An Oral History of ‘Eagleheart,’ Chris Elliott’s Overlooked Adult Swim Show

From Chuck Norris and Walker, Texas Ranger to Chris Elliott and Chris Monsanto, U.S. Marshal

Michael Koman, co-creator, executive producer and writer of Eagleheart: When we worked at Conan, Andrew Weinberg and I did the Walker, Texas Ranger lever bit together, and we spent way, way too much time looking through old episodes of that show. At a certain point, I began to resent the amount of time I was spending watching that show. It would take nine hours of watching to create about five seconds of comedy. It was incredibly inefficient. 

Either way, right around the time of the writers’ strike in 2007, Andrew and I wrote a pilot inspired by the show that we didn’t expect anyone to buy. 

Andrew Weinberg, co-creator, executive producer and writer of Eagleheart: It was called Eagleheart, but it was very different from what Eagleheart became. It was more like The Larry Sanders Show with a Walker, Texas Ranger-type show that they were making. Once we finished it, the first person we took it to was Conan. We asked him if he liked it, and if he would want to produce it. He did. Then Adult Swim bought it, and soon Jason Woliner got on board to help develop it with us and to direct the pilot.

Jason Woliner, executive producer, writer and director of Eagleheart: We set about casting the main guy, and we met with a ton of actors. Then someone from Adult Swim said, “What about Chris Elliott?” We were all like “Yes!” It wasn’t a Chris Elliott-type role, but as soon as they brought him up, the idea became so exciting that we wouldn’t even consider anything else.

That being said, Chris wasn’t really the right fit for the pilot Andrew and Michael had written. We still shot it with Chris, but it didn’t really work. It had all this story stuff that wasn’t interesting or funny. It was a mismatch. Plus, by then, Chuck Norris stuff had become such an internet fixture that it seemed hacky to us. 

Weinberg: We put Chris Elliott in a pilot that was conceived with a more straight dramatic actor, and that’s part of what didn’t work. That’s not what anyone wants to see Chris Elliott doing. 

Chris Elliott, Chris Monsanto on Eagleheart: I don’t think any of us were happy with the original pilot. I specifically thought I sucked in it. 

Koman: Arguably, the show-within-the-show of the original pilot was the part with the biggest laughs. In fact, when Adult Swim saw it, that was what they responded to the most. 

Weinberg: Adult Swim was like, “If you do just the fake show, without the backstage Larry Sanders-type stuff, we’ll pick that up.” But the fake show couldn’t have existed outside of 30-second snippets. Anyway, we’d shot the original pilot around Thanksgiving 2009, then things went quiet. Suddenly, in January, they said they were picking up the show to series, which they did without us ever having come to a consensus on what the show was. 

Out of the Pool and Into the Doghouse: Troubles with Adult Swim

Koman: Mike Lazzo, who ran Adult Swim, was a wonderful executive, and when he liked an idea, he would completely gamble on it. But in the original pilot, the thing he liked was Chris Elliott being tough. That was the only genuine directive we got. 

Woliner: They wanted a straight-up action parody, kind of like Sledge Hammer!, but we didn’t want to do that. So we started to change the show entirely without permission. We wanted something more interesting to us and something we hadn’t seen before. We thought we could do like a minute of that serious action thing, but then it could go off in surreal directions and follow whatever we think is funny. We loved Chris Elliott, and we felt like we had to make a worthy follow-up to Get a Life. To do that, we thought he should play this idiot manchild and the show should be very stupid, surreal, unexpected and stream-of-consciousness-y.

Elliott: I liked the new direction much better. You can’t really write me too far out of my neighborhood, so what they did was write something that was right in my neighborhood and I felt right at home in it. All the surreal aspects of it seemed right.

Weinberg: Basically, we figured out that the character has to be a Chris Elliott character, but Adult Swim disagreed. 

Woliner: We made this first episode called “Death Punch,” and the first minute was like a Walker action show parody. It then became a meditation on loss, and Chris is grappling with having killed this guy. The twist had this perfectly stupid logic that Chris was trying to steal this woman’s meatloaf recipe so that he could make a bowling ball and enter a bowling tournament because this meatloaf is the only substance that can reliably knock down a seven pin. 

