‘Second Best Hospital’ Showrunner Cirocco Dunlap On Finding the Idea, Tone For Amazon’s Unique Animated Series

Cirocco Dunlap is the creator and showrunner of Amazon’s new animated show The Second Best Hospital in the Galaxy. The series features two alien doctors, Klak and Sleech, as they try to heal the sick while also dealing with anxiety and relationship issues. They’re also secretly testing an alien parasite that eats anxiety.  Here, Cirocco Dunlap talks to Awards Daily about the genesis of the series, the major themes she wanted to explore, and how insanely hard being a showrunner is!

Cirocco Dunlap: I was just watching a lot of sci-fi as I always have done, and I started thinking, what if Ripley from Alien had a place to go where they could treat her.  Or if Bill Murray in Groundhog Day had a place that he could go to help him out.  Or John Carpenter’s The Thing, and the Thing that was devouring all these creatures could say, “Hey, I’ve been eating things and shapeshifting, can you help me out?” So it  became this place where all these main characters of classic sci-fi films could be tertiary characters in our show.  It takes a lot of the drama out of it, and makes it a lot more fun!

Cirocco Dunlap: I don’t know that I intended to. But maybe because of my own experience with anxiety and getting on meds several years ago now and how it changed my life. I think no matter what I wrote, it was going to become a part of it just naturally. So I had a  pitch deck full of a lot of ideas and one of the episodes was about this anxiety worm/parasite.  Then when we were writing the pilot we thought, What if this is the idea for the pilot episode and it sets up the season?  I  realized that made sense, because it felt like stories I wanted to tell, and we ended up making some fun ones that I have not seen  portrayed elsewhere.

There was one about Klak having magical thinking, which feels like an offset of anxiety. So Klak has a to-do list that pops up for her and at first it’s really helpful and her tasks are getting completed. But by the end of the episode there are so many that she’s blocked from actual intimacy with someone. It  felt true to my own experience with anxiety, and it felt like a fresh and interesting way that I had not seen  represented that I wanted to see represented.

Cirocco Dunlap: That came naturally, again these are my own struggles with dating. Like everyone, I feel like I’ve had these relationships where you keep coming back even though they are not right and you think that they could be right this time. But it’s also if they haven’t been, then they haven’t been!  That’s it! That’s your answer! I think that the Klak  relationship is a representation of that. Sleech’s  problem with intimacy  comes from things from her past (that will be explored in season 2). She struggles to find intimacy but she does have that really loving relationship with Klak so it is a nice start for her. So I have hope that she’ll get there romantically.

Cirocco Dunlap: Yeah, he is pretty wonderful, and because she is so driven, he offers a nice balance for her where he’s just very in the moment and can calm her just by his presence. That was unexpected for us as well.

Cirocco Dunlap: I tend to think that comedy importantly comes from pain and grief. I really relate to gallow humor and that has been my experience since the tragedy of my own family, as we all have tragedies in our family. It is just in my DNA. Then, at a hospital where your job is death, I just don’t know how else, (personally imagining myself in that situation), how I would cope.  So it felt very natural to me that it would be funny. I think that our whole existence is funny. We die, we live, we have sex—all of it is very funny to me.  It’s all ridiculous.

Cirocco Dunlap: I really wanted that, that emotional honesty in this world, especially when you’re doing such a comedy about death you have to really show it and that moment was one I really loved. The  director did a beautiful job with it, and when it came back for me to look at I thought, Yes, this feels right.  Especially since it’s such a  comedy and so light and then you get this one moment in that episode and you were, like, oh no, and it really hits you in the heart.  It was very important to me that the show had these moments because I think they really ground the comedy and the absurdity in the rest of the show.

Cirocco Dunlap: I really love Robin Eisenberg’s art. I don’t know if you know her but she has drawn the sexiest alien this side of the galaxy. She has a really big Instagram presence and is incredibly talented and I pursued her relentlessly when I got the show.  She was very excited to do it and she usually draws sexy and relaxed. We had to find this balance between that and this world where we wanted sexy aliens (obviously), but we also wanted them to be funny when their heads explode. I am so lucky to have gotten her, and she’s been passionate and involved in everything on the show.

Cirocco Dunlap: Oh, my goodness, it is the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life!  It is like six jobs at once, it’s wild!  I had no idea you can think you’re prepared but once it’s going, it’s going. You are managing teams suddenly and it’s a funny thing, I’ve always just wanted to write. It’s all I ever wanted to do career wise. I picture myself alone in a cabin and now here I am managing five different teams with 900 decisions. I have to go do casting, then I have to go to a recording, then make some art decisions. It’s overwhelming and incredible and I feel like I’ve learned more from this job than I’ve ever learned from a job in my life.    I do just think it would be great if there was just more time to do it all.

Cirocco Dunlap: As mentioned, there’s going to be stuff about Sleech’s past. You know at the end of season 1 it’s just a bit of a tease that Sleech’s  history is missing…. Interesting! (laughing).  As this season was about Klak’s journey with anxiety, the next season becomes about Sleech’s history that she’s talked a little bit about in the second episode, that Klak will never know about her family’s history.

Cirocco Dunlap: I’m so excited that people are going to be seeing it. It’s so new to me that people are seeing it because I’ve been with it for what feels like 900 years. I’m so close to it and it’s about to come out!