Mission to Zyxx's creators are laughing their way through the sci-fi spinoff boom
Charles Pulliam-Moore is a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.
When Mission to Zyxx debuted in 2017, the podcasting space was very different. There were fewer shows, and more money was being spent as companies rushed to figure out how to capitalize on the growing medium. At a time when many big podcasts were focused on news and investigative reporting, Zyxx — an improvised comedy about a group of alien diplomats journeying across the galaxy in search of adventure — felt like an oddity that was channeling the spirit of classic radio dramas.
The show was a loving sendup of Star Wars and Star Trek 's most iconic (and ridiculous) narrative beats. And while nostalgia was a big part of Zyxx 's appeal, meticulous sound design and inspired, on-the-spot performances made each episode sound like something from podcasting's future.
When Mission to Zyxx came to an end in 2022, the show's creators — Alden Ford, Jeremy Bent, Allie Kokesh, Seth Lind, Winston Noel, and Moujan Zolfaghari — needed a break and time to figure out what they wanted to do next. Eventually they landed on The Young Old Derf Chronicles; it's set in the same universe as Mission to Zyxx and features many voices from the original, but it's a very different kind of (mini)series, one that's lampooning something much more modern about sci-fi.
When I recently sat down with Ford and Lind ahead of The Young Old Derf Chronicles ' debut at this year's Tribeca Film Festival, they told me that their new podcast is, in part, a response to the way that studios have become obsessed with expanding their established franchises with prequels. But The Young Old Derf Chronicles is also the creative team's way of showing fans how important their continued support has been.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Looking back, how has the Zyxx fandom evolved, would you say, and how has fan engagement impacted the show?
Alden Ford: When we started in season 2, we started a Patreon to help fund some of the more ambitious aspects of the show and pay [sound designer] Shane [O'Connell] for the work that he was increasingly putting into every episode to make them bigger and crazier. That really connected us to our listeners in a way that I don't think we really would have expected in season 1 when it was just a show that was out there and people liked it.
Seth Lind: Something that surprised us was just how deeply so many of the fans care about the show. When we set out to make it, we wanted it to be funny, we wanted people to like it, and we wanted it to be popular. But we didn't really dare to hope that it would become so important and meaningful to people. We heard from people saying, 'I was in the deepest depression of my life and this was the thing I would look forward to,' or 'My partner passed away and this is the first thing that made me laugh.'
Right around the time the show was ending, a group of fans made us this thick book they called Mission to Zine that was a collection of art and letters saying what the show had meant to them. Things like that made us feel a responsibility to our fans. The show is violent and it can get very blue, but we always worked to protect its heart and make it feel like it was coming from a good place. If there was something that seemed like it was punching down, we'd cut it out, and while characters could be mean as individuals, but like the show as a whole couldn't. I think those instincts led to us cultivating a fandom that really cares for each other. And having that community made it so much more meaningful to make the show.
AF: As fans of sci-fi, we all know very, very intimately how disappointing it can be when you're a fan of something that doesn't land the plane or gets canceled too soon. And so for us, once we got a few seasons in we got invested in making it as good as possible. Especially in the back half of season 5, we were like, 'What are the ways to wrap up this show so that everyone who listens and cares about it is going to be satisfied by it?' Of course, that's an impossible task because you're never going to do something that makes everybody happy. But I think we ended it on our own terms, which is more than a lot of shows can say.
Why Derf?
AF: There's a couple different reasons. The fun reason is that we all know how much Star Wars there is now. I'm not complaining, but I do think it has become its own kind of cliché that no character, no matter how silly or tertiary, deserves their own fully fledged miniseries where you explain every possible aspect of their backstory.
You're not hype for a Glup Shitto series?
AF: [ Laughs ] I mean, yes, I'm looking forward to the Salacious B. Crumb trilogy and the show chronicling Max Rebo's rise to stardom. But yeah, we thought that if we were going to do something else in the Zyxx universe, it'd be fun to do exactly the things Star Wars would do — something like an Obi-Wan, or a Mandalorian, or a Boba Fett series. Parodying the genre and the tropes around it felt very true to us generally. But the other reason is that Justin [Tyler] is a guy we all love and he's a fan favorite.
SL: Derf is the closest thing to being the Obi-Wan of this universe, and just being able to call him 'Young Old Derf' completely sold me on the idea of doing a show about him. Because, like, that's so stupid, and 'the story of Derf when he was slightly less old' is a spinoff no one asked for. But I also remember Justin very early on in the first couple episodes, he gave Alden some feedback about the show, saying that, like, 'Pleck has to be important.'
Especially in the early seasons, Pleck — who's the audience surrogate — was kind of a punching bag, and it was kind of a joke that he was important. But Justin was like, 'As silly as this all is, this guy actually has to be someone who ends up being significant and he has to have an arc to follow.' I think that really helped the show find its voice, and is a big part of what helped us last so many seasons.
Did Andor inform your approach to crafting The Young Old Derf Chronicles?
AF: One of the challenges we gave ourselves is making a new kind of show. Not that we wanted to reinvent the wheel or anything, but we wanted to make Derf distinctly different in substance and structure from the original show. With the new show, it's essentially a first-person narrative where pretty much everything is pretty being told from Derf's perspective. And from an improv standpoint, we approached it way less from the typical Zyxx format where we start on the ship, we get a mission, and then we're on the planet of the week.
With Derf, we thought, what if we treated it more just like a 'fuck around' where we're just having fun with Derf in these new settings with a lot more walk-ons, digressions, and longer scenes where weirder stuff happens and we're not as worried about the propulsion of the plot or a strict three-act structure? It's been way harder to make and way harder to edit and produce, but it's really fulfilling for us especially because we're not just palette-swapping Mission to Zyxx. I don't know if Andor was trying to do that by mixing up the structure and the style, but I do think that's been the key for getting us creatively excited about making this thing.
Would you be open to more Zyxx beyond The Young Old Derf Chronicles?
AF: Absolutely. I think doing this show as a limited series has really felt like a good and sustainable way to keep things going. We've all talked about doing this new show, you know, seeing how listeners respond, and then reassessing our workload to see if doing more in the future makes sense with our lives now. If we continue to make shows in the Zyxx world, it will probably be in ways like this where we'll come up with something, we can produce 10 episodes, work for a year to actually make the thing, and then regroup to see what the next thing is.
The Young Old Derf Chronicles does not yet have a firm release date. But if you're interested in seeing the Mission to Zyxx crew perform and produce an episode live, tickets are still available for their upcoming live show at Caveat in New York City, which will also be livestreamed.
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