Television

NYCC provides first look at Dan Harmon’s ‘Krapopolis’

Harmon confirmed the show has already received a Season 2 pickup order in advance of its November 27th premiere.

October 7, 2022

Rick and Morty‘s Dan Harmon graced New York Comic Con attendees with a first look at his upcoming animated series for Fox, Krapopolis. The footage was still only in the very rough animatic phase, but even Fox is impressed enough with the project this early on because Harmon confirmed the show has already received a Season 2 pickup order in advance of its November 27th premiere.

But if audiences hope to see more after one episode, they’ll have to wait for 2023, when the rest of the episodes currently in production will air.

Krapopolis is “a family, animated sitcom set in the world– I wanted to say Golden Age Greece, but I don’t mean Golden Age in the academic, actual, the real, historical sense,” Harmon explained. “It’s the classic time before time storytime Greece of the myths that we learned.”

“Fans of history, I think, will not like what the show is doing,” Harmon joked of the shows loose approach to historical accuracy. “They’ll be confused and offended all the time.”

“It’s centered around a family,” Harmon said. “The mom is Deliria, a lesser-known goddess but one that goes way back to the beginning of The Olympian Dynasty. She’s sort of the black sheep of the Olympian family.” If you’re unfamiliar with Deliria, don’t call and complain to your former Mythology professor though; Harmon clarified that he made her up.

“I wanted to tell a story about a mother and a son,” said Harmon. “Her son is a mortal named Tyranus. She named him Tyranus because she had big dreams of him conquering the world in her name. You know, it’s a classic mom/son relationship when the mom is kind of like a little disappointed in what you became versus what she had in mind. But also Tyranus is, you know, he gets to hate on her because she’s so powerful. I think, to me, the big thing about the show that drives it is how little Tyranus understands how like his mother he is. A big theme of the show is his empowerment and, you know, what the kids call privilege.”

Harmon said he thinks Tyranus is a cool guy. “He just doesn’t want to start Western Civilization,” Harmon said. This led into a bigger theme Harmon said he’s interested in exploring. “The idea is at a certain point, humans had to invent the idea of living in cities. Before there were these counties, there were city-states. And it reminds me of a lot of post-apocalyptic storytelling where you come upon a big circle of cars. And the people in there have figured out that you’re going to live longer and not be killed by the big Humungus’ with goalie masks on if they huddle together and they organize. And that’s how it all began as well, is people going, ‘well, let’s stick together and grow our food so we can pee in the river. And let’s call that civilization, which is really high-minded.'”

“From the point of view of this show, civilization is an experiment,” Harmon said. “It’s like there’s a lot of people invested in this idea that civilization’s going to be a really big thing, and then a lot of people are quite justifiably like, I don’t think this is going to work. I think we’re going to go back to people hunting in caves.”

The first clip screened was a simple breakfast scene that introduces many of the characters. The other animatic clip depicted Tyranus’ attempt to liberate his hero Prometheus (Ben Stiller) from having an eagle constantly eating his liver every minute.

“It’s like, if you were super powerful, what kind of persons would you be versus if you were disempowered? I was always fascinated by this idea that, according to these stories, there was a time when there were these people walking around. You know, the gods were like superheroes. They didn’t live on clouds. They walked around the Earth, and they couldn’t die. And then there were the rest of us, who then all have to die.”

Harmon takes from this that “the Ancient Greeks were kind of reminding themselves with these stories that if you had immortality, if you had infinite power, you’d be kind of a dick. And that’s how they came up with these ideas of, like, glory and honor and integrity. These are things you can only have if you’re going to die because only if you’re going to die can you choose how you’re going to die and dedicate your life to– You know, you’re sacrificing things. These are human concepts that we made up to cope with mortality.”