Dan Perlman on how Flatbush Misdemeanors took inspiration from Hey, Arnold!

Four years ago, Kevin Iso and Dan Perlman were two friends kicking around on the New York comedy scene who decided to make a few web shorts with their friends and next to zero budget. Now, they have their own premium sitcom, an expansion of that original idea that stays true to the street-born roots that made the show connect with audiences online.

Flatbush Misdemeanors, which premieres today on Starzplay Arabia, follows the two as they live and work in Flatbush, Brooklyn, hoping to transcend their station in life and never quite finding the right footing. Starring its two creators, it’s buoyed by a stellar supporting cast, including Kerry Coddett, Zuri Reed, Kristin Dodson, Hassan Johnson, Sharlene Cruz, and Kareem Green.  

The show is already a cult hit in the US, and now that it hits the region, Perlman jumped on Zoom with Esquire Middle East to talk about the show’s origins, adjusting to the scale of a major TV series, and why the series’ biggest inspiration may have been the classic Nickelodeon cartoon series Hey, Arnold!

Read the full interview below: 

When you began making this show as a web series, did you have any ambitions to begin with it? Or was it literally just that just like, let’s just mess around and try something?

To Kevin’s credit, I think he kind of maybe knew before I did, from my vantage point, it was—I love making stuff, and I’m very sort of restless with that. I always love trying to create different sh*t. Whether it’s just a little shot, or stand-up, or just putting something out there. That’s really fun to do. I think when we made it, it was like 2017. I just done a pilot for FOX, it was like an animated pilot. It’s such a cool experience when you get to make a pilot, and you work with a network, and you clear all these hurdles.

But then ultimately, if it doesn’t go to series, it doesn’t exist, nobody gets to see it. There was some thinking of, ‘we’ll put this up there, and even if 30 people see it’, which might have been a little more than even watched initially. We said, that’s something and it’ll exist, and it’ll be out there, and we can just make it like purely how we would like to see it exist. So that was definitely the coolest thing initially, just to be able to put something out there.

When you put the idea in your mind that you’re just making it to satisfy yourselves rather than a network, how different does the end product end up being?

It’s true, you don’t go through rounds of notes and stuff when you’re making something independently. But then on the flip side, we could just go purely with what we wanted, but the hurdle we kept smacking into was just our complete lack of infrastructure and resources. But there was something maybe a little freeing about the fact that we were just making it and we had to find other ways to be creative because we couldn’t afford good sound, and we couldn’t color it, and we couldn’t mix it.

We had to find people who are willing to let us shoot in a bakery for an hour, while they were still open and stay out of the way. You sort of find other ways to be creative, and that’s where we found the parenthetical subtitles and the interstitials and the audio intros. Just like finding these other ways to make it feel creative within our limitations was the coolest part. Once you get to the network stage, then it’s like, “Okay, cool, we can just build on that foundation, and now, actually afford sound and stuff.”

You’re building from a concept you’ve already proven, you’ve already put your voice into it. So ultimately you’re being less compromised.

Yeah, that was hugely helpful. They knew the sort of tone and feel and stuff.

What were the sort of unintended challenges once it’s like, “Okay cool, they want us to make this show on a much bigger scale. Oh, no, now we have to  ____.” What’s the blank of that sentence? 

I think it was making sure that we stayed consistent with what we wanted the vision of the show to be, which was never just to make it the ‘Dan and Kevin’ show and have everyone else be a plot device. We wanted other characters and to have it feel three dimensional, and to have characters who were “supporting” but that were as fleshed out and interesting and had their own wants and needs and didn’t just exist for our own advancement.

So, it was just kind of making sure that we could still do that. I think kind of the ignorance we had from not having done this before sort of helped. We were picked up in October, and had to be on the air in May and two scripts were written and we had to write the other eight and shoot them and get it all out by May. People were saying “Yo, this is a crazy schedule, right?” and we’re like “I don’t know.”

We kind of didn’t know. And when you don’t really know what is doable, you just kind of do it. I think the biggest thing was just making sure that we maintained it. Also, we kept a lot of the people who we’d worked with before. Like Kareem Green, who plays my stepdad, and Kerry Coddett, who plays Jasmine on the show, and Yamaneika who plays my therapist. We’re all stand ups, and we’ve worked with so many of them, and they were also a really good anchor for us.

How has your and Kevin’s creative relationship evolved in the way you guys work together, when you’re working on that sort of scale? Do you feel that your relationship scaled really well, with the scale of the show? Or were there any friction between you guys?

