Inside Netflix’s ‘Strip Law’: Creator Cullen Crawford on Machine-Gun Jokes, Legal Parodies, and Banning AI

Picture Credits: Team Coco & Netflix Strip Law never hits the brakes on jokes. From creator Cullen Crawford, the animated series is everything he wants to see in a comedy series. Set in a C+ at best law office in Las Vegas, Crawford and the writers’ room put countless gags in a blender, and all the flavors somehow come together in the end.  It’s a funny, sometimes surreal and even grotesque comedy with a tiny, tiny bit of heart. “I just wanted us to go, what’s the funniest thing first,” Crawford said, “and then work on a story around that instead of the other way around.” In other words, jokes came first.  Recently, Crawford spoke with What’s On Netflix about the creation of Strip Law and some of its best gags.  Congratulations on the show. It’s really funny. Thank you so much. Probably over the last four or five years of my career, I’ve had jokes building up in me ready to explode, you know what I mean? I just got to go nuts, like machine gunfire jokes. How did you in the writer’s room keep that machine gunfire so under control? It’s funny because that was my first time running a room. I was always sort of the wildcard in the room, trying to get us off track, throwing a bunch of crazy shit at the wall. Here, I had to be the one not doing that and letting other people do it and acting like I was discouraging it while secretly being like, yes, yes, go be crazy. Such as having an episode with both The Sandlot and The Conversation referenced? We had a pretty eclectic room. For references like that, I told people, “Bring in stuff you think is cool, let’s talk about it. Let’s see if we can pull from it.” We got a lot. Sometimes we just talk about movies for an hour or two.  There is some weird shit. There’s a line in it where a character says, “Anchors Away, Home Slice,” which is a reference to an MTV commercial for a computer-animated Bill Clinton hosting music videos in 1998. That line stuck in my head for 30 years, and I got to put it in there. That’s pop culture references done right in comedy where even if you know it, it’ll still work. If you know the reference, it’s extra funny, but it needs to be funny without the reference. That’s a rule for me. Were there any other rules for the comedy and world of Strip Law? There were some rules. I know it doesn’t seem like it. Some rules we break sometimes, but for the most part, I wanted reality to have rules in it. I didn’t want the world to be magic so much as just, like, crazy shit is happening in the real world. There’s one moment where a priest explodes, and there’s some stuff like that, but for the most part, I didn’t want wacky physics-breaking stuff.  Something consistent throughout the series is ending episodes where you least expect, like a priest at the Vatican called into action or an Interstellar-esque experience. I always like to do a joke then go one joke past it. Okay, we’ve now escalated the three hits, but where’s one extra place we can take this that is truly surprising. It’s built into my DNA for writing.  It’d be interesting to have a stopwatch and see how many jokes Strip Law packs into a minute. Oh my God, we have not done that. I just, without trying to be too up my own ass, if something’s been done before, I want to come up with a new way to do it. It’s even small things that I don’t know the audience is going to notice, but the fact that our second episode is a holiday episode? That is kind of strange. I want to go against whatever convention, but still, have it be coherent. Strip Law S1. Adam Scott as Lincoln Gumb, ESQ., Janelle James as Sheila Flambe and Shannon Gisela as Irene Gumb in Strip Law S1. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2026 The show isn’t a parody of legal shows, but did Boston Legal or Suits or any classic law shows inspire any of Strip Law? Definitely influenced by it, but obviously, we play pretty fast and loose with the law. A part of the joke is that it’s almost like a TV watcher’s understanding of the law. To me, the fun thing about a courtroom is that it’s a place in pop culture and in a child’s imagination. Whoever has the best argument wins. It’s not about anything else. I just like that as if it’s a debate club or something, and that was what the TV version of court is, right? I just wanted to play in that world. L.A. Law was a huge one. We hadn’t watched a ton of Franklin & Bash, but obviously, we do kind of a Franklin & Bash thing in the show. When we started watching it, so much of it felt like the inverse of our show, including that show’s season finale, which is them going to Vegas.  We didn’t plan any of this. It just worked out that way when we were sort of on the fence about that last episode, but then we saw the Franklin & Bash series finale. We were like, “We have to do this Franklin & Bash, sort of tribute-parody thing.” Obviously, there’s a lot of famous courtroom movies that we reference in this show. All the old [John] Grisham stuff and A Few Good Men? I do love courtroom movies. I really do. Something that the series does get right about lawyers: they are often very sad people. That’s true. When you dove into the world of law, did you see comedy in that misery? Absolutely. I would say, too, that the law is a little bit a stand-in for my career in the entertainment industry. You have part of you that wants to be high-minded creating art here and then people don’t engage with it or you don’t get work off of that, and it’s like, just do the thing that gets people’s attention. That sort of approach to entertainment is definitely mirrored in Lincoln (Adam Scott) and Sheila’s (Janelle James) approach to what should happen in a courtroom. Everyone was sending me their town’s billboard guy. The range of ads and billboards that people do out there is so wild that I can’t believe it. People make little mini-movies about themselves, like three-minute movies with crazy theatrics and special effects. I was just like a pig in shit with all that.  Strip Law S1. Adam Scott as Lincoln Gumb, ESQ. in Strip Law S1. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2026 You and the team on the show did a great job with a live-action parody of religious movies. How’d you all get that aesthetic and tone of those movies just right? I have been obsessed with those movies ever since God’s Not Dead. I do think that episode does have a pretty nuanced take on religion. It is not just religion’s bad or good, but those movies do not have a nuanced take. You get to college and immediately the professor’s, like, “Before we can start class, everyone must say that God sucks and doesn’t exist and I hate God because I’m jealous.” I love a good blunt sledgehammer satire of something. For that, there’s something about that format where people just say the subtext out loud that I think is so funny. I’m very well-versed in all those movies. They’re the funniest things out there. Titmouse does great work on the show. What was the collective vision for the show’s animation? They were really wonderful. We got such a good team. Our supervising director, Adam Parton, and our artistic director, Tyler Rice, are both incredible. Their whole teams were great. I told anyone, “I’m never going to get mad at you for trying to make my show funnier. Throw stuff in. I might cut it, I might not, but I will always appreciate you taking a swing.” They took that spirit of collaboration really seriously, and they really tried to add everything. I think we got a lot of insanely great stuff out of it. Even wearing a shirt that says Corn on it — but Corn is spelled correctly on Irene’s shirt — that wasn’t my joke. That was Tyler’s joke, and I thought it was so funny.  Even just the way the characters move sometimes is really accentuating a joke. Could not be happier with the team we got at Titmouse. In the opening credits, it’s proudly stated that Strip Law is made by people. At what point did that become a part of the credits? That was day one a thing I wanted. I think there was some back and forth about how strong of language we can use for various reasons. To me, I would be even more blunt about it, but I think this was a good place where all parties involved were happy with it. It was important to me to say this is the product of a bunch of human beings. Straight up, if someone had the AI note taker thing on during a Zoom meeting, I made sure they turned it off. I wanted zero AI involved in the production of this show.  For a speech I gave at the wrap party, I said, “I think around 450 people touched this show in some way over the course of production. So many little things that never would’ve happened without human involvement made the show so much better.” Picture Credit: Netflix Little jokes that were just spur-of-the-moment things, or we’re in edit and this isn’t working, so we edited in this weird way and everyone’s laughing, or someone flubs a line in a way that makes it a million times funnier. The human element is the point of this. It just makes shit so much better in ways you could never predict. I’m super proud of that label being in the credits. I’m so thankful to Netflix for letting me put it in. I hope it moves a needle for someone somewhere – that you can and should do this without a computer wiping its dick on it.