The Definitive Oral History of ‘Andy Richter Controls the Universe’
On May 26, 2000, Andy Richter taped his last episode as Conan O’Brien’s sidekick on Late Night. The parting was amicable. Richter wanted to pursue more acting roles, a move that O’Brien very much supported. After a handful of smaller film roles and TV guest spots, Richter got his big break on the 2002 Fox sitcom Andy Richter Controls the Universe.
He played a character with the same name as himself, but the character of Andy Richter was an aspiring writer with a mundane office job. As a way to cope with the cog-in-a-machine nature of his work, he would daydream about cartoonish scenarios in which he was a superhero who could crush an old lady’s head into a diamond or that he was wearing a coat lined with puppies to impress a woman he liked. The show even had a cast member who played a completely imaginary character: Mr. Pickering, the long-dead founder of Andy’s company, who would spout offensive things in Andy’s ear.
Along with Titus, Scrubs, Malcolm in the Middle and The Bernie Mac Show, Andy Richter Controls the Universe was part of a wave of single-cam sitcoms that were purposefully breaking the 50-year-old format by doing something completely different. While all of those shows would enjoy longer runs than Andy Richter Controls the Universe, early on, there was reason to believe the show would be successful. After all, it was adored by critics, and its very first episode earned an Emmy nomination.
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But sadly, Andy Richter Controls the Universe never really got the chance to catch on. The first season was a six-episode midseason replacement, and Season Two was just 13 episodes, only eight of which aired (and also a midseason replacement). Moreover, it alternated between Sunday nights and Tuesday nights, making it hard to find at a time when scheduling was paramount to a show’s success.
Still, the brief spark enjoyed by Andy Richter Controls the Universe has continued to endear it to many to this day. Case in point: TV Guide included the show on its list of 60 shows canceled too soon and legendary television critic Tara Ariano recently referred to it as an “extremely underrated surrealist sitcom.” So although it might not have controlled the television universe for as long as it should have, it’s never lost its hold on viewers and everyone who was behind the camera.
Andy Richter: In 2000, I had made the decision to leave the Conan show, which I did because I was antsy. I had been doing it for seven years, and I just felt like doing something else and challenging myself.
I’d had enough friends who had been on The Daily Show — guys like Rob Corddry and Steve Carrell — where, if you’d worked in New York and you became available, Los Angeles just had to have you. So I knew that it was pretty likely that I’d be able to go to L.A. and get some kind of prime-time show.
Originally, I’d said, “I’d like to just think up one by myself,” which I kind of got like a pat on the head about — “Oh, that’s nice.” They were right though. I know how to make a funny show, but at that point, I hadn’t run a show. I needed someone who knew the process and the political hurdles.
My agents set me up on a lot of blind dates with TV writers and creators. I met with tons of people, but I was mostly treated with condescension. They would frequently treat me like Gomer Pyle, just some sort of hillbilly that didn’t know what he was doing. But by that point, I’d been on TV for hundreds and hundreds of hours. I also am a pretty good writer and a good joke writer. That was one of the biggest gifts that Conan O’Brien gave me — from the very beginning, he invited me into the creative process of every show that he did.
Also, in regards to these potential creators I was meeting with, I have something of an authority problem. I’m not a huge rebel, but I really hate people telling me what to do — especially people who I don’t think are as qualified or as competent as I am — and there were a lot of unfunny motherfuckers trying to tell me how this show should be and how funny it should be. So, nothing sparked my interest until they set me up to meet Victor Fresco.
Paget Brewster, Jessica Green on Andy Richter Controls the Universe: I knew both Victor and Andy, and before they met, both of them called me. Victor called me and said, “They want to set me up on a meeting with Andy Richter. I don’t want to waste my time. Is he a good guy or not?” I was like, “He’s a great guy!” Then Richter called me and said, “I think you worked with Victor Fresco. They want to set me up on a meeting with him. What’s he like?” And I said, “Victor’s great.”