It’s always challenging, collaborating, but I do think the thing that drew us to each other initially, and why we’ve worked together for so long is that we have a lot of similarities and our energies, and the type of stuff we find funny and interesting. But also, we’re not the same. I think that sort of push-pull has always brought the end product to a more interesting place. Even the friendship depicted on the show, I think that’s more interesting to both of us to have it be an imperfect kind of friendship because they call each other out, you know, and that’s fun to do.

That can only come with someone who you’ve known for a long time and have worked with for a long time. Then as you work together more, you get a better sense in the writing of like, okay, I’ll probably approach this scene from this way, and then Kev will approach from that way, and you can kind of get better at predicting where in the middle you can kind of meet it. I think it’s good to have a little bit of a different take on it but the same core desire for the show.

How did you guys get to know your own neighborhood better? If you’re basing this very much on a place that you are intimately involved with, how does the process of making the show help you get to know it in a different way?

That was also one of the really important things with doing it on a bigger scale. We both live in Flatbush, Brooklyn, but neither of us was born there. And so we had a lot of people who worked on the show. Kerry Coddett is one, who wrote and acted on the show, is born and raised in Flatbush, and we have a music supervisor and a producer and costume designer, and a lot of our cast is born and raised in Brooklyn. We can kind of bring that authenticity to the show in the sort of specificity of the details, even down to like, this is the type of music you would hear in a roti shop in the place where Kevin works. These are these local businesses that we should reference and to have all that stuff feel just like be correct, you know?

People watching the show who have that kind of familiarity with the neighborhood can see that and also people who aren’t familiar with the neighborhood can still see it and get a real sense and not some more Hollywood, just like wild guess that is just like a sanded down representation of it. But getting all the kinds of nuances of it, but having people in all these different departments who also had a voice, and we contributed.

Humor comes from a lot of different places. How would you define the humor of the show? What conflict is it centered within? And what’s the push and pull around that sort of humor, in terms of finding the voice?

We tried to avoid making it very sitcom, where it’s like a stand-up comedian gets a show kind of thing, where they put their own stand-up jokes into the show, and it just feels very forced. They’re just all of a sudden doing their bit on going to the dentist or whatever, like to their TV wife. We didn’t do that. We wanted the humor of the show to just feel very grounded, and to have the jokes feel very specific to the characters. It’s definitely on the drier side. But we also wanted to kind of showcase a lot of different kinds of performers. So you have me and Kevin, who are way more subtle without delivery. But then you also have Kareem and Yamaneika, who are much bigger. I think the humor and the jokes, we always want to come through the characters. We didn’t want to force-feed jokes, but we wanted it to feel very sort of specific to each person. Drew has his voice, and Kareem has his, and we didn’t want it to feel like a sitcom where there might be good jokes, but it’s all interchangeable of who says what.

Do you feel like there are conscious antecedents for that sort of tone and humor that you felt inspired by? Or you felt that allowed you to have this kind of a voice for the show? Are there certain things either you grew up on or that you’ve seen develop in the TV comedy space over the last 10 to 15 years that you really felt inform the voice of the show?

There are shows that helped convince people that there would be an audience for this. With the success of a lot of these sort of single-camera more like lived-in shows like in, or like High Maintenance or a lot of stuff like that where it feels way more grounded. So that’s definitely helpful to see like, ‘Oh, you can do this, and people will watch and enjoy it’.

I have always liked these sort of independent films and these more just kind of grounded or human stories, and then just sort of tack on my love of stand up, and comedy with that. Sort of just balance the emotion of that with jokes. We love those more authentic shows.

We both loved Hey Arnold! as a kid, which was a kid’s Nickelodeon show, but it had a very melancholy kind of pace, and it also just did a very good job with showing a rich world. We didn’t want to just have that be ‘Dan and Kevin.’ We wanted these three-dimensional characters. When you see the character a second time, you might learn something new about them or see a different side of them, which feels more… You know how things go, you get to know somebody better, and you see them in a different way, you don’t always see them in the same one-note. But anyway, we both like that show for how it was able to do that effectively, especially for a kid’s show.

You definitely just blew my mind with that because suddenly it just clicked in my head how much Hey Arnold! there is in this.

