Exclusive Interview: Pop Culturalist Chats with Q-Force’s Gabe Liedman

Gabe Liedman knows how to make people laugh. He’s built a comedy career that took him from performing stand-up to acting and writing for TV. He’s written for beloved comedy television shows like The Kroll Show, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Broad City, and PEN15. Now, he’s blessed the world with his own brand-new animated comedy series Q-Force about an underdog team of queer secret agents.

We chatted with Gabe about his career path, how he collaborated to create Q-Force, and how animation creates so many possibilities.

PC: So before we dive into Q-Force, I’d love to know how you discovered your passion for storytelling?
Gabe: My background is stand-up comedy and that was the way I found my way to television writing. My stand-up was always in that genre of storytelling—but telling stories about myself. I was more of that kind of stand-up than a set-up-for-fun guy. So I guess I can see that link there, and I’ve always loved to read. I think all of that got me here.

PC: So who— or what—would you say has been the biggest influence on your career so far?
Gabe: I would say my extended community of comedy friends. That’s really how I’ve gotten my opportunities in life. Like I said, I started in stand-up, and the first cool writing jobs I got were from peers of mine who sold their own shows first. First, it was Billy Eichner, then Amy Schumer, and then Nick Kroll that gave me work on their shows back-to-back-to-back. That gave me the creds to start working for strangers.

PC: When you are looking at projects, aside from ones coming from people you know, what is it that draws you in? Is there a certain type of story you’re looking to tell, or a certain viewpoint you want to explore a little bit? 
Gabe: Yeah. I had a really fun time jumping around in genres. I like to collect that experience. So I’ve worked in sketch; I’ve worked in sitcoms. I’ve also worked on dramadies and now in action-adventure animated things. I’m kind of like a seeker in that way. I like to try and do things I haven’t done before. What really draws me project to project are the people involved. I don’t know if a lot of people know this, but making television is an incredibly social activity. You work in large groups for long hours with different people. So it’s really important to me to know what the chemistry is going to be like. That dictates a lot of what I’m going to do next.

PC: So then moving on to Q-Force: what was the inspiration behind Q-Force?
Gabe: Q-Force existed as this very tiny seed of an idea that Sean Hayes had with his producing partner, Todd Milliner. They had this concept that was just, “a gay James Bond,” and they knew that that was a part that Sean would be really good at playing. But, they didn’t really know what to do with it so they started to meet with writers. Sean was a fan of my stand-up and brought me in to see what I thought of that [idea] and what I would do with it. So I took “gay James Bond,” and I just thought on it for a couple of weeks.

What I came back to them with was Q-Force—which is not exactly gay James Bond at all. It’s an ensemble workplace comedy that’s the kind of bigger than just the story of this one guy. I also thought [that] I don’t think gay James Bond would ever really be a thing, even if this guy was as good as James Bond. He might not get the opportunities. That seemed like a rich starting place for a comedy to me. Luckily they agreed. So we developed the idea together, and we brought in Mike Schur, this amazing television creator. We all batted ideas around until we had something to take out to the network.

PC: What led to the decision to make it an animated series versus live action?
Gabe: Well, there are just so many more possibilities in animation. You can do anything. In something like an action-comedy that’s a mashup of genres, no one’s going to pay for a plane for us to crash for a twenty-two-minute episode. So we had to kind of create our own rules, and animation allowed us to do that. Also, it was always going to star Sean. So it was like, “Is he really going to jump out of a plane, land on a car, and punch out the windshield? Or, should we use his voice and give him a new body?” [laughs] It was based on creative decisions, but it was also very practical.

PC: As you were writing and developing the characters, did you have actors or voice actors in mind to go with them? And did you also have the vision of what they looked like as animations?
Gabe: Yes, I definitely had actors in mind. As a writer that really helped me make the dialogue sound real and organic and not just a list of jokes. In some cases, we got those actors. It was always Wanda Sykes for me so my mind is blown that she got the script and said, “Yeah, I’d like to play the part.” She was always Deb for me. In some cases, though, we did the casting and the characters changed a bit to fit them. Laurie Metcalf is an actor with the most insane range in the world so once we knew we had someone as unbelievably talented as she is to play V, then it was like, “Well, we’ve got to give V some sh-t to do.” She’s not going to just be Charlie from Charlie’s Angels, who talks to them, gives them their assignment, and disappears. This is an opportunity to write some really rich stuff. So characters evolve, too, to fit the talent.

As for the character designs: we, in every single case— big character or small character—we always started with what the actor looks like and took the design from there as another way to ground this in reality. Some characters look more like the actors than others, but the inspiration always started with photos of the actors. It did make them more human because there’s the version of Agent Mary or Agent Buck out there that look like cookie-cutter porn stars or whatever. But it was really fun to make Agent Buck balding and paunchy. It made him a real person. I do think that that’s what that guy would look like. 

