Tuca & Bertie‘s Second Life: Tiffany Haddish and Ali Wong Discuss the Show’s Unlikely Return
Images courtesy of Adult Swim
A year ago Tuca & Bertie was saved. Cancelled after one critically-acclaimed season on Netflix, the animated show from Lisa Hanawalt, which stars Ali Wong and Tiffany Haddish as best bird friends, was rescued by Adult Swim. After a long wait the second season finally arrives this weekend, and the creator and cast not only feel they’re in a good spot, but seem excited that their much beloved project is still alive.
“We feel we’re at the right place. Adult Swim is a perfect home for us,” Haddish told us. “They like stuff that’s a little weird, and we’re a little weird but we’re grounded in reality and that’s the good stuff.”. This sentiment was echoed by Wong, who assured us she and Haddish had been friends since the “real Delia’s catalog days” of Clinton’s presidency, and have wanted to work together just as long.
“There’s been many discussions over the years of us doing like a spy movie, a version of like Demolition Man together. All sorts of stuff and this is the only project that has seemed to land,” Wong shared. I, for one, lament that we have been robbed of a Demolition Man remake with this dynamic duo (which one would play John Spartan, and which one would play Simon Phoenix?!?), but Tuca & Bertie is wonderful in its own special way. Being able to continue working on the show looks to be a boon for the longtime friends and Hanawalt, who feels similarly about where they’ve landed.
“Adult Swim was just like, ‘We want that. We’re gonna get it.’ They recognized the value of the show and they’ve just been great creative partners,” Hanawalt shared. “It’s nice to work with a network that understands animation.”
The cancellation thankfully didn’t scare off the cast, and Hanawalt remains firm in the fact that as long as they’re all together, the show should remain much the same as always. “I think for fans of the show, not that much has changed about it. Still have Tiffany and Ali and Steven Yeun, and a lot of our favorite guest actors and the themes are similar and a lot of the storylines are continued.”
A good number of threads do, in fact, get picked back up even in the early episodes of the newest season, with one of the biggest ones being the reemergence of Pastry Pete in Bertie’s life. When we asked Hanawalt about these more serialized elements of her show (since serialization in adult animation isn’t as common as one might think), she offered up, “I think serializing helps because in real life I feel like guys like Pastry Pete don’t go away. Even if you have a bad interaction with them they tend to come back. They don’t just disappear.”
As a matter of fact, she even pokes fun at the very fact that they don’t just disappear in one of the episodes made available to the press, where Bertie wishes aloud that bad men would just be sent to an island before she realizes they would just turn it into a fun island getaway of all the toxic men in the world.
As well as continuing threads, new ones have emerged too. Early on in the second season, there aren’t just hints of growing tension between the friends, but differing priorities too. “I think Tuca is looking for a love in her life and she’s worried that her friendship with Bertie is the thing holding her back from doing that,” Hanawalt said of some of the new direction. When we asked Haddish what she was looking forward to, she said, “I’m excited for [the audience] to see Tuca’s growth. Tuca is definitely getting more grounded and wanting more for herself. But also she’s realizing that her friend is also growing and probably going to have a family and getting a husband and all this and it’s like `Well, what am I doing for me to have a foundation as well?’”