Dan Harmon has taken audiences from a small community college in Colorado to the furthest reaches of space and alternate dimensions. But his latest series, the animated Krapopolis, will see the creative bringing audiences to a time before Ancient Greek culture was founded.
“I wanted to say Golden Age Greece, but I don’t mean Golden Age in the academic, actual, the real, historical sense,” Harmon explained earlier today from the main stage at this weekend’s New York Comic Con. “It’s the classic time-before-time storytime Greece of the myths that we learned. It’s important for people to know that no historical accuracy is being attempted.”
Harmon went on to explain that the series will center on a family dynamic as people are just trying to figure out what civilization is.
“The mom is Deliria, a lesser known goddess but one which goes back to the beginning of the Olympian dynasty,” Harmon stated, while also noting that she is a character created for the show and not actually derived from Greek mythology. “She’s sort of the black sheep of the Olympian family. I wanted to tell the story about a mother and a son and her son is a mortal named Tyrannis. She named him Tyrannis because she had big dreams of him conquering the world in her name. It’s a classic mom-son relationship when the mom is a little disappointed in what he became versus what she had in mind. But also, Tyrannis gets to hate on her because she is so powerful, but to me the big thing of the show is that drives is how little Tyrannis understands how much like his mother he is.”
Tryannis is voiced by The IT Crowd‘s Richard Ayoade and Deliria is played by Hannah Waddingham (Ted Lasso). Rounding out the core family unit is Shlub (voiced by What We Do In The Shadow‘s Matt Berry), Tyrannis’s father and Tyranni’s half-siblings Stupendous (Pam Murphy), whose father was a cyclops and Hippocampus (Duncan Trussell). Harmon also stated that Tom Kinney, Joel McHale, Stephanie Beatriz, Daveed Diggs and Ben Stiller will all be guest starring in early episodes.
But for Harmon, the bigger theme of the show is the idea of how humans transitioned to the idea of settling down and creating cities.
“The idea is at a certain point, humans had to invent the idea of living in cities, Harmon explained. “From the point of view of the show, civilization is an experiment. There’s a lot of people really heavily invested that civilization is going to be this really big thing, but there are a lot of people who are justifiably going ‘I don’t think this is going to work. I think we’re going to go back to people huddling in caves.'”
Krapopolis is set to premier with a preview episode on November 27 and then roll out next May as part of Fox’s Animation Domination Sunday programming block. And while the public hasn’t seen anything of the show yet – outside of the two scenes that Harmon brought along for the New York Comic Con audience – the network has liked the show enough that they have already ordered a second season.
“Fox wants more,” Harmon said. “I guess I think they think it’s good.”
What more of a ringing endorsement could a network ask for?
