by A year after they released the pilot for Kid Farm, Jamie Lee, Pete Holmes and the Front Page Films gang are back with a full Atom.com webseries about the family that just keeps on reproducing. No, not the Duggars of TLC’s 19 Kids and Counting. It’s Bill and Jean Engvall. No. Not that Bill Engvall.
Just watch the first two episodes and you’ll get the drift. The action begins as the Engvalls get ready to welcome their 18th child to the family. Holmes, as Bill Engvall, is in full “fun Dad” mode, and then some! Katina Corrao plays his busy wife, Jean.
And Episode 3 also is available, so let’s watch that, and then find out how this all came about, via Kid Farm co-creator Jamie Lee!
So, the inspiration for Kid Farm is fairly obvious. How did you and Pete go about creating it, and then turning it into a webseries? And how many episodes can we look forward to seeing?
“I had tried writing a bit about the Duggars for my stand-up, but there was just so much to joke about, too much really. I remember trying it once at an open mic. It ate up my entire allotted 5 minutes and I had only gotten through half of what I wanted to talk about. Right around that time, I introduced Pete to the TLC show (he also found the Duggars to be fascinating/creepy/wonderful/terrifying/hilarious) and that’s when we discussed making a parody. It wasn’t until we brought the idea to the amazing Oren Brimer, though, that the show began to take shape. Once we knew Oren was on board, Pete and I wrote the pilot and worked with Oren to develop the concept into something tangible. And funny.
We shot the pilot (aka episode 1) at my aunt and uncle’s house in West Orange, NJ, but didn’t put it online immediately because we wanted to use it for pitching purposes. Initially, no one sank their teeth in so that’s when we said “Eh, let’s just put it online.” — and it’s a good thing we did! Huffington Post, Tosh.0, BestWeekEver.tv and some other great sites posted it… Diablo Cody tweeted about it… and that’s when Oren talked to Atom.com (who also own other Front Page Films shorts) about producing a series.
There will be seven episodes total this season including the pilot that has been online for about a year now.”
How many episodes of the Duggars have you watched, exactly?
“Re: how many Duggars episodes I’ve seen, the answer is: a LOT. Before we shot episodes 2-7, me, Oren, Katina Corrao, Jay Bois and a few other people got together one afternoon and marathoned some eps just to get in the “zone” for the next day’s shoot. We channel the Duggars when working on “Kid Farm” for sure.
It’s incredible — each (Duggar) episode revolves around the most mundane theme like “laundry” or “dinner,” yet because it’s fascinating to see a large family complete any task without utter chaos ensuing, TV audiences are at home drooling in awe, myself included.
Michelle and Jim-Bob Duggar are two of the most eerily positive people on TV/the planet, and I think “Kid Farm” does a good job of reminding us that nobody, no matter how conservatively or piously they live, is “above” having a dark side. It just ain’t human!”
