RetroGrav : Interview Reflecting 10 years with Nick Merchant on Comedy Cubed & Drakoloid

Hello Internet.

If you read my last blog I interviewed the founder of "Drakoloid" so this time around I decided to interview Nick Merchant the man who created the channel "Comedy Cubed" and some of our favourite shows on Drakoloid such as High Schooled and Bad Influences. There are many deep questions that were answered throughout this interview.

Some of you may or may not know in February 5, 2021 it marked the 10 year anniversary of Comedy Cubed.

My first encounter with this channel was when Drakoloid began airing a new show called "High Schooled" back in Summer 2016. I found it quite different from most of the Drakoloid shows at the time but also similar energy to the other ones. Even though I was out of high school myself by this time I could relate to the situations and the messages behind High Schooled. Later that year I believe I saw other shows on Drakoloid livestream one day that had Nick Merchant such as Uniquely Normal and Kevin & Alec's Adventures and I thought Ryan from High Schooled had a younger brother lol realized later he was much younger in those shows, later then I discovered Comedy Cubed and did my own research on that channel myself.

High Schooled had more morale than ARTic does because ARTic is a show that has absurd comedy where this has more storyline. It also did not date itself by making it a Gen Z show but more of a show any generation could relate too. A major reason why Viral Jenneration did not work past season 1 is because it was trying to hard to be "the next generation". This show just went with an all encompassing feel. Bad Influences came in the picture and was more of a show that had a continuing plot device that season 1 has only seen while season 2 has not been released. I have asked all these questions.

For those who don’t know what Comedy Cubed, it is an online production channel that was founded by Nick Merchant and created multiple web-series that had co-productions with Drakoloid. The channel launched on February 5, 2011.

Q1: What interested you into creating this brand and a brand one that was in the kids/teen entertainment field?

Whenever I make content, I aim to create something that I myself would want to watch. I started as a kid, so content for my peers was my goal. Watching High Schooled through Derek & Ryan, you’ll be able to see how the whole cast and crew matured and shifted our target audience as we grew up.

Q2: What programming software did you use to help develop your shows?

For years, I wrote my scripts on Google Drive, trying to format them from scratch. I’ve since graduated to Final Draft. As for editing, I personally use Final Cut Pro, but most of my editors use Premiere, so usually that’s what ends up being used.

Q3: Did you take any classes in media prior to launching your channel?

Nope! I was ten years old when I first started my YouTube channel, and had no idea what I was doing. I mostly learned from studying what worked in the film and TV I loved, and even more importantly, what didn’t work. From there, most of my learning came from creating, and making plenty of mistakes.

Q4: I noticed you started in animation before switching to live action. Were you interested in being an animator or was it always producers, director, actor?

Ultimately, what interests me the most is storytelling. I adore animation, but I quickly found that I simply didn’t have the skills at the time to make anything worthwhile (then again, what 4th grader does). People would laugh at my films, so I decided to embrace it and pivot to comedy, and that’s what I’ve been doing since. I really love every aspect of the filmmaking process.

Q5: Who we’re your inspirations growing up to create in film?

What inspired me more than any one work was the medium of situational comedy itself. I fell in love with the structure of episodic stories, and being able to play with form while building on the rich tradition of television sitcoms. Even creating content for YouTube, I always looked to TV as a guide. One of the reasons Drakoloid felt like such a perfect place for my work was Drake’s similar commitment to television.

Q6: Did you know throughout school that you were planning to be in the entertainment industry creating and acting in shows?

I would always tell myself, even now still, that I’m not sure what I want to do professionally. Yet time and time again, my passion leads me to film and TV. The industry itself scares me, but I love the work (even the long hours!).

Q7: How old were you when you started acting?

I started acting in my own projects out of necessity, so around age ten.

Q8: Did you ever attend acting classes or did any theatre prior to Comedy Cubed?

Nope! And it shows.

Q9: When the channel launched on February 5, 2011 did you celebrate? What did you remember about that day?

