The puppet people from AMC's Ultra City Smiths are even weirder than its weird premise
The show is about a murder mystery starring repurposed baby dolls as the characters
TV News AMC
In May, we heard that AMC had picked up a surprising number of famous people for the voice cast of Ultra City Smiths, a stop-motion animated series created by Steve Conrad (Perpetual Grace) and Stoopid Buddy (every stop-motion animated TV show) about the investigation into the disappearance of a rich guy campaigning to become the mayor of a major city full of rampant corruption. (Oh, also, all of the characters are baby dolls repurposed as adults.) The cast includes Kurtwood Smith, Kristen Bell, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Alia Shawkat, Melissa Villaseñor, Jimmi Simpson, John C. Reilly, Jason Mantzoukas, Tim Heidecker, Tim Meadows, Debra Winger, Dax Shepard, Damon Herriman, Hana Mae Lee, Terry O’Quinn, Chris Conrad, Julian Barratt, Sunita Mani, and Luis Guzmán, with Tom Waits serving as the narrator. Basically, if you asked us if the show is a comedy, we would just awkwardly trail off and try to change the subject. It’s one of those TV shows.
And that was before we saw what these baby doll characters are going to look like! Now that we have, holy shit, we’re not even convinced that this is a real TV show. It seems like a fake TV show that the characters would watch in a David Lynch movie, and to them it would be totally normal even though it’s very much not normal, tipping the audience off that there’s some weird shit going on. Have we dragged this out long enough? Are you sufficiently prepared for these characters? Either way, here they are:
The IMDb page is like a glimpse into an alternate universe where Elizabeth Banks made a weird show about puppets instead of Kristen Bell, which makes this whole thing even more bizarre. Are we in the prime universe or the alternate universe?!
6 Comments
I got both an Ultracity 6060 AND a Super Adventure Team notification for THIS?
Woah, Steve Conrad made a stop motion show? Narrated by Tom Waits?! With Terry O’ Quinn?!? And John C. Reilly??!! Man, where have I been? This is definitely the first I’ve heard of this. I am entirely and immediately onboard. Sounds like it was made for me, specifically. “Patriot” remains one of my favorite comedies of the last 20 years. Conrad writes the most interesting and hilarious dialogue and I bet it’ll translate wonderfully over to puppets.Cool.
I’ve been waiting for this one too – big props to the guy for inventiveness. If you haven’t already come across it, there are 5 or so podcast chapters of The Structural Dynamics of Flow, as read by Leslie Claret online that are pure gold
Oh. My. God. This is just the most wonderful thing. Thank you so much for telling me about it! So ridiculously perfect. Kurtwood Smith will be talking me to sleep for weeks.
All i needed to hear was Jason Mantzoukas.
I know she has done voice acting before (most famously in the Frozen series), but it kind of seems like not being able to see Bell kind of takes away half the point. There are certainly “faces made for radio” as the phrase goes, but not hers.