How Pete Davidson’s “Fever Dream” Life Inspired Bupkis
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The post How Pete Davidson’s “Fever Dream” Life Inspired Bupkis appeared first on Consequence.
According to Bupkis showrunner Judah Miller (American Dad!, Crashing), the challenge of adapting Pete Davidson’s life for the semi-autobiographical Peacock comedy was matched by Davidson’s ambition. “He’s a dreamer and he thinks big,” the writer/producer tells Consequence. “And I think that that’s part of what’s so incredible about partnering with him on this, is that he aims for the sky and then somehow we end up hitting these targets, even when we’re told it’s impossible.”
Thus, while the series might have originally been billed as a Curb Your Enthusiasm-esque look at the SNL alum’s existence, Larry David never devoted an entire episode to an increasingly obvious homage to the Fast & Furious saga — just one of the blockbuster-scale ideas incorporated into the show’s first season.
“So many of the things that we did on this show were so ambitious, and I think we just lucked out in so many instances, where we were able to do things that people would say would be impossible,” Miller says. “Like, given the production of our show, for us to pull off that car chase sequence and have it look and feel as much like Fast and Furious as it ended up being was incredibly ambitious. And then, to get music and to get some of the actors that we were able to get, I feel like it’s part of Pete’s, you know…”
Miller trails off there, but “Pete’s, you know…” feels like a pretty eloquent way of describing the way Davidson moves through the world, the surreality of which is a major part of the Bupkis viewing experience. Below, Miller explains how he got involved with Bupkis, how many of the show’s epic cameos came together, and whether Davidson had any rules about what the show could or couldn’t explore.
I’d like to start off by asking how you first got involved with Pete’s world.
I first met Pete on the movie The King of Staten Island — I’d worked with Judd Apatow for a long time and was fortunate enough to be able to work on that movie, and Pete and I and Dave Sirus [the film’s other co-writer] all just gravitated towards each other; we kind of instantly became very close friends, because we have very similar comic sensibilities.
During the pandemic, that very surreal time in the world, I was in my house, like everyone else, and I got a text from Pete saying, “Hey, do you want to write a show with me?” And we just started writing episodes of this show, you know, not knowing where it was gonna go… Which I think contributed to some of the kind of boundless nature of what the series ended up being, because we were just writing it in this vacuum, which was nice.
Bupkis (Peacock)
How many episodes would you say you wrote on spec?
It’s hard to say because we wrote more episodes than we ended up making and we ended up combining a couple of episodes. But I think we wrote four or five maybe. We were ready to be in production and I wasn’t really sure what was going to turn out of it. But we had faith that this would see the light of day.
Beyond just “Do you want to write a TV show?”, what was the angle on it?
I think that one of the early concepts of the show was that becoming close friends with Pete and hanging out with him… His life has an absurd kind of fever dream quality to it, and when you’re in his orbit, you get sucked into that fever dream with him. There’s a relentlessness to his life that keeps continually escalating, seemingly endlessly escalating. So when we started talking about concepts of what we wanted the show to be like, it was obvious that his actual life was a great platform to mine comedy from.
There was obviously going to be some thematic crossover between this project and [The King of Staten Island], but I’d say the shifting tone of this series is part of what, to us, completely differentiates this project from that project. There’s an absurdity to this show, there’s an anarchy to this show. I think that one of the exciting aspects of the show is that you’re not going to know what to expect from episode to episode — and sometimes even within episodes, we’ll be drastically shifting tones. Even though [Davidson]’s also depicting a fictitious version of his actual life, I think the free boundless nature of this series is something that, to us, [made this] very different.
I’m guessing the secret to getting all of these cameos is Pete’s phone list?
Yeah, a lot of the guest stars are… [Laughs] Pete has a lot of contacts in Hollywood, and a lot of people are very interested in Pete and really love Pete. So Pete was able to get us an incredible list of unbelievable guest stars that I think really contribute to the show — it meant so much to us that we got such incredible world-class caliber talent to come and do sometimes really ridiculous and absurd things. And sometimes you have these unbelievably gifted and dramatic actors doing absurd things and adding this nuance and realism to absurd moments, which was incredible.
I have two questions about the Al Gore cameo — first of all, is Al Gore in Pete’s phone?
Pete knows Al Gore. You can never underestimate who Pete [knows]. Pete has actually done climate change summits with Al Gore, so there is a relationship and yeah, Al Gore came through and showed up for us, which was really incredible.
And did someone have to explain to him the Wu-Tang sign he’s doing in the trailer?
He got it right away. I think he understood the reference. I don’t know if he understood the context, but he’s definitely down with the Wu-Tang.
So in playing with Pete’s life in the context of fiction, were there any topics that he felt were off limits?
I mean, Pete is so fearless when it comes to his creativity. I can’t think of anything that he really felt was off limits. I think one of the things that we wanted to hit with this show was to have a truthfulness to the stories that we tell. And, you know, as absurd and relentless as the show can get within every episode, there’s an emotional core that speaks to something very real in Pete’s life. Pete’s mantra in the early days of writing this was that he wanted to write this without fear and that we, in the writers’ room, should be free to write whatever we want to write, without any sense of fear.
I don’t think that there’s anything that was off limits to Pete. He’s a very fearless performer and I think that people that respond to Pete and are fans of Pete appreciate that authenticity and that filterless point of view that he provides within his comedy. That’s definitely something you’re going to get through the show.
All eight episodes of Bupkis Season 1 are streaming now on Peacock.
How Pete Davidson’s “Fever Dream” Life Inspired Bupkis
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