https://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/screens/2016-09-12/crunch-time-for-rooster-teeth/

Crunch Time for Rooster Teeth

By Richard Whittaker, September 12, 2016, 3:30pm, Picture in Picture

When the world ends, it will be with neither a bang nor a whimper but, according to Crunch Time, with a lot of finger-pointing and really bad ideas.

The six-episode show is the latest programming expansion for Austin's Rooster Teeth studio/online behemoth. First they went into films with Lazer Team, then serial drama with Day Five, and now this is their first foray into the half-hour sitcom.

Created by Bradley Jackson and Andrew Disney, Crunch Time focuses on a quartet dabbling with big science – well, if that's what you can call a machine that allows you to enter a dog's dreams. When the experiment runs amok (wormholes, bad dating experiences, and a dream version of Casper Van Dien – yes, Starship Troopers' Casper Van Dien) – the team are there to save the universe. Or at least to blame everyone else.

Think of it as the anti-Fantastic Four. After a bizarre super-science experiment, nobody gets super powers, and nobody nobly tries to save the world. Or, as Jackson describes it, "terrible, petty people using big science for selfish reasons."

Austin Chronicle: So … why Casper Van Dien?

Bradley Jackson: When we wrote the script, we wrote that in there as this crazy idea. One, the series will never happen. Two, Casper Van Dien will never come and be in a show where he'll play this idealized dream version of himself.

AC: Isn't the idealized dream version of Casper Van Dien just Casper Van Dien?

Andrew Disney: Bradley and I both grew up loving Starship Troopers, but it was that movie you never got to see in theatres because it was rated R, but then you got to see it on TV in the middle of the day. So there was that moment in the Nineties when he was the hunky dream guy. He really is chiseled, just this perfect specimen of a man. People have compared him to a Ken doll.

BJ: He's very funny. He's very self-aware, and I think he relished the chance to mix it up with these comedians.

AD: And I think it's just random enough that this weird dream logic, that it would burn in your mind. Just the name, Casper Van Dien, it's so mysterious and amazing.

BJ: Dreams are so arbitrary sometimes. Like, why did I dream about Edward James Olmos? I have no idea. Is it because I saw Battlestar Galactica four days ago? Dreams make no sense. So we really loved the idea of Casper Van Dien popping up in her dream.

AC: You start with an Inception-esque theme, then manage to tear a hole in the universe by episode two. It seems like you're going, "How many science-fiction tropes can we throw in here?"

BJ: We loved the idea of real stakes, this real dark universe that people are living in. But it was a great way to have a serialized comedy. The TV I watch mostly is one-hour dramas. I want that bingeworthiness. I want it to feel like candy, that you've got to have that next bite.

AD: And most comedies are not serialized. Some of my favorite comedies are things like It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia or Seinfeld, where it's "What wacky adventure will the gang get into this week?" and then the next episode never mentions it.

BJ: I love the high stakes. I love characters that are so ill-equipped, that whole fish-out-of-water thing.

AD: They legitimately might die at the end of every single episode.

AC: It's also a battle to the bottom.

BJ: Totally. It's all about how greedy and selfish can these people get. That's the comedy. They just get more and more selfish, and it causes more and more problems for the entire world around them.

AD: And what excited us, too is that people are very capable and intelligent. One of the original pitches to Rooster Teeth was "It's Always Sunny meets Inception." But the characters from Sunny are not intelligent. They're dumb, which is great for this show, but we want these characters to be really capable, really smart, but also really petty, and not people that you want to be in charge of saving the world.

Crunch Time episodes one and two are available at www.roosterteeth.com.