The ‘Three Busy Debras’ Reveal How Their Suburban Nightmare Landed on Adult Swim

If you’re a sucker for abjectly stupid comedy, then Adult Swim and three women of the same name have your back this spring. Three Busy Debras follows the near perfect lives of three immaculately dressed women named Debra who float through their suburban lives in the charming city of Lemoncurd. Together they’ll have to figure out the struggles of brunch, murder, and cheating on their husbands.

Warped and so pointed it’s savage, Three Busy Debras gleefully skewers the dream of white picket fence Americana through this group of sociopaths. Decider spoke to the series’ creators and stars Sandy Honig, Mitra Jouhari, and Alyssa Stonoha about what went into making their self-proclaimed live-action cartoon and what it’s been like to have this distinctly feminine comedy on such a male-dominated network.

Decider: What are your inspirations for Three Busy Debras?

Alyssa Stonoha: We kind of describe it as a live-action cartoon. We all think very cartoonishly in some ways when we write jokes, very visually, so we try to translate that to the best of our ability in a live action way.

Mitra Jouhari: So much of our live show was us describing silly situations that we couldn’t actually create in a black box theater, so having the show meant that we could. The moment in the driveway in the pilot is something we would describe at length in the play. It’s very exciting to have it be real.

Sandy Honig: When we were writing the show I was watching a lot of old Betty Boop cartoons because those are so funny and so scary too. A lot of the jokes in it are very similar to jokes we would write. It was helping me think more visually.

Jouhari: Everything’s alive.

What are the inspirations for your individual Debras?

Jouhari: They’re largely, us. Each of us has a person in our life that I think our Debra or a Debra is based off of, but the characters themselves are definitely informed by us.

What was it like turning your play into a show?

Honig: We started working on a script version of the show when we were still performing it. We would meet like once a week at Mitra’s house and just figure out ways that we could translate it. We were trying to do a version of it where we played all the characters in the show, like it was sort of a sketch show but also narrative.

Jouhari: There were a bunch of different iterations of it. It started as a play which obviously is its own thing. You’re speaking out to the audience, and as much as we make it feel as interactive as it is, it’s a limited space in a black box theater so it was a lot of trial and error to figure out how we talk to each other as Debras now that were on camera rather than live on stage. Also because we were very limited in what we were able to execute visually while we were in the black box, just financially and technically speaking, we had to train ourselves to think bigger. It had been a long time since we had done that. Even our videos were very low budget because it was us making them. It was very exciting but it definitely took a long time to figure out.

Stonoha: There are things in especially earlier drafts of pilots that we were writing so big, because we were like, “OK now we like got these limitations we like gotten them off, now we are writing things that are like impossible to execute.” And now going forward it’s constantly finding this balance between “Can Sandy fly? How can we make that happen? And if it’s not possible, what else can she do?”

Was Adult Swim the first network you went to, or did you shop around different networks?

Stonoha: We had a day of pitching, but luckily Adult Swim wanted it and we felt that that was going to be the best choice. This is a place we love and I don’t think it would be possible anywhere else because Adult Swim has the biggest threshold for creative control for creators, or so it seems from their other shows and what we’ve experienced.

Jouhari: Yeah, we really knew we would get to make our show. And that was exciting.

Historically, Adult Swim has been very male dominated. And you are three female creators with this very female-centric show, making fun of degrees of femininity and performing feminism and stuff. What is it like being on this male-dominated network?

Jouhari: We’ve had a very positive experience and really gotten to make a show that’s true to us and what we like.

Honig: Yeah, everyone’s been super supportive. They seem really excited about the show and yeah, it’s been great.

Stonoha: That excitement has translated to this all hands on deck to like make this a very positive and successful experience and for it to be hopefully well received.

What crazy stunts do people have to look forward to this season?

Honig: One of my favorite bits is Mitra climbs into a giant purse and a giant hand lifts her up and out of a store.

Stonoha: That was one that was very exciting to see our crew execute.

How did you do that?

Jouhari: Well, our amazing art department made the purse. So there was a day in the office where they brought out the purse and then we did the test which was just me climbing into a purse and sitting in it.

Honig: There was one day of Mitra in the store standing in the purse. She closes it and gets into it. Then, there was another day in a green screen space where they had the bag hooked up to like a pulley system, where basically this guy, our special effects —

Jouhari: Yeah, he is pulling it down to make the bag fly into the air and then they are also shooting someone’s hand grabbing a smaller bag on a green screen.

Honig: And then they collaged them together. There were so many places where we thought we would have to sacrifice things like that because we didn’t know what was possible and not possible and no one has said no to us.

Has Three Busy Debras encouraged you to shoot for bigger stunts and bigger things in your writing?

Jouhari: It certainly has shown me that I need to wait to be told no before deciding something is not possible. I think that kind of extends out to all projects going forward.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity

New episodes of Three Busy Debras premiere on Adult Swim Sundays at 11:59 p.m. ET.

Where to stream Three Busy Debras