Miranda Sings, Colleen Ballinger Talks: “Haters Back Off!”

If you have no idea who Miranda Sings is or why she’s a YouTube superstar with more than 7 million subscribers and one billion views and now the star of her own Netflix series, Haters Back Off!, then please allow me to give you the shorthand.

Imagine a surreal world with the musical score and cinematography of a Pee-wee Herman movie, with the naïveté of Pee-wee once Miranda encounters the world outside her home, plus an unhealthy dose of the dourness of Napoleon Dynamite. That’s how Miranda takes on all haters (after first giving them plenty of reasons to hate her) in Haters Back Off!, now available to stream on Netflix.

“I take that as a compliment, because both of them are wonderful things to be compared to, in my opinion, so yeah. That’s awesome,” says Colleen Ballinger, who created Miranda in late 2007 as a goofy alter-ego to her real-life singing career as a Disneyland performer, and sat with me Friday to talk about her first starring streaming series.

What were you going for?

“Kind of that!” Ballinger laughs.

“You know, Napoleon Dynamite was a huge reference for us. And I’ve been compared to Pee-wee Herman since the beginning of the character. So, it’s a huge compliment. But there’s a lot of different inspirations for the show. I grew up watching Christopher Guest movies so I love that style of improve, having wacky characters that somehow feel real and relatable.”

(That reminds me to watch Mascots, which is also on Netflix.)

“Yeah, it came out the day before!”

The sense of telling haters to back off, that’s been an intrinsic part of Miranda’s DNA from the get-go, correct?

“Yeah, yeah, definitely. The show, Haters Back Off! has been a phrase I’ve said as Miranda from the very beginning of doing the character. So when we created the show, it just made sense that that would be the name of the show. But all of the characters and the world have all been a part of Miranda since the beginning. I’ve always kind of known what her mom would be like, what her uncle would be like, and I’ve been dying to show these characters to the world for so long,” Ballinger told me.

She got Angela Kinsey (The Office; The Hotwives, Orlando and Las Vegas seasons) and Steve Little (Eastbound & Down; The Grinder) to co-star as her mom and uncle, blindly devoted to homeschooling Miranda and loyal to her dream of becoming a singing superstar. Despite her obvious lack of talent or people skills.

Her whole persona represents a rallying cry against people who want to keep her down.

“Yeah, exactly. And I think that’s what made Miranda an inspirational character for people,” she told me. “I never intended for that to happen, but there’s something inspiring about a girl who’s weird and different from what is supposed to be talented, or pretty. She’s a total weirdo, and lives to the beat of her own drum, and she’s confident in that. And that became an inspiring person for my audience to look up to.”

Almost nine years into playing Miranda, Ballinger says: “This is all still crazy to me. It’s insane to me that I’m here in New York City, and all this press is happening (she also appeared on Friday’s The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon), and my show is out. Every day just seems crazy to me. From the beginning, I’ve thought: This is going to be my 15 minutes of fame. Tomorrow, no one will watch me anymore. Because the stuff on the Internet is like a flash in the pan. You know, something goes viral, and then we all forget about it in two days, and that’s what I thought this was going to be for me.”

Did you think you’d be like “Chocolate Rain?”

“Oh, I love Chocolate Rain!” she said. “And that’s what I had anticipated for myself. So I thought, I really need to make this Miranda thing count, because it’s going to be gone tomorrow.”

[Watch Haters Back Off! on Netflix]

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.