Interview: Hamish Steele talks the queer sensibility of ‘Dead End: Paranormal Park,’ the origins of the idea and crafting a musical episode

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Over the last decade, trans representation in media has been coming to the forefront. Series such as Orange is the New Black, Pose and Genera+ion have put their trans characters front-and-center, allowing them to be full people beyond their identities and giving the LGBTQ+ community more representation.

This is especially true for Netflix’s new animated series, Dead End: Paranormal Park, created by Hamish Steele based off his DeadEndia comics. The series follows a young, trans, Jewish teen named Barney who leaves his house to live and work at an amusement park while finding a chosen family along the way. Steele describes this as not just being simple representation, describing it as “meant to be in the structure and the bones of the show.” This kind of animated program that navigates the toughness and joys of being trans and finding a chosen family as each character is going through their own issues.

I recently spoke to Steele via Zoom (as he was in the UK) and we discussed the origins of the original idea of the story, how the series came about at Netflix, and his hopes for more seasons of the series. 

Tyler Doster: I want to start by asking you how you came up with the original idea for Dead End back when it was a short?

Hamish Steele: Honestly, I answered an ad on Tumblr, which maybe explains how long ago it was, from Frederator Studios’ Cartoon Hangover, who’d done Bee and PuppyCat and Bravest Warriors and things like that. And it was just an open call for submissions. And I just sent them a bunch of comics I was working on. And they did feature Barney and Norma from the show, but it wasn’t about haunted houses. It wasn’t about anything else. It was just quite a wacky slice of life, mashed-up kind of stories.

And they liked the characters, but they wanted just a comedy idea for a five minute short. And I think I just chose haunted houses because I like spooky movies, and I thought it would make for, I kind of like it when characters scream, so I just think it’s funny. And Pugsley came from a student film I had made, and then we changed his design quite a lot because he looked a lot like Jake the dog originally. And so it really was just a Frankenstein creation of just drawings I was doing, things I was thinking of at the time. And it was when it came to adapting it into a comic that I started building out the world and thinking, well, why do they live in a haunted house? What if it was in a theme park? And it kind of just went from there.

TD: What made you want to adapt it into a 10 episode series?

HS: Well, I wasn’t even thinking about it. It’s really unusual. I didn’t actually pitch this show necessarily in a traditional sense. When we made the original short, we shopped it around a few places. We sort of developed it for a little bit with Nickelodeon, but it just didn’t end up happening. And so I kind of drew a line under it ever being a show and I turned it into a comic book series. And so I was working on the comic and developing other shows and pitching other pilots simultaneously. So I was pitching other shows for about eight years and got very far on a few, completely crashed and burned on others. And so I just went for a general meeting with Netflix and Blink, who makes it and I was working with. And we pitched a bunch of shows, none of which were Dead End. And at the end of the meeting, I think they liked me, but I hadn’t quite impressed them with the ideas. And they said, “Whatever happened to that short you made all those years ago?” And I slid the comic book across the table. And they were the ones that said, “This is what you should go with. This is clearly the story you’re most passionate about.”

And they said 10 episodes. And we kind of built the show during pre-production, before… Well, not pre-production. Development, I guess, before the green light, and made the show I always wanted to make. I just had, I’d sort of thought that once you get a few rejections, that’s it for a project. I didn’t know it could kind of linger for so long.

TD: The original short was supposed to be more of an adult cartoon, and I know it still has a curse word and references to porn in it. And I know that you were asked to take some of that out to make it more youth friendly. So I guess my question is: what was that decision like when you were making the Netflix show? Did you always want it to be more friendly for kids? Or were you originally thinking about making it adult-oriented like your original project?

HS: No, funnily enough the adult comedy was added to the short. I didn’t pitch it that adult, and then Cartoon Hangover’s brand at the time was trying to make more adult cartoons, and then halfway through production they changed their mind because I think it demonetized their videos, and that was their whole business model. So it used to be a lot worse. There was some proper bad stuff in there.

So we took out what we could and we left in the stuff we did, and we still think it’s funny. And then the comic was more YA, I wouldn’t say adult, I guess more teen. It kind of set the tone of the show. No, I wanted it to be kind of kid friendly but see what we could get away with in terms of spookiness. I’ve always felt like officially we say that it’s eight to twelves, but I think it will talk to older kids and teens more. But we also always knew that it would just be four kids that like scary stuff, and that can kind of… It doesn’t quite have an age range. Some kids love the scary things and some older kids find it terrifying, so it was pretty natural, I think.