Richter: Victor got on a plane and flew to New York to have lunch with me. I very much liked him — he’s a very sedate, calm kind of guy, but very dry and very funny. He told me, “I’m thinking of this idea, a narrative trick where you have a first-person narrator who can change the story and do flights of fancy and reset things.”
Victor Fresco, creator of Andy Richter Controls the Universe: I came up with this idea that Andy would be an unreliable narrator, so that he could narrate his world but he can mess with us. I hadn’t seen that before, and I thought it would be fun.
We justified the concept by saying he’s a writer, which is why he has this active imagination. We weren’t going to make him a successful writer, so I thought, “What’s his job?” The corporate world is interesting to me. It’s so political and unlike sports or writing or many other things; the corporate world isn’t as merit-based. Your skill set is largely politics and navigating that world. The original title was Anything Can Happen, and the idea was he could tell us anything and it may or may not be real.
Richter: I instantly was like, “Oh yeah, there’s mileage in that.” After that, we basically faxed back and forth and had phone conversations and kicked it around. Then he wrote the pilot and we were off. Victor had a deal with Paramount, so that was our studio and it ended up being on Fox, which is where I wanted it to go anyway. I remember thinking, “Fox has both The Simpsons and When Animals Attack — I can fit somewhere in there.”
Fresco: When I pitched the show to Fox, I did something I’ve never done before, I wrote the first scene and just asked them to read it. I told them, “I have this idea. It’s easier to just look at it than for me to explain it. Here are the first three pages. I’m going to leave the room, and then I’ll come back.”
I left the room, and they read this scene where Andy’s day starts and stops like five different times. Then I came back in and said, “That’s the premise of this show, and here’s where it’s set…” This was back in the day where they bought stuff in the room, so I pitched it, they liked it and I was off and running to make the pilot.
Richter: The only problem was the title, Anything Can Happen. They didn’t like it, and apparently, I was a big enough get at the time that they insisted that my name be in the title, which I wasn’t entirely comfortable with. For one, if you put your name on the show, you’re very much saddled with its success or failure. Also, I have a very severe case of Midwesternism, and I’m not one to toot my own horn; so it made me somewhat uncomfortable to have my name in the title. But it was a non-negotiable thing.
I came up with Andy Richter Controls the Universe. My thinking was, if my name is in the title, it’ll be something grandiose so that people know it’s a joke. I also wanted it to tell a bit about what the narrative gimmick was about. Honestly, though, it’s a terrible title, because nobody can ever get it right. I’ve heard Andy Richter Rules the World and things like that.
James Patrick Stuart, Keith on Andy Richter Controls the Universe: The thing I remember about that cast was how immediately fond of one another we were.
Jonathan Slavin, Byron Togler on Andy Richter Controls the Universe: What I’ll say about Andy is this: They often say that the “number one sets the tone,” and I think that’s true for better or for worse. The set of Andy Richter Controls the Universe was an absolute pleasure to work on, and it was because Andy is just a good person. It’s not even like he tries to be a good person. He just is a good, regular person.
Andy Ackerman, director on Andy Richter Controls the Universe: Irene Molloy was wonderful as Wendy. She was quiet and sweet, but super talented. She wasn’t as facile comedically as the other actors when we started, but she was an incredibly fast learner and fell right in step with everyone else and really surprised me and Victor with the great comic chops she had.
Richter: James Patrick Stuart came from soap operas, and like Irene, he didn’t have to be as funny as he was. His part was predicated on him being the handsome guy, but that character evolved because James was really funny.
Stuart: That’s nice of Andy to say, but I’d give the credit to Victor Fresco for never wanting to go for the obvious joke. There’s an archetype of the snobby, good-looking dude who had everything growing up and he gets off on making Andy’s character feel bad about himself, but Victor didn‘t want to do that. Keith has a really good heart, so this rivalry is happening in Andy’s mind. It was such a fresh take on it.
Richter: The late John Bliss played Mr. Pickering, the dead founder of the company. That character was a great excuse to say awful, awful things, which is always a good comic device.
