Columbus Dispatch: Writer’s Series Stars Animated Monsters
Once you’ve become big, it’s worth looking back at your hometown to give you a boost. The creator of “You’re Not a Monster,” an animated comedy short voiced by Kelsey Grammar, got a recent boost in the Columbus Dispatch. Here’s what his hometown paper has to say about Frank Lesser.
Entertainment & Life
Television |
Writer’s series stars animated monsters
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Frank Lesser
By Erica Thompson
The Columbus DispatchPosted Oct 31, 2019 at 5:00 AMUpdated Oct 31, 2019 at 8:23 AM
Monsters need therapists, too, especially the day after Halloween.
At least that’s what Bexley native Frank Lesser thinks.
“It’s gotta be a little bit of a weird come-down after everybody is dressing up as you,” said Lesser, a 39-year-old author and satirist, who won four Primetime Emmys while writing for “The Colbert Report.”
His imagination and enthusiasm for ghouls, ghosts and goblins prompted him to create “You’re Not a Monster,” a new animated series now available to stream for free on IMDb TV.
Kelsey Grammar voices a vampire who is a former psychiatrist. He left his practice to his great-great grandson, Max Seward, voiced by Eric Stonestreet. In each of the 14 episodes, which run less than 5 minutes, Seward, who is human, counsels myriad monsters, voiced by celebrity guests that include Patton Oswalt, Ellie Kemper and Amy Sedaris.
“It’s a show about a therapist whose patients are the horrifying monsters that they think they are because they really are horrifying monsters,” said Lesser, who now resides in New York. “But it’s (also) about how, as any person with any anxiety, with any neuroses, you tend to think you’re weird (or) you’re not a normal person. And then you realize, ‘Oh, everybody is like that.’ That’s sort of the message of the show.”
In that spirit, viewers might be able to relate to a lonely headless horseman, a demon secretary with her own demons or a Frankenstein monster that is figuratively — and literally — falling apart.
Lesser describes his childhood in Bexley as idyllic, so much so that he began to imagine something sinister lurking beneath the veneer — a sentiment helped by the fact that “Goosebumps” author R.L. Stine is from the same neighborhood.
“In my mind, I just am like, ‘There’s gotta be something else going on,’” he said with a laugh. “Like, the only way this beautiful suburb works is if everybody is a monster.”
Lesser said he also could identify with a monster’s feeling of being different.
“I think it’s easy to feel like an outsider in this beautiful, Midwestern town where I don’t really play sports,” he said. “I didn’t root for sports teams. I would root for King Kong versus Godzilla.”
Though Lesser has followed Bigfoot hunters, lived in an apartment built over a cemetery and spent the night in haunted hotels, he said he has never interacted with a monster. Now he can live vicariously through Seward, his animated protagonist.
“The therapist is actually good with monsters,” Lesser said. “Their greatest dream is to be human, so they like interacting with (him). ... The monsters want a very empathetic friend who they — in general — won’t try to eat.”