Adult Swim hated it so much that they shut the show down. They said, “The show makes no sense!” I remember Lazzo yelling that he didn’t want Chris to be an idiot. I was like, “That’s who you hired! Chris is the funniest idiot in the world!” Lazzo screamed back at me, “It’s my money!” Andrew, Michael and I were always on the same page, but Mike Lazzo and I would get in screaming matches on the phone. Then Troy Miller, from Dakota Pictures, which was producing the show, tried to get Chris’ blessing to replace me, but Chris always had my back. 

Still, the first season was very contentious between us and Adult Swim. They sent Matt Harrigan, an Adult Swim executive, to sit behind me and make sure Chris was being tough enough on camera. He’d whisper in my ear, “Have him say it tougher,” and I’d have to tell Chris, “Tougher!” It was a miserable situation. 

Koman: There was a point during Season One where we were really close to throwing in the towel. There was this night when we got into our cars, and we were like, “We’re going to call them in the morning and tell them we’re not going to make the show anymore.” Before we left though, one of us was like, “Let’s just see what happens,” and we stuck with it. 

Woliner: Ultimately, I think about half the episodes from Season One are funny. The other half I was in the doghouse for and had nothing to do with. The second season is when we really figured it out. That said, I don’t know why we got a second season. Maybe Mike Lazzo just wanted Chris Elliott to like him. 

Weinberg: We weren’t sure if we were going to get a Season Two, but they picked it up and Mike Lazzo started to like it more. As we started to hone in on what we wanted to do, Lazzo started to like it more and more. Ultimately, I think he liked what we liked about it, which was that we put a Chris Elliott character and these absurd ideas into a world that looked and felt totally serious.

Koman: We didn’t have the burden of popularity to guide the show, so it felt like we could do whatever we wanted with it.

Woliner: The weird thing was, we weren’t babysat at all on Season Two. Maybe they just gave up? I don’t know. Regardless, Lazzo and I eventually got along, and we came to respect one another.

Weinberg: By the end of Season Two, Lazzo liked it so much he gave us a third season. And we didn’t get a single note all season long during Season Three.

The Chris Elliott Experience

Weinberg: Brett Gelman was very close with Jason and Michael, and I knew Maria Thayer from Conan. They both had small roles in the original pilot. When we restructured the series, we built the new roles of Chris’ deputies around them. 

Maria Thayer, Susie Wagner on Eagleheart: Working with Chris Elliott was so much fun. He would razz me and Gelman all the time, and I love to get razzed. 

Elliott: I got under Maria’s skin a little bit, but I tormented Brett. He’d be hilarious and brilliant in a scene, and I’d say, “That’s it? That’s all you got? That’s what you’re doing? You’re going to do that on TV?” There were times he laughed at it, but there were other times I got under his skin. It was amusing to the rest of us, but probably not to Brett.

As we got to know each other, everyone knew it was just me joking and to not take me seriously. But I’m sure Brett still has some nightmares about me. If you talk to him, just tell him Chris apologizes for his behavior on set. 

Brett Gelman, Brett Mobley on Eagleheart: He shouldn’t feel guilty — it was comic genius! The stuff most vivid in my memory about Eagleheart was how Chris tortured me. He did it so much that, eventually, Jason would have to be like, “Chris, you have to stop torturing Brett because we have to shoot this show!” 

There was as much comedy going on when the cameras were turned off as Chris would continue with these insane bits. So many times I didn’t know if I was actually arguing with him or if it was a joke. But whether it was real or not, I enjoyed it just as much.

I did get mad at him once and we didn’t talk for a couple days, then I realized it was all just joking. His sense of humor was brutal, but he didn’t mean anything bad by it. I’m grateful for the experience. No one has ever put me to the test like Chris did, but I’m a better man for it. He’s a genius, and geniuses have a different kind of thing to them. Speaking as a genius, I can attest to that. 

Monsanto’s Most Wanted: The Guest Stars of ‘Eagleheart’

Woliner: One thing we loved about Eagleheart was casting these really good actors and having them say these really stupid lines completely seriously. Like Ben Stiller, he was really great in the Silly Sammy episode. 

Koman: We also had Mickey Rooney in Season One. He showed up in shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, and he said there was no reason to change his wardrobe. When we showed him that we’d put all of his lines on cue cards, he swatted them away and claimed they weren’t necessary. Then he said like one word out of ten that was actually scripted. The entire thing had to be jump-cut to piece together something that made sense from 50 different takes. 