Ackerman: It was the Mr. Pickering character that sold me on the show because there was nothing like that on TV at the time. He was one of the things Victor and I talked about the most early on. We wondered how we were going to shoot it. Would we put him in a different, ethereal kind of light? My idea was, and Victor agreed, was to shoot him standing there, and he’ll stand out because of his wardrobe and his antiquated diction.
Also, John Bliss was a true gentleman. He kept telling us how grateful he was to have that role at that stage in his life. I think it was the most fun he’d had in his whole career.
Fresco: Jonathan Slavin, who played Byron, is one of my favorite people in Hollywood. I’ve done three shows with him. The guy just delivers, and he’s a sweetheart. When you find those people that just enhance your writing, you just never want to let them go, and Jonathan's that guy for me.
He and Paget Brewster had a really sweet relationship. People would get the giggles a lot on this show, especially Paget and Jonathan. That’s fun to watch — until it becomes expensive, then it’s not fun anymore.
Slavin: I don’t think I’ve ever laughed as hard on a set — or got in trouble for laughing so much on a set — as I did working with Paget. She could really break me during a scene.
Brewster: Jonathan Slavin and I had a funny scene in my character’s office, and Jonathan kept cracking up and we couldn’t finish the scene. He was laughing so hard that Victor Fresco called me out of the room and, Victor’s not an emotional guy, but he was so mad he was sort of vibrating. He was like, “You have to tell Jonathan to stop laughing. We’re going to go too late, and we’re not going to get this scene.”
I’d never seen Victor upset before, so I went back in and whispered to Jonathan, “You’ve got to get it together! Victor’s really mad!” Jonathan was like “Dad’s mad?” I was like, “Dad’s so fucking mad! If you laugh one more time, you’re fired!” Victor hadn’t said anything like that, but it was the only way to get him through the scene, telling him Victor was going to fire him, which wasn’t true.
Slavin: Okay, that is not what happened, but I appreciate that that is her perception of what happened. I did get a talking-to from Victor for laughing, but Paget did not take me aside and tell me I was going to be fired.
Richter: The pilot was originally shot with another actress in Paget’s role. Paget had been on Victor’s previous show, The Trouble with Normal, and the Jessica part in this show was written with Paget in mind. But when it got to the network, they said, “We’ve seen her a lot.” They’d seen her in pilots that didn’t work, and in their dum-dum brains, that must mean there’s a problem with her.
Brewster: I’d had a development deal with Fox for two years, so they were sick of me.
Fresco: We shot the pilot with another actress. She was fine, but the network asked us to recast her, so we brought Paget in.
Brewster: I had to audition for it three times — for a role written for me — I was testing against all these other women. Victor told them, “Test whoever you want, but test them against Paget.” They were really like, “Ugh, no. We don’t want her.”
After my second audition, Victor said to me, “You’re coming in again, and at the end of the audition, don’t look around like, ‘Did I do a good job?’ I want you to stick the landing like a gymnast in the Olympics. Be confident and leave the room like it’s your part.”
I don’t know what occurred to me, but after I finished the third audition, I stood up and did that gymnast thing where they throw their arms up in the air facing one way, then they face the other way, and I walked out. I could hear everybody laughing when I walked out. Later, Victor was like, “I didn’t mean for you to literally do that, but it worked. They’re giving you the part.”
Irene Molloy, Wendy McKay on Andy Richter Controls the Universe: The first day we were filming, I had to try on all this lingerie for this fantasy sequence where the secretary jumps into bed with Andy. But I was so young and I didn’t really think things through, so I didn’t understand why I was trying on this lingerie. Like, I thought, because it was a fantasy sequence, that meant I wouldn’t really be doing it. I eventually put it together though.
Richter: Scenes like that — or scenes where I was making out with someone — were very uncomfortable for me. Given my physique, I never expected to be in sex scenes in my career, but the first day of filming, Irene was in this lingerie and she jumped on top of me in bed and was sitting on my groin.
Molloy: Andy would always carry this little personal fan around with him because he was always sweating. He was sweating a lot that day.