PC: You mentioned making Q-Force more of an ensemble piece than the original idea. When the cast was recording, were they recording together? And, if so, did that ensemble itself affect any of the storylines? Did it influence any of their arcs? 
Gabe: Well, sadly…or not sadly, but just matter of factly, our production schedule became completely different because of COVID-19. The pandemic hit when we were a little less than halfway done writing, and we hadn’t started really recording anything yet. So we had to scramble and figure out a new process for everything. So half the writing, all of the voice acting, all of the animation, all the editing, all the music, and everything else was done in complete isolation. It would have been awesome to have a bunch of the actors in the booth together, improvising, and having chemistry and all of that, but we just didn’t have that luxury. We just did it one actor at a time, line by line, and either I or one of my other writers would be reading the other parts of the scene with them.

PC: Of all of the characters in the show, is there one that you personally connect with the most? Or enjoy the most?
Gabe: Well, I based every single character off of people in my life so I love them all equally. They’re like my friends…because they literally are. [laughs] But I put a lot of myself and my own kind of neuroses and failings into Agent Mary. I’ve been a showrunner before, but I’ve never been a showrunner of an animated show. And, I’ve never been the showrunner of an animated during a global pandemic before. So there was a lot of needing things for the first time, a lot of learning things first time, and being “in charge.” So I just poured a lot of myself into that character.

[And] the other characters…I don’t know if anyone’s funnier to me than Twink. And, especially, Matt’s performance of Twink is such a break-out to me. And V is my idol. I wish I was as cool as she is, but I’m not. [laughs] But, yeah, I love all the characters.

PC: Since you mentioned this was the first animated show you ran, were there any surprising challenges that you were not expecting going into it? Aside from the pandemic, of course!
Gabe: I mean, yeah, there is… Animation is so freeing. You have so much control over everything. There’s not real-bodied actors. There’s no set. There’s no lighting. There’re no locations. The world is really your oyster, which is a very exciting concept, but it also plays out in this really intimidating way. You’re actually making a million more micro-choices along the way than you are in live action. That was something I had never anticipated…down to when the characters breathe and blink and what the door sounds like when it opens and closes. Things like that. You’re not really used to choosing that. I think that that would really appeal to certain types of artists, but, to me, I was like usually just crushed under the weight of how many decisions get made every day. I was like, “Well, I mean, the door sounds like a door.” But then you listen, and there’s a thousand ways a door can sound! It’s so strange. That was something I never anticipated.

PC: Would you do another animated series, then, or are you like, “Okay, that’s done. We’re focusing on this live action from now on”?
Gabe: Oh, I would kill to do another season of Q-Force. It was so fun. It’s so crazy. Doing Season 1, I learned a lot so there’re things I would do differently and things that I figured out that really work. So yeah, I would love to be on more confident footing going into a second season. I think that could be really fun, and I have a lot of crazy ideas. So I’m just kind of holding my breath, hoping that Netflix gives it a shot.

PC: The industry has made slow progress in terms of greater representation on screen. In terms of Q-Force, what has it meant to you to continue to push that movement forward and have greater representation?
Gabe: I’ve been working for long enough now that I feel like I’ve seen some improvement in on screen representation, especially for LGBTQ+ people. There’s certainly so much room for more, but there’s more now than there was when I started. I feel like we can only improve from here. That’s certainly true of a myriad of other groups who are extremely underrepresented on screen.

As far as this one project, I tried to just sort of bake representation into the very concept and foundation of the show. Like, this is a clear path; this is a clear story. It’s always going to be clear. So that it didn’t become this moment-to-moment assignment to keep it that. It’s always going to be that, and I found that that was very helpful. From the first second I was talking to Netflix, it was like, “This is a queer show, and this is a queer cast. This is my queer writing team, and these are my queer artists.” So it’s just so baked in the DNA of the show that it felt kind of freeing to be like, “Okay, great, that part is there. So now let’s just have fun and make a show.”

Whereas, I think that in the past, it’s been a sort of day-to-day battle to sort of carve out [representation] on other shows like, “Hey, maybe this side character could be queer?” or “Maybe we could take this small opportunity in this one episode to carve out the time to tell this story?” You know what I mean? So the whole house here is queer. So, it allowed us the freedom to just sort of be like let’s not be educational. Let’s not be political every second. It’s queer, and it’s here! Let’s just go nuts and see if we can keep doing this forever.

Make sure to follow Gabe on Twitter and to check out season 1 of Q-Force on Netflix!