At the time, I had been making content for a year, and my dad was the one who pushed me to release it. Then and now, I mainly made it for myself, so publicising it was never my top concern. I mainly remember not knowing what to name the channel, and being unable to come up with anything better than what my dad suggested (nicdem25, which would be the channel’s name for years). As soon as it was up, there was something so satisfying about releasing each video, being able to say I had made something, and the evidence being available to watch online, even without any audience.

Q10: What was the first web series that you acted in and how did it all come about?

My first real web series was Uniquely Normal, which was initially a spin-off of my friend Chauson’s show (though there’s little relation between the two other than his character having the same name on both). I was always terrible at starting my own projects, and I found it easier to build off of other’s work, even if it was only in a superficial way. Chauson had just moved with his family and started at my school that year, and he had made a series with his friends called “Idiot Says No!” that was never released. We filmed a few short episodes at first, inspired by popular sitcoms at the time (especially The Office’s mockumentary style), and we loved doing it, so we kept making more.

Q11: I heard Uniquely Normal and Kevin & Alec were shorter in terms of length back then in terms of your other web series?

I have a tendency to keep pushing my series to be bigger, often against my own better judgement. Every time I start something, I say I’ll keep it small, and then that ends up getting thrown out the window as soon as I begin to write for the characters. I just always wanna do more with them! For example, Uniquely Normal started out with 90 second episodes, and finished with a 22 minute finale. Kevin & Alec started out with 4-5 minute stories, but in season 2 we expanded to making multi-part serials. High Schooled was the biggest project I attempted, and its pilot was 12 minutes long. Now, the shortest episode of Derek & Ryan season 2 is 25 minutes long.

Q12: Do you still keep up with any of the former actors from Uniquely Normal and Kevin & Alec?

Yeah, all the time! Chauson and I even go to the same university. Sam DuBose (Leroy from Uniquely Normal) is one of my close friends. And Alec just returned for a cameo in a project I was filming a few weeks ago. Even the ones I don’t see as often as I’d like I remain forever grateful to for giving me their time and patience.

Q13: Like High Schooled? Would there ever be a reboot for Uniquely Normal

I considered doing revivals for both Uniquely Normal and Kevin & Alec, years after their finales. I always like to think about what the characters would be up to today. However, in both cases, I realized I was satisfied with where we left them off. Reviving High Schooled was deeply important for because it didn’t have a proper conclusion yet.

Q14: How did you start working with Drakoloid? Did you watch any of the shows on the network prior to joining?

In 2015, I received an email from Drake Vegas, saying he liked my work and wanted me to star in a show he was creating called Freshman Fall, about a group of friends in their freshman year of high school. I loved the script and the whole internet collaboration idea, so I immediately said yes. While the show didn’t get picked up beyond a pilot, it’s how I discovered Drakoloid and realized that Drake was doing so many of the things I’d always aspired to. The focus on sitcoms and creating a tight-knit fanbase greatly appealed to me, and Drake created such a beautiful place for creators such as myself to create and share their content.

Q15: What was the inspiration behind High Schooled?

With Uniquely Normal wrapping up, I wanted to finally start work on a new show that I created and planned from the ground up. I had never written and developed a pilot before, with past shows evolving naturally out of shorts made with friends. For a year, I explored different options and wrote treatments and scripts for a variety of different series. From science-fiction to drama, time and time again I returned to the idea of a lower-concept sitcom inspired by elements of my own life.

Q16: How did you first meet Derek de Jong who played Derek on the show?

Ultimately, my inspiration for High Schooled was Derek himself. We had met in drama class in middle school, and hit it off immediately. He was such a unique and energetic performer, and we had instant comedic chemistry. I build my shows around people I want to work with, and meeting Derek is what ended my search for what to make a show about. I originally wrote a pilot called “Lipton’s Lab” for him, which would’ve been a sci-fi comedy. The characters might sound familiar: an energetic but slightly crazy lead, the long suffering assistant who no one listens to, the strict but commanding neighbor, and the annoyed little sister. Derek and I developed Lipton’s Lab for months, but as I kept writing, I found that I loved the ensemble bouncing off each other more than the premise itself, and the most fun to write was when we went off premise to show their personal and academic lives. So instead, with the lessons learned from writing the characters on Lipton’s Lab, and merging it with another series idea I had based on me and my best friend, I wrote a new pilot. The rest is history.

