Smiling Friends creators Zach Hadel (The Amazing Digital Circus, Hazbin Hotel) and Michael Cusack (YOLO, Bushworld Adventures) revealed their reaction to the show’s surprise Emmy nomination in Thursday interview with The Wrap. Last month, the runaway Adult Swim animated comedy’s third season — and unexpectedly, its last — received a nomination in the Outstanding Animated Program category for the episode “Le Voyage Incroyable De Monsieur Grenouille”, which follows the fan-favorite agent of chaos Mr. Frog through an unexpectedly existential search for meaning.
“Seeing our names up there with all those gigantic monoliths is kind of weird,” Hadel told The Wrap. “We’re this little rinky-dinky tiny little thing, so that’s very cool.” Cusack confirmed that the nomination was “completely unexpected, genuinely. I can’t speak for Zach, but I’ve never won anything. Like, even at school. Even to be nominated for something like this is very strange.”
Mr. Frog made his debut in a self-titled episode Smiling Friends’ first season, where main characters Pim and Charlie are forced to help the recently-cancelled celebrity amphibian earn the forgiveness of the public. While the duo eventually succeed, it quickly becomes clear that Mr. Frog is ridiculously unhinged, with polluting local rivers, robbing banks, and turning random passerby into skeletons via Green Goblin bombs numbering among his many, many illegal pastimes. The joke goes one step further in season two, where Mr. Frog is voted President of the United States despite his extensive on-screen history of assaults and human rights abuses. (This, of course, has no real world analogue.)
“Le Voyage Incroyable De Monsieur Grenouille,” though, sees Mr. Frog becomes a victim of his own success. Despite his inexplicable tendency to fail upwards, he feels his life lacks any real meaning; he resigns the presidency and enters on a journey of self-discovery. It’s an extremely funny episode that also isn’t afraid to get serious (well, as serious as a show with Mr. Frog in it can be, anyways). The penultimate scene of the episode sees character actor Creed Bratton (The Office, Labor Pains) appear as the amphibian’s father, who tearfully berates his son for his crimes and his unwillingness to acknowledge his mother’s recent death.
Hadel and Cusack deny that the episode is a metaphor for their own relationship with Smiling Friends, which they announced would end with its third season due to a desire to preserve the series’ creative integrity. “I would say the most is we were thinking about it in terms of a trilogy,” Hadel told The Wrap. “We had a Mr. Frog episode in season one, we had one in season two and this felt like, OK, this is a nice wrap-up arc to the character. Even if we thought we were going to go on, there’s something about trilogies. For whatever reason, things work in threes.” Cusack admitted that he “could see subconscious elements” of the decision “leaking through”, but that the team never intentionally sought to address it in the episode.
All seasons of Smiling Friends are streaming now on HBO Max.