Gelman: In Season Two, we worked with the late, great Bud Cort. I had lunch with him, and he told me stories about how Groucho Marx died in his arms and how they shared a psychiatrist and that the ghost of Groucho liked to come and terrorize him. He said he’d have to call on the ghost of their psychiatrist to get Groucho to leave him alone. That was totally insane. This whole show was a fucking madhouse.

Koman: In Season Three, we had Joe Estevez playing his brother, Martin Sheen, but he was really playing himself pretending to be Martin Sheen. Andrew and I took Joe out to lunch every day, and he always said the same thing when the check came: “I got short arms and deep pockets!” That was his signal that he wasn’t going to pick up the check. 

Chris Monsanto’s Last Case

Koman: We were never told what kind of audience we had on Eagleheart. The way it worked was, Adult Swim’s ratings were dependent on Family Guy reruns, and if you were following a Family Guy rerun, all you had to do was not lose a huge portion of that audience. I always thought that people turned on Family Guy, then they went and did other things and their television was just on, and we were allowed to keep making this thing because they needed some kind of moving picture to have on the air. 

Woliner: We were always very grumpy about the press we were unable to get. We felt like we struggled to get recognized as an actual TV show — it was like no one considered us a real show. 

Weinberg: We never seemed to develop any real following.  

Koman: Common sense told us that Season Three was going to be it. Career-wise too, many of our friends from Conan were writing on major network shows. While it was nice to have the freedom we had, we felt maybe it’d be better to move onto something else.

Woliner: Heading into Season Three, we were of the mind that maybe people weren’t catching on because the show was cut too tightly or people weren’t connecting with these characters. So we thought, “What if we did a season-long storyline that you could follow, and it would get you interested in the next episode?” Instead of it just being a comedy writer jack-off session. 

And so, we tried to break a story with an emotional core and some humanity to it, while still keeping the absurd tone that we’d found and that we loved. On top of that, Brett Gelman got cast on the Matthew Perry sitcom Go On, so we lost Brett. Originally, they said we could get him for one episode, but we ended up getting him in three. Regardless, we knew the show was really going to lose something without his energy. But we also thought that could be the emotional impetus to support a storyline for a season, so we had his character go missing. 

Koman: Season Three concluded with Chris singing “Bye Bye Life” from All That Jazz. I’m obsessed with All That Jazz, and the ending of the show was based on the ending of that movie. I liked the ending not only because I like All That Jazz, but because it felt like something perfect for Chris Elliott.

Elliott: That All That Jazz thing in the last episode was a lot of fun for me. I can’t remember if I’d told them this or if they were already working on this ending, but I’d already had an obsession with that movie and with Roy Scheider’s singing and I always wanted to do that scene. I was glad I got to do it finally. It was a lot of fun, and it was different from anything I’d done before. 

Weinberg: We got to make exactly the show we wanted to make, which is very, very rare. One thing that stands out a decade later is, I have a very cherished memory of the Season Three screening at Cinefamily. Conan was sitting in the row in front of me, and in one of the episodes, we had this character who was revealed to be a door-to-door blackmailer. I remember seeing Conan laugh as hard as I’ve ever seen him laugh, pounding his leg almost in frustration.

Koman: Not having a real sense of who was watching the show, I think my memories are positive because of a handful of screenings that we did. There were a few times we got to see it with a big crowd and people laughed and it made the whole experience just permanently happy.

Elliot: The show was terrific. It’s hard to believe it’s been 10 years since we did it.

Thayer: Every episode was so different, and the episodes were all so crazy. I got to shoot so many people on that show! I also got shot once, and I was covered in blood a few times. It was a very ambitious and artistic show.

Gelman: It felt like we were outlaws, like it was this show that was secretly happening. I couldn’t believe the stuff in it was going to be on TV. It deserves a lot more credit than it’s gotten.

Woliner: During the show, we complained endlessly amongst each other that this show couldn’t even reach the status of a “cult hit.” We just couldn’t get people to find out about it or give it a chance. But looking back, it was a pure comedy vehicle in a way that couldn’t be done today because nobody is doing anything that experimental in the way Adult Swim did. I just wish I hadn’t been annoyed the whole time we were doing it.