Richter: The thing I remember most about shooting the pilot was the puppy-lined coat. Wearing that thing was nerve-racking because there were all these squirming puppies in these pockets, and if a puppy fell, I had no way to catch them without dislodging another puppy from another pocket. If you watch that scene, my hands are frozen into tense claws of stress because I’m so nervous about a puppy falling out and breaking its neck.
Fresco: That suit weighed like 70 pounds. There was a lot of puppy meat in there.
Richter: We did the pilot, then they ordered the episodes in chunks. We were a mid-season replacement, and Season One was just six episodes. Even though they greenlit the show, there were a few problems. The fact that the show wasn’t fully owned by Fox was a problem because, thanks to vertical integration, they could make a lot more money on a show that they fully owned. Also, the fact that our show was a workplace comedy was a problem. We were told “Fox comedies are family comedies.” I hadn’t realized it before then, but they kind of are. Even Arrested Development was kind of a family comedy.
Fresco: After we shot the pilot and Fox picked it up, I hired a bunch of writers for the show.
Eric Kaplan, writer on Andy Richter Controls the Universe: Here’s one thing that I remember about Andy Richter Controls the Universe. When I came in on the first day, we were all seated around the writers’ table, and Victor Fresco said, “You’re all here because I want you to be here. You don’t need to prove yourselves, so what I’d really like to see from everybody is to show respect for each other. You don’t need to top anybody, you don’t need to interrupt anybody. Please show respect for each other.” I had never heard a showrunner say anything like that.
Jim Bernstein, writer on Andy Richter Controls the Universe: Victor really wanted us to do crazy stuff with the show, and make use of the fantasies. It was like working in animation. Another unusual thing about the show — and this was good — was that Andy was in the writers’ room. You don’t usually want the star in the writers’ room, but Andy was periodically in there and he was super relaxed and really supportive.
Kaplan: Andy referred to the writers as “The Nerd Tower.” While he wanted to stand up for his own creative participation in the show, he still would say, “All things must be proven by the Nerd Tower.”
Tommy Blacha, writer on Andy Richter Controls the Universe: Andy and I, in addition to working on Conan together, were college roommates. A thing that was great about this show is that Andy was a great person to get behind. A lot of shows you’re like, “Oh, we’re behind some kind of shit-heel,” but it was a pleasure to be on a show where the main guy was really decent.
Fresco: The hardest thing about Season One was that fucking kangaroo.
Richter: In one episode, I ended up boxing this kangaroo. I love animals and I always like working with animals, so I was excited about the kangaroo, but I was off-put by some of the stuff people were telling me, like how nasty they are and that their go-to move is to use their huge, powerful feet to attempt to swipe off your genitalia.
Brewster: When we shot the kangaroo episode, it was right after 9/11. At the time, there were only three professional kangaroos in the world, and there was a movie being shot in Australia called Kangaroo Jack that had all three working kangaroos. But then one kangaroo had gotten out early and was shooting something in Canada. They had to file some crazy permit and pay $20,000 to get this kangaroo from Canada across the border to get the kangaroo to Paramount to box Andy.
Fresco: I remember it as being a kangaroo from Vegas, but I might be wrong. Paget probably has a better memory.
Brewster: Anyway, we get the kangaroo, and we have a boxing ring set up. Everybody is on set to see Andy box this kangaroo. There’s this kangaroo in boxing shorts and boxing gloves on, and let me tell you, a kangaroo from the neck to the knees is completely human. They have a ripped martial artist body — you can’t tell the difference until the legs go kangaroo at the bottom.
Andy is in the ring with this thing, and he is terrified. What kangaroos do that is dangerous is, when they’re ready to kick the shit out of you, they put their tail down and lean back and kick you with their feet. The talons on their feet can disembowel a human, so whenever the kangaroo was looking like it was tired or pissed off and it put the tail down, the trainer, who was this Russian guy, would run into the ring and stand in between the kangaroo and Andy so Andy didn’t get disemboweled.
Ackerman: That kangaroo was a true test of patience for Andy. All I needed was a two- or three-second shot of the kangaroo standing still in the boxing ring so we could do some voiceover work, but I couldn’t get the shot. We tried to get the trainer to keep the kangaroo still, but the trainer just couldn’t do it. It was the only time we went into overtime in the entire series.
