Q-Force, Netflix's newest addition to its roster of adult animated series, is a spy thriller/comedy that's not afraid to devote significant screen time to an extended Princess Diaries homage. The series focuses on "Agent Mary" (Sean Hayes), a secret agent who comes out to his employers and finds his career sidelined as a result. After years of heading up a team of LGBTQ agents (voiced by Wanda Sykes, Patti Harrison, and Matt Rogers) in West Hollywood, CA, Mary finally gets a shot at some real missions that might lead to saving the world — but he'll need the help of his team as well as his longtime mentor V (Laurie Metcalf) and token straight man Agent Buck (David Harbour).

In a phone interview with Collider, showrunner Gabe Liedman (who also plays the role of Mary's love interest Benji in the series) explained how he successfully pitched his way into getting the Q-Force job, and what was key to developing the characters beyond stereotypes. He also reveals what went into the casting process, what it was like to give Laurie Metcalf notes, why it was important to him to feature plenty of full-frontal male nudity, and how far ahead he's planned for the show.

Collider: To start off, as a longtime West Hollywood resident, it was a delight to see my town on screen so accurately.

GABE LIEDMAN: Yay! That was actually so important to me. I'm glad to hear that.

How much of the development of the show involves you just driving around the neighborhood and taking photos and sending it to the design team?

LIEDMAN: I will say that the office space being in the Pacific Design Center was in the actual pitch I made to Netflix to sell the show. That was very important. And the Abbey was always in the pilot. And when it came time to design the locations and the backgrounds, I was sending Redfin links to our artists and being like, "This is the type of home that Mary would live in." The realism and the landscapes and all of that were really important to me.

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Image via Netflix

How did you originally get involved with the series?

LIEDMAN: Sean Hayes and his producing partner, Todd Milliner, had the very beginning seed of an idea, that they were just calling quote unquote gay James Bond, that's it. One sentence. And they knew that that was a part that Sean really wanted to play and a world that they really want us to develop something in.

And so they started meeting with writers and Sean was a fan of my stand-up, and that's how I got the opportunity to sit down with him and Todd and develop that. So they shared that idea with me, "Gay James Bond." And I was really excited because I love action movies and I love James Bond and Jason Bourne and all of that whole world. And I just leapt at the opportunity to develop this and went away and sat on it for a while. And what I came back to them with was Q-Force, this ensemble version of gay James Bond that's not gay James Bond. It's this ensemble workplace comedy that is telling the larger story of the squad and the people that he's working with and the sort of power structure that you would be up against as a gay guy.

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Image via Netflix

What was important for you about taking the original concept and making it an ensemble?

LIEDMAN: It just felt like it would be a missed opportunity to not tell a bigger story. If we focused on this one cis gay guy, it's not really the story of the community. And as a cis gay guy, I find myself next to and friends with and working with bi people and lesbian people and trans people and non-binary people. I do feel a sense of community. And I do think that we all lift each other up and we fight the same fight. And it just seemed like this is a richer version of a queer action-comedy, if we open it up and we try and tell as many cool stories as possible.

What's so interesting about the starting point of "gay James Bond" is that it could basically just be a comedy sketch. What helped you unlock that initial idea and make it into an actual multi-episode TV show?

LIEDMAN: Really trying to give it heart and make the characters real people. That was what really unlocked it. What challenges are we actually up against in the workplace? Even though I've never worked in the intelligence community, I wanted to share some of my own experiences and also the experiences of my peers.

Also, I wanted to make sure as much as it's a workplace comedy, that the characters felt real and had lives outside of work, so that we could see who their lovers are and who their families are. Just trying to shade it in a way that would make it less one-dimensional. And that led to some of the best stories. I guess that's it. Trying to give it heart, make them like each other, and not just be good at their jobs and also let them fuck up. That was really important to me. I think in a lot of television shows that are trying to be representative of underserved communities who haven't been on TV or had their shows yet, there's a need to make everyone super-perfect. And because this is a comedy and because of the animation and because it just seemed like it would be better, I just wanted to make sure everyone had the chance to fuck up, too. And I think that that rounded it out.

Along those lines, some of the characters do fall into stereotypes on the surface — like there's literally a character called Twink. In terms of developing them past the stereotype, what were you looking towards?