TD: I personally loved the spooky elements of it. I thought it was put in there so well.

HS: Thank you.

TD: Much of your work has some kind of talking animal in it. You have Croc and Roll, you have Badly Drawn Animals, and you have Pugsley from [Dead End]. So I wanted to know what draws you to creating these talking animals, and what do you like about having them?

HS: Well, also all three examples also have human characters as well, and I haven’t made anything yet that’s like Zootopia or something, where it’s all animals. And I think there’s something almost more human the more removed you get, sort of those core relationships like Barney and Pugsley, and then Croc and Roll, it’s Mayday and Alan and the crocodiles. There’s like the human gets to go through the real human journey, the kind of angst of life and the more grounded problems, and the animal character kind of gets to be a window into it.

So Pugsley, we like to use, because I think of him a little bit like Olaf from Frozen, because he is not technically a child, but he’s kind of a child’s window, like an innocent window into the kind of more adult storyline. So for Pugsley, it’s kind of a way of getting a more child point-of-view into a story that can sometimes get a little grown up. But yeah, I never really noticed that trend. I think definitely with animation it’s a bit about character designs as well. I think for the original short, I just thought it’d be really funny if one of them was a dog, and in the original short there’s no explanation why there is a dog with them talking. I just thought it was funny.

TD: Yeah. And in the original short he’s just kind of there. He just is already a character. It was so funny to watch after also seeing all of Dead End: Paranormal Park, just to see where it came from and how it evolved.

HS: Yeah.

TD: The series tackles some pretty important themes such as trans identity, mental health issues, specifically Norma has a lot of social anxiety. Did you know when you started this that you wanted to use this as a vehicle to tackle these kind of issues?

HS: I think so. It’s interesting because I think there’s this bad rap made at the kind of very special episode type show. And I’ve never really thought about it like that because they’re topics that I just… I kind of can’t remove them from my work because they’re just what I want to write about. And I’m actually really pleased with Norma specifically because I have written protagonists like her quite a few times in the shows I was pitching, and I would always get this note that they’re unrelatable or they’re weird. I feel with quite a few female protagonists in animation for kids there’s this quite strong sense that they need to be bubbly and perky the whole time, and their only flaws can be that they’re a little bit clumsy, if that.

And so I’d written Norma-like characters in quite a few shows, and I just kept getting notes about making them more likable. And I quite like that Norma is… I won’t ever call her annoying, but she’s not trying to be liked in the first episode. She sort of has a goal and is very competitive and doesn’t really warm to the rest of the characters that quickly. It does take a little while. Norma’s also special to me in some ways because when I was writing her for the comics, I kept getting this comment… Not comment, but I kept getting people saying that they had canoned her as autistic, and a lot of autistic readers would sort of bring up that they really related to her.

And so when we started writing the show, we got an autism consultant in and we started writing that intentionally. And the consultant commented on my writing, “Wow, you must have done a lot of research.” And I said, “Um, not really.” And to cut a long story short, I was diagnosed with autism last year because of Norma, because at the time I was just writing something intended to be, “Hashtag relatable. Everyone feels this way.” Turns out that’s not true. And one of the more validating things was in the writer’s room, one of the writers said, “I don’t relate to Norma.” And that was kind of a win for me. I sort of don’t want every character to be always relatable to everybody. It kind of makes it hard to write specific-ness, I guess.

TD: I want to get specific with you about a few lines on the show, if that’s okay with you.

HS: Okay.

TD: In the third episode, everyone is dealing with their fears, and Norma mistakenly thinks that Barney fears his Grammy Gram, to which he tells her that his fear is actually his parents not having his back, which I think is universal for LGBTQ+ members all over the world. So I just wanted to ask how important was it to show that fear and all of their fears?