Q17: The show High Schooled looked fun to film especially when you got to an actual High School. Was that your High School or did you rent a space?

Two scenes from “Derek For President” were shot at our actual high school, but most of the school scenes were shot at Rosenwald Hall at the University of Chicago, including all of season 2. Coincidentally, I ended up going there for college, and so we returned to film more school scenes in the same locations for Derek & Ryan. It was a lot of fun returning years later to the same rooms.

Q18: What was the most fun High Schooled episode to film?

Filming “Derek for President” is probably my favorite experience on set. Victor was a character that we’d been developing since before the pilot was even written, and I was nervous about the execution, but Jacob Beiser completely blew me away with his performance and elevated the character far beyond the script. Seeing the ideas he added on set was a delight, and Derek and I had trouble keeping a straight face.

Q19: Why did the show take a turn from the first season being all storylines being separated to the second season being one continuous storyline combined?

Once again, my tendency to go bigger with the stories I was telling affected the show. It was such a joy writing the multi-episode student council election arc that closed out season 1, that I wanted to take the lessons I’d learned and do a three episode arc at the start of season 2. However, it ended up forcing us down a certain path with little flexibility, and so I tried to go back and add more episodic elements (such as The Chatbot).

I’m still proud of our intentions that season: what would happen to Derek and Ryan’s friendship if Ryan was no longer just a sidekick? What if he also had a life outside of Derek? How would Derek respond? From the pilot, we wanted to explore deeper themes of their friendship (Derek calls Ryan “Replaceable Ryan” in the first episode, so the seeds of toxicity were always there) but we soon course corrected to something more traditionally positive, allowing the audience to first grow to like the characters over the first season before we dived too deep into their flaws.

Q20: Set the record straight, Why was High Schooled cancelled abruptly? I read there was supposed to be a third season that involved Amanda. Was that internet speculation or was that actually the plan?

The extended arc of season 2 ultimately is what caused the show’s downfall. I had some grand plans to explore and deconstruct the friendship between Derek and Ryan, but the fan reception wasn’t what we’d hoped, and it worked against some of the show’s strengths to strain their relationship. I soon found there’s a reason we had course corrected away from the toxic friendship portrayed in the pilot. The deeper into the season we got, the more I tried to escape the path we’d set, but there was an obligation to see the story through. I’m very proud of the ambitions of the season, but it just didn’t mesh properly with the show’s creative framework. After the big cliffhanger at the end of “The Conspiracy”, the next episode was intended to wrap up that storyline, and the original plan was for a big music festival episode (which is why the music festival is mentioned in the season 2 premiere). It was gonna be a mockumentary-style episode, shot by Kenny, and Sarah Kellysen of ARTic was a guest star (she actually completed her scenes for it and did a fantastic job). I spent a year coming up with the story for it and Henrik Nielsen (who also plays Ralph) wrote a wonderful script for the episode, but when we started shooting scenes for it, we realized it took the show too far away from its roots, so we instead scrapped it and decided to start fresh.

Derek and Ryan were always intended to exit at the end of season 2, coinciding with Derek and I’s actual graduation from high school. When Drake renewed the show for a third season, our intention was for it to focus on Amanda and Nikki, with Kenny and Ralph staying on for the first few episodes to serve as a bridge (Derek and I would’ve also probably returned in a guest capacity). I always loved writing for all four of them, and we’d shot some episodes of Middle Schooled with Amanda and Nikki that gave me confidence that they could lead the show. Since we never finished season 2, this never came to fruition. It ended up being a blessing in disguise because, contrary to the show’s title, it’s not about high school, it’s about Derek and Ryan. They are the heart of the show, and trying to do it without them would’ve only ended in failure.

Q21: Was the High Schooled episode “Camp Kenny” supposed to be the actual series finale? Or was this just a separate movie?

