With ‘Cake,’ FX Is Hoping to Turn Short Form Into the New Prestige TV

Don’t think of Cake, FXX’s newest short-form comedy series, as an experiment. Think of it as an investment in FX’s future. A mix of live action and animation, Cake is a half-hour anthology series that’s determined to bring the same level of network prestige to short form as they do to their more long form series. Decider spoke to the curator behind this delightfully bizarre show, Kate Lambert, SVP, Original Programming, FX Networks, about what exactly went into translating this too-often overlooked medium to a network space, and why FX is taking short form so seriously right now.

“We had gotten into the limited series form a few years prior. We felt like that form was having a sort of resurgence starting with Fargo, American Horror Story,” Lambert said. “[Cake] kind of came out of, ‘OK, what are the other forms?’ The half-hour, the one-hour, the limited, well what about short form? Why can’t short form have the same kind of criteria applied to it? What’s going on there? Why is nobody playing there in the on air environment?”

Cake began its development process in 2017. Each episode of the show is centered around a different quarter-hour miniseries with smaller shorts filling in the gaps throughout each episode. Though FX licensed some of the miniseries and shorts, most are commissioned from artists the team felt passionately about. Every installment of Cake is a mad rush of colors and emotions. And yet the themes of every episode blend seamlessly together thanks in large part of FX’s production team. “If you’ve worked at FX long enough we’re constantly like, ‘Where is nobody playing right now? Let’s go see what’s over there,'” Lambert said.

Executive produced and creatively driven by both FX and the production company SLAQR, Lambert described Cake as “a labor of love.” Currently 30 episodes of the series are set to be released. Cake‘s eight-episode first season will wrap up this fall with another 20 episodes premiering in early 2020.

“We were seeing lots of great voices that just weren’t a half hour. Or weren’t yet a half hour, but people should know about. So it just felt like there should be an on air environment for that,” Lambert explained. “Each season has a different flavor organized around the quarter hour anchor show.”

According to Lambert, the comedy in the series intentionally runs the gamut from Atlanta to Archer. “The common denominator just being that they’re each really authentic, they’re really specific and they’re really auteur-ative, so to speak. Only that person could do it,” Lambert said.

For Cake‘s first season, that anchor show is Teddy Blanks and Alex Karpovsky’s miniseries “Oh Jerome, No.” Each installment follows the hopelessly anxious and in love Jerome (Mamoudou Athie) as he makes misstep after misstep in his relationships.

The silly and introspective “Oh Jerome, No” goes a long way in setting the tone for Cake‘s eight-episode first season. “[This season] has a diverse, millennial, female vibe. It’s a little bit more existential and philosophical, a little bit more surreal,” Lambert explained. She’s fond of describing this first season as 500 Days of Summer but in shorts. “I love that it’s about a sensitive man. We commissioned this long before the #MeToo movement, and to me the point of view of a young man who just can’t help but have too many feelings and say ‘I love you’ is utterly relatable. Everyone has a friend like this, and it’s not often seen from the male point of view.”

But Cake‘s next season will be more comedically akin to It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia or Archer. “The next batch is more hard, traditional comedy. It’s a little bit loud,” Lambert revealed.

So how did FX and SLAQR go about finding talent where no one else was looking? In addition to more traditional routes like exploring the animation film circuit, the Cake team looked to Instagram and music videos.

“All the anchor shows, those quarter hour shows, are all fully commissioned by us and are owned,” Lambert explained. “Some of the animation is licensed. Obviously when you’re filling a block like this there’s just a lot of great work out there that we wanted to showcase. So it’s a mix of commissions and license.”

Some of Cake‘s shorts even involved special commissions and partnerships between writers and animators. “Ted Travelstead has one called ‘Missed Connections’ coming up which functioned that way. He’d written little ideas based off of Craigslist rejections, and we paired him with this animator that he quite liked,” Lambert said.

Once these projects were commissioned by FX, the network treated them as intensely as any other project. The Cake team looked over the pitch decks, worked on scripts and animatics, and weighed in on the voice acting cast. That care translated into an intensive note process. That was the case in Bernardo Britto’s animated short “The Places Where We Live: All the Seconds Before You Swipe.”

In its completed form the short follows an anxious young woman who obsessively watches a man decide whether or not to swipe right on her on a dating app. “It was a male character. And Bernardo was like, ‘I think I want to make it a female,’” Lambert revealed. “We debated the pros and cons of whether it should be from the male point of view or the female point of view. And then we helped put Abbi Jacobson in the voice. So we were pretty involved.”

This intense development process also serves another function. It helps FX incubate talent. “We work with younger, earlier talent as the marketplace has become more competitive. You can kind of invest in people early and work to figure out what their strengths are and help grow them,” Lambert explained.

So far FX is working to develop two half-hour projects with creators whose work appears in Cake. The first is from Samantha Jayne and team that does Quarter Life Poetry. The other is from Psychotown creators Nikos Andronicos and Dave Carter. But the ultimate goal of Cake isn’t fostering a talent pool or pushing boundaries. It’s creating a space where short-form is appreciated.

“We’re trying to make Cake an actual destination show, which is slightly different than what’s been done before. We’re trying to say, ‘Come watch this show. You might like everything. You might like some. But we guarantee that something will come along that’s interesting,'” Lambert said. “This isn’t a side hustle of the network. It’s another extension of the brand in short form. It’s treated with the same respect and care.”

New episodes of Cake premiere on FXX Wednesdays at 10:30/9:30c.

Watch Cake on FXX