HS: Yeah, Barney’s relationship with his parents was one of the main things we talked about in the first couple of days when we started writing, because in the books the parents are the sort of unseen, much more bigoted kind of concept. They’re not characters in any way. And I started thinking that parents might be watching this with their kids, and I kind of wanted to vouch for parents a little bit more, but also maybe offer them lessons as well as the kids. And so I do think the idea of, I guess allyship versus… Maybe I don’t mean that, but the idea that the parents have said all the right things, but they’re not necessarily doing all the right things is a kind of nuanced experience I think a lot of people go through, and I thought it would just be interesting to explore something kind of between what you usually see of either the super, super, super perfect parents or the sort of monster parents. I don’t think the kind of more realistic… I don’t even want to say realistic. Those things are real, but maybe more common mental ground where there’s definitely support, but they’re confused. They don’t know if they’re saying the right things, doing the right things.

But like you say, it was meant to be relatable to everybody. And I think that’s the thing I hope with Barney is that even though on paper it might seem like this kind of story hasn’t been told before, it’s meant to be something that everyone should relate to. And I think Barney is the kind of Everyman and the audience surrogate in some ways, so I thought it was important to show that. And some of the fears in the episode seem a little silly, but we tried to make sure that all of them had a serious grounding. So for example, one of them is Logs has a fear of seemingly his power going out on his computer, which seems silly. But the idea behind it was that he actually has a fear of missing out on chances. And so the idea is he was typing something important and it goes away. So similarly the Barney fear, you think it’s one thing, but it’s actually another.

TD: In the same episode, Temeluchus says that only mortals deal in absolutes. And I wanted to ask you: am I crazy for thinking that that is an allusion to the gender and sexuality spectrum?

HS: Wow. Because you’re wearing a Star Wars shirt, I thought you were going to mention, is it “only a Sith deals in absolutes”, because I think that was on our mind. Yeah, I think so. I will say that it’s not completely present in series one. Season one is laying the groundwork, and the hope for the future is to delve a bit more into this. And it’s the concept of what the demons kind of represent, and it’s vague at the… Well, not vague at the moment, but it’s not meant to be one specific thing.

But generally the demons are meant to be demonized people. So people who, anybody who has kind of, the world has at any point told them that they’re the kind of villain, and I think some of the things that the demons say and do in the season, more sort of re-contextualized later on, even the sort of big invasion at the end, I think we’ll start to see that maybe they had a point. So that’s something, and it’s interesting that you’re picking up on these things because the kind of queer element of the show isn’t just meant to be the representation. It’s kind of meant to be in the structure and the bones of the show a little bit.

TD: In episode seven, Barney says, “sometimes the things we need are right in front of us.” Is that his way of accepting his chosen family?

HS: I think so. I think trying to work out… These are good spots. I think one change from the books is that in the books Barney and Norma are already friends when the book starts. And the reason we changed that was that if the show is about what home means and what found family and chosen family means, we should see that unfold completely on the screen. And I think episode three at the end when they’re all sat together is where we consider them a friend group now. But I think episodes 7, 8, and 9 really tests the friend group. And I think by 10 that’s when it kind of becomes a found family. I think, not to completely spoil it, but Pugsley does say, “You came home,” to Courtney, which… Yeah, it’s that kind of concept of what is home? The first episode ends with Barney finding a sense of home in a coffin in a basement, so it’s definitely not the building. It’s just sort of who the people are. And yeah, good spot.

TD: Speaking to that, I actually was going to ask about Courtney as well, because basically at the end of the series, in episode 10, they seem to be more comfortable with this found family as well. Was that important to bring in the demon as well, to make it more of a found family?

HS: Yeah, in a sense. I feel like, again, the demons are a way of telling the sort of grounded story on a bigger scale. And I think while Barney’s storyline is running away from home, Courtney’s trying to get home and sort of doesn’t realize that they are home. They have a family. They have everything. And I think when Courtney goes down… We already spoiled spoiler territory here, but when Courtney attempts to connect with other demons and thinks they’ll get everything they want by going down there, it’s that realization… Courtney thinks, “Blood is thicker than water. I’ll be home with the demons,” but they’re all outcasts in a way. None of them quite have been born into a world that had them in mind. And we’ll delve a little bit more into that in the future, because it’s sort of intentional that none of the other demons look like Courtney. And so even though Courtney, we haven’t even explained why was Courtney banished and all that stuff, so that’s still to come.