To replace the original music festival/documentary episode, I came up with an idea for a more traditional, situational comedy based episode revolving around Camp Kenny, Kenny’s annual camping expedition. Between writing “The Conspiracy” and “Camp Kenny”, I had taken a six month long hiatus to do Bad Influences, and it reminded me how much I loved writing sitcoms. I wanted to bring that same character based situational humor back to High Schooled, which I felt had been led off course by the season long arc. “Camp Kenny” was always intended to resolve the student council arc, but as it became clear how large in scope the episode would be, and how well it explored Derek and Ryan’s friendship, it seemed like a natural ending point for the series as a whole. Writing it, I wanted to move away from the convoluted student council mess that had been setup, and refocus on what that whole story arc was about: Derek and Ryan’s friendship. Unfortunately, due to the time constraints faced by scrapping the original planning and starting fresh, we jumped into filming without a complete outline, and not even the start of a script.

As we filmed, we realized we had backed ourselves into a corner, and there really wasn’t a way to resolve the story positively while staying true to the characters. What ended up killing the show was this story issue: we simply couldn’t find an ending we felt was satisfactory. We wanted to earn a happy ending, and we hadn’t yet, so instead we decided to let it sit and take the time to earn that ending, which is where the idea of Derek & Ryan was born.

Q22: There were rumours that ARTic and High Schooled were supposed to do a crossover? Was that ever going to happen and do you think that would have worked?

Drake and I often talked about crossing over certain performers (such as Sarah guest starring on High Schooled or Derek and I guest starring on ARTic), but never the characters themselves. I think it would’ve been a lot of fun on paper, but I’m not sure how it would work visually. ARTic is an internet collaboration, where actors read their lines individually and then everything is spliced together in a style closer to a staged reading, while High Schooled was a more traditional single-camera show, shot on location.

Q23: Did Bad Influences have any influence (no pun intended) in the termination of High Schooled by you or Drakoloid?

It pushed us to take a hard look at what wasn’t working in High Schooled’s second season. In retrospect, I think trying to showrun two shows at the same time was doomed from the beginning, and what ended up happening was I would work for half a year on one show before returning to work on the other, and bouncing back and forth between them. It killed a lot of the momentum, because as soon as we’d found our footing, I’d have to switch back to writing the other show.

Q24: How did the idea for Bad Influences come about?

I had been bouncing around the ideas for Bad Influences for a number of years, and wrote a pilot for it in 2015 with the same three personalities, but a slightly different premise. Similar to High Schooled, what pushed me to actually launch the show was finding the right performer to anchor it. After working with Jacob on High Schooled season 1, I instantly knew he was an incredible talented and committed actor that could bring Dave to life. The shooting script for the pilot was tailor-made for the three actors, but it wasn’t until fairly late in the process that we decided who Tommy and I should play, and I kept switching our roles. I’m very pleased with the final casting.

Q25: We have seen season 1 of Bad Influences. Is there a second season filmed with 5 more episodes. There was an episode list I believe leaked online? Will we ever see them or did those never get filmed?

Similarly to Camp Kenny, the burnout of switching between shows doomed Bad Influences. Unlike Camp Kenny however, we actually shot 99% of the show’s conclusion (more than enough to assemble it). It was a very rushed process, but I’m proud of the work we did, both in terms of the scripts and the performances. The character arcs setup for each character are wrapped up nicely. In fact, Jacob and I were just rewatching some of the footage from it last month, and it holds up. I truly hope one day to finish it.

Q26: What was it like working with Jacob Beiser? Did you have him in mind as the role of Dave since writing the show?

Jacob is probably the most talented actor I have ever had the pleasure of working with. I had no intention of making another series during the run of High Schooled, but I was just too impressed by his work to resist. We originally talked about making Victor a starring role in season 2 of High Schooled, but figured it was better for both projects to do a new show that could make use of both Jacob’s comedic and dramatic talents.

Q27: What made you want to create a High Schooled reboot/spin off “Derek and Ryan”?

High Schooled currently ends on a cliffhanger, and we never had any intention of leaving it like that. As we wrote Camp Kenny, the one idea we kept circling back to as to how to resolve it was a time jump, where we returned to the characters years later. Originally, Derek was hoping for a more serious limited series/movie that explored depression and resolved the student council arc using the existing footage from Camp Kenny as the beginning, but we decided that we needed to first escape the burdens of High Schooled and go back to the roots of fun, comedic episodic stories before we were ready to jump back into resolving that arc. Abandoning High Schooled was never considered.

