, Hulu, Disney+, Starz, Tubi. Maybe it could go to Tubi if they have a budget. I don’t know if they do, but we’d do it for anyone really because we just loved working on the show and with the voice actors and everything.”

They’d also love to keep doing more seasons of Paradise PD, whose fourth and final season dropped on Dec. 16, 2022, but the current Netflix model that we’re all too familiar with doesn’t really allow for it. They want short successful runs of new shows, one after the other. “It’s not only us that get to know the characters and the world and all of that but the audience falls in love with these people and likes to follow them throughout the seasons,” says Black. “It becomes like a family.”