Fresco: We were there until about 3 a.m. A kangaroo’s brain is basically like a squirrel. From what I can detect, there’s not a lot of intelligence there. I thought it was going to be like a dog, but they’re like big squirrels. I’ll never write for a kangaroo again — that could be the name of my memoir.
Richter: I heard something funny once. Someone went into a meeting once with the head of the network, Rupert Murdoch, and they watched this episode and Rupert Murdoch said, “That’s not a real roo!” I’m like, “Fuck, yes, it was, goddammit!”
Conan O’Brien, June Lockhart and Adolf Hitler: Highlights from Season Two
Brewster: Between Seasons One and Two, the show was nominated for an Emmy. The reviews were really good, too. We were surprised because we definitely got the impression that we weren’t welcome on the network at the time.
Blacha: After Season One, they kept us waiting a long time before they picked us up for Season Two. We were expecting to hear from them, and they kept delaying it.
Fresco: A lot of executives at Fox loved the show and wanted to keep it going. That's what got us to Season Two, because they liked it in spite of the fact that there was a drop-off from its lead-in (That ’70s Show).
Richter: My favorite moment in the show came from the first episode we did for Season Two. I had the idea that the other guy named Andy in the office, in addition to being Black, is Irish and my character says something really bigoted about Irish people. The two of us go into Jessica’s office, and I explain that I’ve said something racist. Jessica’s like, “How could you?” And I’m like, “No, it wasn’t about him being Black, it was about him being Irish.” She goes “Oh, what’s the problem?” Then you smash cut to the three of us standing in front of Jessica’s superior, who’s an African-American woman, and the exact same thing happens. She’s like, “You can’t be racist,” and we say, “It was about the Irish.” She’s like, “Oh well, who cares?” Then it’s a smash cut of all four of us standing in front of that woman’s superior who turns and says, in a ridiculous leprechaun accent, “Now what seems to be the problem?”
We were so happy with it that we started to think of different buttons we could push, which led to the episode where Andy has a girlfriend that he finds out is anti-Semetic, but she’s so hot that he doesn’t break up with her right away. Those were both episodes where we got to explore awkward social issues and prejudices.
Molloy: We just laughed so much on this show. The moment I laughed the hardest was when Andy crushed an old lady’s head into a diamond, or when Andy accused the sandwich man of being Adolf Hitler.
Richter: I had this idea of a cutaway fantasy where Paget and I are having shovel fights, and we are taking full baseball swings with shovels. We used foam rubber shovels, but I did catch the tip of Paget’s nose and it hurt. I felt terrible.
Brewster: He definitely hit me. It’s a big nose — it’s an extremity! But that wasn’t as bad as when we had a pizza fight and everybody had pieces of cheese and pepperoni in their ears. That was worse than being hit in the face with a rubber shovel, which isn’t a sentence you say often.
Molloy: After the pizza fight, I had to go straight to a red-eye, and I flew to New York with dried pizza in my hair. That was a sensory experience I’ll never forget.
Slavin: There was also a huge pillow fight, which isn’t nearly as fun as it sounds. Afterwards, Paget said to me, “Jonathan, you’re not a vegan anymore after inhaling that many feathers.”
Ackerman: Season Two had the episode where Conan guest starred — I love that episode. We only had Conan for a couple of days because of his show, so we had a lot to do in two days. But it was a blast, and it was great to see him and Andy together again.
Fresco: The two of them interacted like brothers. They gave each other shit; they were sweet with each other. Conan would also just hang out on set just to watch Andy work like an older brother. It was very sweet. He was very supportive of what Andy was doing.
Brewster: The Conan episode was the one where Andy got bit by a panther. Or was it a cheetah? I don’t remember, but it really bit him.
