“Ugly Americans” is the new animated comedy series on Comedy Central, which had its series premiere last march.
Oct 6, the show returned with its second season. In a phone interview with two of the voiceover actors, Matt Oberg and Natasha Leggero, they spoke of their experience on the show and reveal what viewers can expect from the new episodes.
The series is set in a version of New York which is inhabited not only by humans, but also by all kinds of other species, such as demons, wizards, zombies and double-headed worms. In the first season, viewers meet Mark Lilly (Oberg), who just moved to the Big Apple and works as a social worker at the “Department of Integration”. His love interest, Callie Maggotbone (Leggero), is the product of the devil raping a drugged woman and struggles with reconciling her human and devil selves.
“Callie does have a human side and it comes out more in her love relationships,” says Leggero about her character,
Lilly lives with zombie Randall, who in the second season joins a zombie cult to deal with his obsession over his ex-girlfriend.
According to Oberg, “the show gets weirder from here on in, now that we have sort-of established the baseline . It gets weirder and dirtier, but I think still clever.”
He notes about the show that “the animation is really the coolest part about it . To me, I’m always so impressed with the amount of detail and care (Chris Augenblick and his team) put into even the smallest characters and backgrounds.”
Both of the voiceover actors have a background in comedy, which prepared them for improvising on the show. In her career as a voiceover artist, Leggero had previously done “impressions of Hillary Clinton or Lindsey Lohan . so this was really fun for me because I really got to just create my unique character.”
This year, Leggero was a judge of NBC’s “Last Comic Standing” and is going to tape her Comedy Central Special in New York on Oct 16. Oberg had never done any animation work before, but “I do improve shows every Saturday” with a group called “Big Black Car” in New York.
Despite the actors’ insistence on the show being a comedy, the first episode of season two seems depressing, rather than funny. Most of the jokes come across as offensive, making fun of rape, abuse and depression.
A show made for college students, its humor clearly doesn’t appeal to all of us. The question is – does it appeal to any of us?