LIEDMAN: I tried to base these characters on people who I know and who I love, who are real. So there are a lot of femme gay guys in my life who I love, who are twinks. So I don't see that as a stereotype. I see that as a type of person I know and love. So that's why they're not one-dimensional because I wasn't trying to make characters out of stereotypes. It's not how I approached it at all. I thought, who are people in the real world? Yeah, his name is Twink. It's funny to me, but it wasn't ever meant to be like a list of stereotypes that I was checking off at all. Deb and Pam are based on women in my life who are my dear, dear friends. And so that's why my portrayal of them is loving, even if like some of their traits are traits that a straight person would make fun of a lesbian for. I never wanted to make fun of them. I wanted to show them how much I love them and what makes them different from straight people is cool to me and beautiful. So I hope that it's like a celebration as opposed to that they're the butt of the joke. To me, it's the world that thinks that they're weird who are the butts of the joke.

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Talk a little bit about casting, because of course, you came in with Sean already set as the lead, but it's a really interesting collection of actors beyond that.

LIEDMAN: Yeah. We really lucked out big time with who signed on for the show. I'm still completely blown away. When you're writing — or when I'm writing, at least — it is really helpful to have an actor in mind so that their dialog feels organic and you can hear someone saying it. So when I was writing Deb at first, it was always Wanda [Sykes] in my head, and it's just completely mind-blowing to me about she read the material and was like, "Yeah, I'll do this." And now, it's not just the voice in my head, but she was the voice that everyone else hears as Deb.

Matt Rogers, who plays Twink, was one of the writers on the show and is just a comedian that I really admire, and I've been a big fan of, for a long time. So I was thrilled when he signed on to write the show with me, and when it came time to cast Twink, we were already doing table reads and he was reading the part of Twink. And it just became incredibly evident that no one was going to do it better than him. It just fit him like a glove.

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Image via Netflix

Patti [Harrison] plays Stat — she's another comedian who I've just admired from afar for a really long time. And she auditioned and nailed it. And as for David Harbour who plays Buck and Laurie Metcalf, who plays Dee, they're not people I know in real life. They're just people I'm a huge fan of, and have been. This was hard for me to even believe because I have such imposter syndrome, but they just read the script and liked them and wanted to play these parts. It was a very traditional casting process, and they were such unbelievable additions to the team. Now I can't can't picture the parts being played by anyone else.

We did all the recording in isolation, too, over Zoom, this is all done during these waves of COVID that we've been having for the last year-and-a-half. It was this extra level of gameness that everyone needed to have, to re-imagine how we work.

What was it like being in a position to give Laurie Metcalf notes?

LIEDMAN: Oh, my God. I was so scared going into it, but she turned out to be just as nice as you would have imagined, or maybe that you would hope that she is. It was a very technically difficult situation where she was sitting on the floor of her closet with a sleeping bag over her head with a laptop. And IT people doing the sound engineering from afar and me in her ear giving her notes and she just made it so easy. As you can imagine, she didn't really need a lot of notes. She's pretty good. And a lot of her instincts were dead on.

And she also brought this whole other levels of that character that wasn't exactly on the page. [V] became a much more grumbling, ferocious, powerful person, just in the way that she voiced her. Laurie has this growl that you can't write. It's coming straight out of her gut. And so her sessions were really just me pinching myself. I can't believe this is real. She was so nice. And she was so easy. It made my day when we would get through a new line and she would say, "Oh God, I've been looking forward to this joke." It was so fun, but all the actors were incredibly like... Difficult situate, holding blankets over their heads in weird times zones, one room over from their kids, just some weird. It was not the cushy recording studio situation that normal shows are made in.

Logistically, was it a situation where you had all the scripts written and then you started recording? Or were you still writing as you were recording?

LIEDMAN: COVID hit when we were writing Episode 4. So we would, in an ideal world, been writing and recording at the same time so that we could adjust but that was just wasn't reality for us. So what we did was, we finished up writing. We wrote a little more than half the season with everyone in isolation. And then we began the recording process. So there was actually no scenes on the show where the actors were ever in the same room as each other. Everything was done line-by-line. And we just sort of had to keep all the performances in our heads as we move forward. There was some light rewriting just based on cuts of the show. Like "We would put everything together and then say, oh, I think that line isn't working the way we thought it would." And then if we could get the actor again, we would adjust. But for the most part, all the writing was done and then all the acting was done and then all the animation was done.