It’s like, be funny, and then you’d be like, “Oh, yeah, there’s Harold,” and you’re like, “oh, Harold’s having a bar mitzvah. Oh, that’s weird. I thought he was just like, oh, a loud idiot.” They would kind of dip their toe into these other worlds. In doing that, there is a sort of richness in their ability to tell different stories, and make it all feel very alive and fresh, and play with everyone’s relationship to one another. And everyone’s got their own shit going on, in a way that feels more like New York and more like a city in general.

Oh, for sure. If you turn on the “Rugrats” Christmas special, they’re like opening presents, you turn on the Hey Arnold! special, it’s like Mr. Hyunh’s life is going to devastate you.

This guy who they just used as a random one-line joke has a daughter who is like mourning being apart from, and that’s the Christmas special. You’re like ‘that’s so weird and cool.’ It’s so fun to do that because you’re not even really aware, as you’re writing it, you’re just kind of planting these seeds. But it’s nice to kind of think of it as, Oh, these are just that, you’re planting a seed, and then you can go back and be like, Oh, we could flesh that person. And just like organically expand the world in a way that feels like we’re not just throwing in some random wrench of a person you’ve never… there is no surprise twin is showing up, we’re kind of gradually building the thing out in a way that hopefully feels real to people.

Arnold in general is like ahead of its time in a way. It’s just decentering, like on your show, as you’re saying.

The stoop kid, all this stuff was about these much broader things, but they weren’t hitting it over the head in an obvious way. We also didn’t want to do a very special episode about this cause or that, but just have the characters dealing with what they’re dealing with and by nature, you focus on this micro thing, and it reflects something broader, you know.

All those journeys are not just a matter of like defining Arnold’s journey, or defining Dan or Kevin’s journey.

Yeah, which we’re both fine doing. We’re the entry point into this rich world, but our characters who do not think about our characters much. We don’t matter to them, and that’s fun, but we still step on each other and then overlap and have to coexist, and that’s fun to play with.

Did you go back and rewatch Hey Arnold! Is it one of those things where it’s just a comfort show, you just go back and you’re stuck.

I hadn’t seen it in a long time, And then I rewatched some of them. Yeah, I still enjoy it. I guess I didn’t realize, as a kid, I didn’t appreciate it, but then you watch it and you’re like, man, Helga is like the best character on that show. She is so interesting and complicated. Even though Arnold is the name of it, she is this very nuanced character. I’m doing a good plug for a 20-year-olds cartoon. But yeah, I mean, she’s family and the dad, Big Bob’s Beepers, and there’s the sister who she’s in the shadow of. But again, they organically build this stuff out in a way that you watch it and you’re like “Oh, that’s cool.”

Yeah, you have this heart, you overcome the main character problem that serious sitcoms always have. Often, the main character’s journey is boring. He’s never as interesting as everyone else. Arnold’s just kind of like this chill center who’s just kind of out of the way, and a calming presence.

Yeah, I guess that’s how I feel with some of these shows where it’s like you said, it is focused on that one person or that they are the equator of Earth and everything. I am eventually, just like, ‘I don’t care about them,’ you know what I mean? There is this old movie I saw when I was a kid, it was called the Mission to Mars, and it was like, I don’t really remember anything about it. It’s a stupid movie, but I remember the opening scene they have the satellite on Mars or whatever, and they’re pushing forward, and they stopped on a rock. They stopped on the rock, and then they cut to NASA headquarters and they’re like, we did it we found a rock and they’re all high fiving each other or whatever, and they’re like bring it home. Then the satellite goes home and then our camera pushes forward five feet, and they see they would have discovered this whole civilization of flying cars and saucers and alien life and stuff. I guess I always think that with shows and movies and stuff. Sometimes they’re just stopping at the boring rock where if they push a little forward there’s like a whole world there potentially You know? So yeah.

Do you ultimately see your character as Arnold consciously?

Not consciously, no. I guess I see that character as like, I am referencing a lot of movies here but my character is like one of those, you know, in all those guilty pleasure teacher movies, where I love them all but hate them all. Where the teacher goes into an inner-city school and saves it and Matthew Perry will play hopscotch with the kids, and suddenly they know pre-calc. But before that, there’s always like a montage where they’re like, “we’ve gone through 19 teachers in three months and nobody can teach kids to read.” I consciously was viewing my character as he would have been in that montage scene and left him there because nobody cares. So that’s who I see that guy is. I see him as somebody who’s empathetic and genuinely wants to help but has just a demonstrable lack of ability in every single way.

Flatbush Misdemeanors is now streaming on Starzplay Arabia