Q28: Derek and Ryan is supposed to be a more mature show. Is it set in college or outside of college?

It was important for us to stick to something lower-concept, so the show doesn’t really feature college much (especially since Derek and I go to different schools), and instead focuses on Derek and Ryan going on adventures. The show is certainly more adult than High Schooled, but if anything, it’s more immature. I see it as a spiritual continuation of the early days of High Schooled, where Derek and Ryan would get into crazy, week to week hijinks. It’s been the most fun either of us have ever had with the characters, and it’s been an incredible joy to work on it.

It was also important to us to avoid the mistakes of High Schooled, so we’ve already largely completed filming both seasons of the show before its premiere. There’s only a day or two of filming left on the entire series.

Q29: What did it feel like playing the role and writing the role of Ryan again? Did it feel the same or has time changed that?

Writing Derek & Ryan was the first time I really felt clarity on who these characters were. Throughout High Schooled, it always felt like we were still reaching to figure out who they were, which makes sense given the nature of teenagers. With Derek & Ryan, we were able to enter with an extremely solid foundation and instead be able to focus on having fun and telling enjoyable stories. Ryan has certainly changed with time, and has grown as a character, and I feel far more confidence playing him than I did when we first started High Schooled.

Q30: Are you real life friends with Derek de Jong? What do you guys do to hangout?

In a case of life imitating art, Derek is my absolute best friend in the world. When we started High Schooled, we knew we had comedic chemistry, but it wasn’t until later on in the run that we went from friends to best friends. Now, writing Derek & Ryan, I draw from our own experiences. I feel really lucky to have such a strong friendship. It feels almost like a movie in how perfect it is. Over quarantine, we both moved back home to be with our families, and were in each other’s bubbles, so we spent just about every day together for nearly a year. A lot of the stuff we do when hanging out in real life will be seen on Derek & Ryan, including all the spots we actually hang out at, such as my roof. We have something called “Best Friend Moment” whenever we experience something together that is unique to our bond. From the smallest things like being excited to hang out, to more serious situations like when we’re comforting the other in a time of deep sadness, we’re always there for each other. Wow, writing this really is a Best Friend Moment itself.

Q31: How was it like working with Drake Vegas and just Drakoloid in general?

Working with Drake has been an incredible experience, and he’s someone who completely understands content-creation both from the side of the filmmaker and as a distributor. It’s a real gift that not many people have, and without it there would never be a Drakoloid. The whole network really is held up by his hard work. I feel extremely lucky to be part of this beautiful community he has created, and I’ve always felt like my work has been respected and appreciated.

Q32: People call you the King of Drakoloid because you are the most driven actor they had and plus you're a writer, director, producer and creator. Do you hope there will be other creators coming in that will take on all those titles?

I hope so, but it honestly seems strange because the true King of Drakoloid has always been Drake himself. He’s the one giving the opportunities for creators like me to shine. As long as Drake’s there, I have no doubt he’ll discover the next generation of talent.

Q33: One decision you thought was best for any of your shows? and one you regret?

My best decisions have always come down to casting: these are the actors entrusted to bring my characters to life, and their dedication throughout the years is the key to everything’s success. Particularly, casting Derek and Jacob to lead each of their respective shows.

My biggest regret is not pushing for the completion of Bad Influences season 2. It’s really a brilliant season and some of my finest work, and I hope one day it’ll be seen and appreciated.

Q34: Do you think Comedy Cubed will be around for a 20th anniversary?

I certainly plan to keep making content and develop as a filmmaker, and an important part of that is maturing what I work on and embracing my talents. I’ve never been as interested in the channel management side of things, so I don’t think Comedy Cubed will continue in its current form. It was always a necessity to create an audience, but with wonderful distributors like Drakoloid, it’s not needed anymore, and I’m able to focus on what I truly enjoy doing: making film and TV.