‘Tooning Out The News’ Showrunner RJ Fried Dishes on What to Expect This Season and Why Animated Anchors are the Best People to Deliver Bad News

The cartoon anchors of Stephen Colbert’s hit satire Tooning Out the News will be back on air, parodying top news stories on Wednesday, October 5.

The series, which features a cast of hilarious cartoon hosts, has landed interviews some of the biggest names in media and politics since it debuted March 2020. Daily episodes of Tooning Out the News mimic typical cable news shows, featuring the day’s top headlines at the top of the show and later a guest segment where the cartoon anchors can delve deeper into issues with a comedic spin.

RJ Fried, Tooning Out’s showrunner and executive producer — who also voices lead anchor James Smartwood — recognizes that the magic of the series lies in its animation, which he considers their “special tool.”

Delivering the news in a cartoon world has allowed the series’ anchors to confront their guests on difficult topics, holding them accountable with little worry about the health of their own access or careers.

“Much like South Park or Sacha Baron Cohen’s characters, we can tackle these issues in a way that is still palatable to the audience,” Fried told Mediaite in a recent interview. “There’s sometimes something about a human face that makes something a little too visceral. We feel like we just have a great tool here to tackle the way our politics are right now, which is pretty intense.”

I spoke with Fried about the major changes ahead of Season 3, such as the inclusion of real-life contributors, the departure of Chris Licht to CNN, which interviews he’s looking forward to, midterm election plans, and what he wants viewers to take away from the show.

Tooning Out the News is moving from Paramount+ to Comedy Central and will air after The Daily Show. Can you talk a bit about that switch-up? How do you think your show will be impacted by moving to cable?

We have such reverence for that timeslot, we’re so excited too. It’s one thing we kind of always knew — that the audience for these types of shows is watching late-night on Comedy Central.

So, we are so grateful to [Paramount executives] Chris McCarthy, Grant Gish, and his team for embracing that and putting us there. It’s a huge honor and it’s also not lost on the us that it’s the real estate that The Colbert Report used to occupy. And also, linear television is topical and so it feels like the right place for this show to be.

The series animators recently voted to join the Animation Guild. What are your thoughts on that vote to unionize?

It’s exciting. I spoke with the EPs last night and we’re union people. I’m in the WGA and SAG-AFTRA, so is Stephen Colbert.

Our series fights for people’s and workers’ rights. In that spirit, it was something we did want to support, and so we released that statement last night.

We see up close how hard those animation workers work. They’re incredible, they’re talented, and yes, of course, we stand in solidarity with them.

You’ve lost a pretty big name over at CBS with Chris Licht going to CNN. He was an executive producer of Tooning Out as well as of the Late Show. Did you face any challenges or changes that came with Licht’s departure?

I’m just excited to be able to rib our old friend Chris Licht.

Obviously, there are a lot of changes happening at CNN. He is a great friend of ours and we admire him deeply. That said, we cannot pull our punches and that includes CNN.

So, Chris, we love you, but don’t think you’re off the hook.

Do you anticipate any interviews from this season going viral, like the Rick Wilson interview from Season 1?

We’ll see what happens, but all I will say is that our show takes great pride in being nonpartisan and honestly trying to do the news better than the news.

Part of that effort is to make sure that we are holding the powerful to account. If we see something, we want to say something, and we have an extremely talented research team here. They’re journalists, first and foremost. They know how to file FOIAs. They know how to look through fundraising reports.

You can’t make fun of the news unless you try to do it better, and so that’s something that I’m sure we will continue to do this season. We have some fun things planned.

I don’t want to scare any guests away — we have some amazing guests coming on the show. We will have Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg in the first episode, Senator Cory Booker is going to be in the second episode, and then down the line, there is Congresswoman Cori Bush, New York City Mayor Eric Adams, and Bob Woodward. We just also booked Van Jones, George R.R. Martin, and Huma Abedin as well, so it’s going to be an awesome season.

In addition to new guests, you’re including a roster of actual living contributors this season, such as Major Garrett and Margaret Hoover. What was the thought process behind that?

This is the first season of Tooning Out the News in which we have real-life, breathing contributors. It’s something that the cable news networks do and we have always wanted to do, and we are so thrilled to have them.

The thought process is, typically in the first block of cable news, they have their regular contributors to go to and they have a rapport with them and the audience is familiar with them. That’s something we wanted to replicate, so we picked four people who are just excellent and can cover every single story. And they have a sense of humor.

We love the idea of them developing rapport with the animated characters. That is a huge thrill for us. Last season we had a report with Weijia Jiang from the White House lawn. It just looked incredible and we need more of that.

What are your plans for midterm election coverage?

We’re going to have our special election coverage, and there are certain things we can anticipate, but that show is going to be written in the three hours before we record it.

We get our main hosts together, just like cable news does. We’ll tape at 11 p.m. to have an animated show out the door the next day. There’s nothing like it on TV — turning around this much animation this quickly. We really want the audience to feel that immediacy. We’re writing this stuff right up until we record and it’s being animated right up until delivery. It’s a super exciting show to produce.

I worked at MSNBC for a couple of years and got to see it up close and people on our staff used to work for cable news. Something is lost, and the audience can feel it, if it is overly planned. It just doesn’t feel like the news and the comedy gets lost. Yes, we’ll have election coverage. What’s going to be on that show? I’m not sure. I won’t know until the night before, which I think is exciting and the best way to produce this kind of show.

What do you want your viewers to take away from this season?

One thing we have taken pride in and will continue to take pride in this season is just having a show with a lot of courage. Just the way the news is right now, I do think there is an opening for a show like that. And I’m just really proud of our writers and our performers who continue to bring really great, edgy, and also in a weird way, hopeful comedy out there.

I will say the one thing about this show that is so exciting in a moment like this is that our news landscape is just dark. It just really is, and there’s a lot of contention and there are a lot of serious problems.

A lot of our issues, they’re the symptom of larger problems in our system, and those are just always going to be there. Just because Donald Trump is not in office doesn’t mean that there are no problems anymore. There are huge problems that allow a leader like that to thrive, and that’s on both sides of the aisle.

We have a hard rule in our writers’ room: we’re not making jokes about Trump’s hair. That’s not the problem. The real problem is these underlying structural issues within our institutions. And that’s something we’ll absolutely try to always bring to the surface.

Any other big changes this season?

I should note that there is a big redesign of Big News this season. Big News is coming back with a different look, and it may or may not have some similarities to CNN programming. Smartwood’s got glasses this season. That’s a big change.

This season will also have a podcast that will be available wherever you get your podcast on the night of the show. It’s going to make sure that people who missed the show can get everything they missed, but it will have its own spin on it as well.

Watch the trailer for the new season of Tooning Out the News above, via Comedy Central.