Richter: I wasn’t really bitten. I had the leopard on a choke chain, and it kept putting its teeth into the arch of my foot and slowly closing its jaw just enough to get the sense of how many hundreds of pounds of pressure he could sink into my foot. The trainer told me not to let him do that because, if I didn’t stop him, he’d just keep going. So I had to pull the choke chain a couple of times to stop him.
Brewster: Season Two also had the episode where Jonathan was dating Andy’s grandmother, June Lockhart. She was flirty!
Slavin: She was like, “Honey, just grab me and kiss me, it’s fine.”
Richter: In the June Lockhart episode, Jonathan Slavin was very uncomfortable because he had to do nudity — like, sock-on-his-dick nudity, which freaked him out.
Slavin: I was uncomfortable with it and nervous about it. But after going through body makeup, sitting in my trailer in my robe, there was a knock on the door. Andy came in with a VHS tape, and he said, “I want to show you something.” He plopped it into the player, and it was a nude scene he’d done on Conan. He was like, “I just want you to know, I’ve been where you are. It was uncomfortable, but I did it and I know you can.” It was this lovely moment of empathy. The fact that it even occurred to him was really lovely. That’s who Andy Richter is.
Stuart: There was a line from the June Lockhart episode that I texted Victor about recently. Andy needs help to move his grandmother, and he goes to all of us, “Hey, you guys want to go out tonight and look for movie stars?” We all go, “Yeah!” Then Andy goes, “Great, but first we have to help my grandmother move. Afterwards, we’ll look for movie stars — if there’s time. There probably won’t be.”
There are hundreds of lines like that that still pop into my head. Then I’ll text them to Paget or Jonathan. I work on General Hospital now and I tend to forget those lines in an hour, but I still remember so many jokes from Andy Richter Controls the Universe.
Andy Loses Control: The End of ‘Andy Richter Controls the Universe’
Fresco: Before we got canceled, the writing was kind of on the wall, so me and the studio went in to plead our case for Season Three. There was a trade ad the studio took out in Variety that was just pull quotes from critics. We printed that up as a poster. We were going into the executives to basically tell them, “You’ve got a show here that, if you leave it alone, it’s going to get Emmys.” But we were arguing with someone who was just a bean-counter. This wasn’t the person running the network, it was the person over them and all this praise the show received didn’t mean anything to them. It was like arguing with an A.I. version of humanity. We got canceled soon thereafter.
Bernstein: The ratings were always a bit soft, but I was optimistic because the critics loved it so much. The crazy thing is, compared to now, those ratings would be considered incredibly high.
Blacha: If they’d gotten behind us, who knows how long it could have gone. There were other shows like Arrested Development that didn’t get better numbers, but they got behind them more. They were stupid for canceling it. Just dumb and disappointing. Oh why? Because it wasn’t a “family show”? Thank you for protecting the fabric of society. What the fuck?
Brewster: We were all so sad that we weren’t continuing. I know enough now about the television business to know that I don’t know anything, but the show didn’t last as long as it could have. “Charming” sounds reductive, but there’s something really charming about that show. There was something hopeful and optimistic and earnest about it.
Richter: When Andy Richter Controls the Universe ended, I tried to be philosophical about it. I had a kid and a family and a full life, and this is a business with so much rejection that you try to bulletproof yourself against it, but I was deeply, deeply disappointed. I’d been given this chance to be number one on the call sheet — to be on a television show with my name on it — and I had contributed to the success of the show. They put me out in front of people, and those people said, “No thanks.” There’s no rejection quite like the rejection you feel when you think “America didn’t want me.” After that, there was like 10 months when I didn’t work at all. I was just licking my wounds.
Looking back on the show now, I’m very very proud of it. I’m very happy that the first thing that I was the star of is as beloved as it is. The following it has is cultish, and the whole experience was a continuation of what was so nice about having worked for Conan all these years. By that I mean, the most rewarding thing to me is meeting young people who have been inspired by this stuff, so much so that it inspires them to make comedy themselves. The Conan show was that — there are a lot of people making very good comedy today that were inspired by the Conan show. There is also a smaller number of people making quality comedy today who were inspired by Andy Richter Controls the Universe and that’s really meaningful to me.