BUPKIS: Judah Miller on Pete Davidson’s Semi-Autobiographical New Peacock Series

BUPKIS, the new Peacock series debuting on Thursday, May 4 (with all 8 episodes dropping at once), is diving into the (semi-autobiographical) world of Pete Davidson.

“We wrote this show in a vacuum, during the pandemic,” showrunner Judah Miller explains to Give Me My Remote in the video below. (Note: This interview was conducted before the WGA strike.)  “We wanted the show to have a boundlessness to it, and a sense of anarchy. It was important to us that there were no restrictions on what the show was allowed to do. It was really, at the end of the day, what made us laugh the hardest, or what made us feel the most, was sort of our guiding metric with that.”

“I don’t think there was a calculated [question of] how much we want to exaggerate or how much we want to focus on things that were real,” he continues. “I think at the end of the day, it was just like within each of the episodes: there is an underlayer of a truthful dynamic within Pete’s life. And then where we take that core kind of truthfulness, there’s a wild erraticness to it that makes it BUPKIS.”

Part of that planned erraticness translated into how they told the story: Episodes frequently feel like snapshots from Pete’s life, rather than a firm season-long arc.

“We really wanted this show to continually shift and turn in unexpected ways,” Miller says. “And even though we are telling a story arc for each of our characters, we didn’t want to overly map anything. And I think it was important to us that, in the sense of having a sense of anarchy to the show, we deliberately wanted to defy expectations between episodes—and sometimes even within episodes by shifting tone.”

“It feels like that’s oddly more truthful to real life, because sometimes the darkest and most depressing moments can also be the most absurd and even comedic moments,” he continues. “To us, that seemed to just make sense.”

The show is also a who’s who of bonkers guest stars, including Steve Buscemi, Bobby Cannavale, Charlamagne Tha God, Charlie Day, Brad Garrett, Al Gore, John Mulaney, Ray Romano, Cliff “Method Man” Smith, Jon Stewart, Kenan Thompson, Ricky Velez, Marissa Jaret Winokur, and Chase Sui Wonders.

“Pete was very instrumental in suggesting people, and a lot of our cast, which is like an unbelievable laundry list of some of the most incredible actors,” Miller says. “I’d like to describe the show as a fever dream of how absurd it is to be in Pete’s orbit. And I say our casting is like a wonderful fever dream, because Pete is a dreamer, and he goes for very ambitious gets, in terms of his favorite people in the world.”

“Even when it seems like it’s impossible, somehow the stars aligned and we were able to get Joe Pesci to play his grandfather and Edie Falco to play his mother,” he continues. “I think for fans of Pete Davidson, you can come to the show and you’re going to see a lot of reference points to his favorite things in the world, his favorite actors that are associated with his favorite projects. It was a mixture of people he knew, people he’s massive fans of, and everywhere in between. It was a surreal thing to be able to get everyone you could possibly wish for to play these roles and elevate what we wrote the way that they did.”

BUPKIS, Series Debut, Thursday, May 4, Peacock

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