President Curtis premiered last night, and the Rick and Morty spin-off already has a second season coming. Keith David voices the POTUS, with backup from David’s Community cohort Jim Rash as Secret Service agent O’Doyle and Stephanie Beatriz as Banks, Curtis’ chief of staff.
Ahead of President Curtis‘ debut, io9 talked with co-creators Dan Harmon and James Siciliano to learn more about their new series. A president tasked with keeping America safe requires an unusually gifted staff; in President Curtis’ case, that means a hot-tempered half-leprechaun and a woman with a robot brain. The combination was somewhat Star Trek-inspired, Harmon explained, going back to Captain Kirk’s reliance on Spock and Bones for their different perspectives. “I wanted to arrive at the strength of that at the core; I also didn’t want to just rip it off. We don’t want to once again do, like, ‘Oh, this one’s the robotic, logical, everything has to make sense person,’ and the other is, ‘I feel feelings all the time.’ So from there, it was just about nuance. I believe that’s the difference; she’s a robot that’s not a robot. She is definitely the less hysterical one. He’s more given to tantrums and is more ashamed of himself. These two are both—they’re very similar in a lot of ways. So we look at it like they’re like siblings under a foster dad that are kind of like learning about each other.” Added Siciliano, “They also both gave us worlds that we could build out around each one of them. Don’t get us started on leprechaun lore. They both gave, in the Star Trek and X-Files sense, a different genre, so to speak, or a different circle for us to expand while also kind of maintaining that triangle around Curtis.”
