Geekscape Interviews Agents of Cracked Star Dan O’Brien

Cracked.com has progressively becoming one of the most popular and influential websites on the internet. Starting as a rival magazine to the infamous MAD, cracked has managed to survive and adapt to the digital era where others struggled and failed. No more centered around spooks and parody the site has become a daily dosage of interesting and humorous lists ranging from Most Bad-ass Presidents, Deadliest Animals and Terrifying Children’s movies. The popularity even lead to this year’s book You Might Be A Zombie (And Other Bad News).

Cracked.com however is more than just lists and books. They also host a few delightful web shows like After Hours or the Award Winning Agents of Cracked series. Today they are premiering their season 3 episode Hoorah!shomon. I got to talk to star Dan O’Brien. 

For those who have lived under a rock and haven’t experience the glory of Agents of Cracked, can you briefly sum up the show’s concept.

It’s a conventional sitcom premise, (Odd Couple), buried in an unconventional sitcom. Agents of Cracked follows Daniel O’Brien and Michael Swaim, two mismatched partners working for a comedy website.  There will be betrayal. There will be passion. There will be almost nothing whatsoever related to working in the field of web comedy. 

This week you’ve got an incredible episode up your sleeve, can you explain it for me?

For a show that started out as “Two guys bantering at their cubicles,” this is probably our biggest departure. We decided to have a lot of fun with both the storytelling and the filming of this episode. We’re presenting it as a Rashomon-style episode, where we’re telling the same story multiple times from the perspective of all of our main characters. Shaping everyone’s respective point of view meant that we got to recreate our office over and over again. It was a real blast getting inside each character’s head and visually representing how they saw the world. It’s an episode for people who like the characters, it’s an episode for people who like fun, unique storytelling devices, and it’s an episode for people who like shows with compelling visual tricks. Also jokes, we’ve got jokes in it. I don’t want to say the episode has something for everyone in the world, but I WILL say that if you don’t like it, you’re probably dead inside, mostly. 

Do you worry that Kurosawa’s Rashomon may be a movie that most of your readers aren’t familiar with?

I think people are familiar enough with the concept of multiple-perspective storytelling that it doesn’t matter if they don’t immediately make the connection to “Rashomon.” All in the Family had a Rashomon episode, there are some elements of it in a few episodes of the Simpsons, I’m pretty sure Powerpuff Girls even used it in an episode once, so I think most folks will be on board with what we’re doing. And if they AREN’T familiar with this particular storytelling style, then they’ll think we invented it, and I am totally fine with that.

After the episode you’re doing a live Q&A, any particular reason you’re doing this for this specific episode?

For one thing, we all just have a lot to say about the episode. Because of the complexity of the script and the shooting, we had very long, very involved production meetings where we discussed every inch of the episode, beat by beat. Not that other episodes ever get ignored, but this one just required hours and hours of discussion and we still all have a lot to say about what creating it was like. We all had such a blast working on it, and we’re eager to talk about, especially to our viewers who are interested in creating web video. Episodes like this one aren’t typically done on the internet. We’re happy to have the chance to talk with future online video producers and say “See? Web video doesn’t have to just be clips of cats and babies, it can be complex, and weird, and involved. And we can teach you how to do it!”

Agent of Cracked isn’t the only show that you and Michael have on your plate either though. You both are involved in After Hours. Is it difficult juggling two different shows where you play exaggerated versions of yourselves?

A little bit. We certainly agonize over it more than, I’m sure, anyone who watches either show does. Often when we’re writing After Hours, we’ll catch ourselves and say “We’re getting too close to AOC Michael or AOC Dan,” and we’ll tone down what we’re doing, (because AH is a slightly more realistic but still exaggerated version of the real Cracked staff). This never would have been a problem if we weren’t so lazy; one day, we’ll create a show that ISN’T about two Cracked employees named “Dan” and “Mike.” Probably.

With a project this over the top it seems like the next logical step is Agents of Cracked THE MOVIE! I certainly worked for Gong Show.

Oh, we want it all. An Agents of Cracked movie, a novelization of that movie, a musical version, a movie musical version, a TV movie based on the movie musical version, a documentary covering what a disaster the TV movie was, a smoke signal version of the movie, and, to bring things full circle, a web series spin-off based on the movie. We want absolutely everything.

Hoorah!shomon is currently up at cracked.com right now!

To learn more about the inner workings of Cracked.com and their other web-shows check out Michael Swaim’s interview on The Saint Mort Show