4.6 • 639 Ratings
🗓️ 1 July 2015
⏱️ 29 minutes
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Co-creators Kim and Roberto Benabib talk about making global annihilation funny in their new series for HBO, The Brink.
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0:00.0 | Hi, I'm Elvis Mitchell, and thanks for listening to The Treatment. |
0:03.3 | Some of the most entertaining stories produced today, however, are not on the big screen, |
0:07.3 | but they can be heard on KCRW's Unfictional, |
0:10.3 | intimate stories and artful documentaries crafted by some of the most talented radio producers across the world. |
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0:20.5 | From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment. |
0:32.6 | Welcome to The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. You may ask yourself, what's missing from comedy these days? |
0:39.4 | It's so much about who's sleeping with whom and who isn't sleeping with whom. And the new comedy that |
0:44.4 | Brink on HBO is kind of about that. It touches on that, but it's mostly, it's political comedies, |
0:50.1 | geopolitical comedies. The kind of thing that's been missing from TV probably forever. And the creators |
0:54.7 | of the show, Roberto and Ken Bervea here. First of all, guys, thanks much for being here. |
0:58.7 | Oh, absolutely. Thanks for having us all this. And Roberto, you were telling me this kind of grew |
1:02.9 | out of you going to see the Kubrick exhibit at Lackma a few years back. Yeah, it was a great exhibit |
1:10.0 | and found myself in the strange Love part of it and realized, |
1:15.3 | God, all the great kind of political comedies that I'd grown up with, like MASH and Catch 22, |
1:21.2 | and Network and Strange Love itself, were just missing. Comedies in a post-Sinfeld world had gotten so small and macro, and they were |
1:30.0 | kind of all about interpersonal relationships and workplace, and I was hankering for comedy that |
1:38.8 | dealt with something more. So I called Kim. I said, does this appeal to you? And he said, absolutely. And we just started working on it. And it was just fun. And the upshot of it is, we can't figure out why no one was doing this sooner. Why was there a direct correlation between like 1975 and now? But, you know, maybe Vietnam. Maybe it was, |
2:04.4 | those comedies came out of Vietnam era. And so they were pushed. We were pushed as a society |
2:10.0 | more politically than we are now. Also, you have to, you have to remember, we did this as a spec script. |
2:16.1 | You know, and one of the things that happened |
2:18.7 | is it got very quickly, people responded to how different it was. And that was what was |
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