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Image via Netflix

Before I move on from casting, I want to ask about bringing in Stephanie Beatriz, because just because I think most people are most familiar with her from Brooklyn Nine-Nine, which of course you wrote on, but here she is playing the princess and I feel like a lot of people may not know she has that level of range to her voice.

LIEDMAN: I think you're dead-on with that. I remember sharing our casting and telling our creative execs, I want Stephanie Beatriz for the princess, I would think a lot of people are like, "What are you talking about?" Just exactly what you're saying. She is known as Rosa Diaz from Brooklyn Nine-Nine, this really gruff, really shut down, really strong, but harsh and gravelly character. But I spent a lot of time with her on set and I've gotten to know her over the years. And I just knew, that's not her. She's doing such a head-to-toe character as Rosa. It's nothing like she is in real life. And she is like, nothing like Rosa.

And she's also nothing like the princess, but I did notice that she had that range because we joke around together, and I know what her real voice sounds like. And I also just know, I look back on maybe the most memorable time I ever had on set on Brooklyn Nine-Nine was the first scene I got to shoot with her. And she is just such a full-bodied, studied character actress. Like she just came on to set like a tank and with so much power and energy to play Rosa. And then in between takes, she went back to normal Stephanie and I was like, "Holy shit." It just was going away. But like I knew she had the princess in her and she's so good at comedy. She can land any joke, but yeah, it's a real departure. And I hope that it blows some minds. I know she has a ton of fans out there, so this will be a different side of Stephanie for everyone.

So just in general, male full-frontal nudity is not like a thing you see a lot of on TV — meanwhile, there's a lot of it in this. What was important for you about that?

LIEDMAN: This is a show for adults and I wanted the show to be really sexy, because I think that that's something that speaks to me about the James Bond genre is sexiness and intrigue in that world. And I didn't want to desex it in any way, just because it's male-on-male sex or woman-on-woman sex or trans women, you know what I mean? Like I wanted to make sure that just because it's not the sex you've seen a ton of, that we didn't hide it because it's inherent in the genre.

I also just think it's funny. You're right, you don't see a lot of penises, but you see a lot of boobs and butts and even sometimes vaginas on TV. So it just felt like, "Well, why not?" And we're not asking real actors to bear any parts of themselves that they're not comfortable doing. So it felt like not a tough ask. I wasn't sure what Netflix was going to think of it, but they didn't really push back at all. So it was mostly a silly, kind of squirmy conversation to have with the artists who have to design everyone's penises and pubic hair and butts and boobs and stuff. But we're all adults and I think everyone was totally comfortable.

You've got tons of references packed into this, including the really big ones to like Brokeback Mountain and The Princess Diaries and L.A. Confidential. Looking forward, what are the other big touchstones that you imagine the show incorporating down the line?

LIEDMAN: Well, I don't want to say anything too specific, but that being kind of culturally referential is for me, at least in my own experience, kind of a touchstone of queer culture, especially in my life as a gay guy. I quote a lot of stuff. I reference a lot of stuff. It is a little bit of a shorthand that I have with my friends. So I did want the show to be a little referential, but it's also the perk of working in animation that you can change styles and you can do homages and play with the form.

So it was always important to me to do that. I don't want to say anything too specific of what I would do in future seasons, but I would say that referential comedy and just living in different worlds is part of the lens through which I see this show and how I want to tell these stories. So yeah, that's always been a part of it from the beginning.

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Image via Netflix

So no spoilers, but while Season 1 has a nice conclusion, it definitely doesn't shut the door on future seasons. Do you have a notebook full of plans for Seasons 2 through 5, or Seasons 2 through 10?

LIEDMAN: More like two through five. I would say, yes. I have a lot of ideas. And if Netflix gives me the opportunity to make more episodes of this show, I will be so happy. I had a lot of fun doing Season 1 and yeah, to me, we leave the show on like a bit of an emotional cliffhanger. I think some plot stuff is wrapped up, but it also begs a lot of questions. So I hope that we do get to keep telling you this story and yeah, I have some insane, truly insane ideas for Season 2. So I hope we get the chance to make them real. And there are some other characters that I want to go really much deeper on that maybe didn't fit so much into Season 1's arc. But yeah, I think I know what I want to do with Season 2. And to me, Season 1, I left a lot of doors open, so my hope is we got the opportunity.

Q-Force Season 1 is streaming now on Netflix.

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