And I think it’s just the kind of… I don’t think Courtney’s identity crisis of where they belong is necessarily solved, but it’s… Yeah, I don’t know. One thing that was interesting in the writing process is that originally in the comics, Courtney’s not in every chapter and isn’t super major. But during the writing, Courtney’s role just became bigger and bigger until we realized that they were the sort of thesis of the show and the heart of the show in some ways. So yeah, I’m pleased with that.

TD: I have to ask you about episode nine. When you started out on this, did you know you wanted to do a musical episode, and what was that like from a production standpoint that differs from the other episodes?

HS: Yeah, pretty much I treated the show like I’d never get another chance to make a show. And so pretty much the day we got the green light, I was like, we are doing a musical episode. I didn’t know what it would be. I’m so pleased with what it became, and it’s kind of this secret… I sometimes feel like we stuffed a movie inside a TV show by secret, and it kind of comes out of nowhere. And I don’t know if you had this experience, but after the first song and then the second song starts, you’re like, wait, this is a whole musical episode? Are we doing this? Is the kind of feeling I wanted to give people. And so basically in the same time it took to write the other nine episodes, we were writing the musical episode. So we started writing the music way, way early just to even see if it was possible and just try to squeeze as many songs in.

And there was definitely some cut songs. And then the other thing we desperately wanted is for it not to feel like a gimmicky episode that people could skip. It’s the penultimate episode because it’s where the character journeys are at their peak, so they have a lot of stuff to sing about. And we wanted the songs to matter. We didn’t want them to be just filler. It’s an opportunity to check in with where all the characters are emotionally before the finale. It’s definitely the aspect of the show I’m proudest of, and I hope I can write more musicals because it was really fun. And we were casting the show at the same time as we were writing, so we were getting very excited when we were auditioning people and then finding out that they all could sing really well. So yeah, that was good.

TD: What are some of those cut songs like, and would they possibly be used in a future season?

HS: (laughs) I’m hoping that we can maybe release some demos. Some of them didn’t really exist beyond ideas. Originally, Pauline was going to have quite an emotional song on the stage and sort of realized the error of her ways while singing. But we just thought it would be funnier for Pauline to not learn her lesson just yet and keep her more villainous. And then originally Pugsley had an opening song that was sort of inspired by “Science Fiction/Double Feature” from Rocky Horror where it was Pugsley’s mouth sort of narrating. And that was cut because A, we didn’t know if the Pugsley actor could sing, because we were casting at the same time. And when we cast Alex Brightman who does the Temeluchus voice, and he’s a Tony nominee, we sort of rewrote that duet song for him.

But originally the opening song we cut because it’s funnier if the musical comes out of nowhere as a surprise. So originally the whole episode would have curtains, and “It’s the musical episode,” but I like that it just starts like a minute and a half in. And the co-writer of the musical, Patrick Stump, voices Josh, the first person to sing, again, because we thought it would be funny if the first person to sing in the musical episode was a really background, minor character who has an amazing voice. I would love to do another musical episode if we get more seasons. I’ve got other ideas. I think before we settled on this idea, I thought about doing a demon Eurovision song contest where all the different demon worlds competed. But that would just be a collection of weird pop songs, and I feel like I wanted something a bit more Broadway and musical.

TD: Well, I’ll be on the lookout on Spotify for the demos. I’m going to hold you to that. For my last question I just wanted to ask what would a second season of Dead End: Paranormal Park look like?

HS: Well, I mentioned that we still don’t have some answers to why was Courtney banished. We sort of find out who was punishing them, and there’s some references in the final episode to angels. So we’ve seen what demons are like, and I think we’d go up the elevator this time and see what’s up there. And I think just explore the other demon worlds a bit more because one of the few big notes we got from Netflix at the start when we were writing was that… I think in my original draft of the first episode, they went down to the demon plane straight away. And they just said that, “But the theme park is such a fun setting.” So we had this kind of mandate to keep the theme park central.

So for future seasons, I’d like to… There’s 13 planes that have all been designed and named, and we know what’s on them, so I’d like to explore them. And finally I’d just say, just continuing to deepen the character relationships, particularly Barney and Logs have had their, I guess, first kiss, so now I’d like to see an actual relationship, see what that’s like.

Season one of Dead End: Paranormal Park is currently streaming exclusively on Netflix.