Maya Rudolph and Natasha Lyonne Go to Sexy Space in Animated Comedy About Self-Doubt & Hyper-Horniness
As the conduits of the rare, female-created, adult animation show, Rudolph, Lyonne, and creator Cirocco Dunlap spoke to Jezebel about birthing the oddity that is The Second Best Hospital in the Galaxy.
Photo: Prime Video EntertainmentTV
Sometimes mixing Lexapro with weepy nighttime soaps can be a win. Just ask Cirocco Dunlap, a television writer for shows like Russian Doll and the animated Big Hero 6 spin-off, Baymax!. Faced with trying to find her next gig in television she just decided to write and pitch her own series.
“I was suddenly like, ‘It’s time!’” Dunlap told Jezebel. “It was very, like full go mode. For months, this is all I was focused on.”
Fusing together her love for heady sci-fi, animation, and female-centric series like Grey’s Anatomy, she Frankensteined it all together into one ambitious show. Dunlap then got a meeting with Danielle Renfrew Behrens at Animal Pictures (the one-time joint production shingle of Maya Rudolph and Natasha Lyonne), and it was an eclectic match made in heaven.
In 2019, Rudolph and Lyonne joined Dunlap to pitch Prime Video The Second Best Hospital in the Galaxy, a future-set space comedy about two alien surgeons, Dr. Sleech (Stephanie Hsu) and Dr. Klak (Keke Palmer), who have been besties since training and now practice questionable medicine in a weirdo outpost in deep space.
“It was the coolest pitch in the entire world because I was sitting between Maya Rudolph and Natasha Lyonne,” Dunlap said with plenty of residual awe. It also didn’t hurt that her lady heroes attached themselves as series producers, and the voice talent for the robot Dr. Vlam (Rudolph) and acerbic Nurse Tup (Lyonne). Then voila! It’s now an original Prime Video animated series with a two-season order premiering February 23 on the streamer.
Unlike anything other adult animated shows out there, Dunlap said Second Best Hospital was born out of a few core ideas. “The whole season is about anxiety,” she said of her main characters who wrestle with self-doubt and hyper-horniness. “And then the fun part of it was I just kept thinking about how fun it would be, using the example of Groundhog Day, to be stuck in a time loop. Or, if an alien being is impregnated, where would they get treated? And what if they were not the main character? That was something that felt cool to me and very special, and also a place where the kind of ideas that I have could live because I love sci-fi.”