Creating his own arc

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This article was published 15/11/2021 (1718 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s not that Burke Scurfield was necessarily destined for a life in the entertainment industry.

But he allows being put in a headlock at the age of four by professional wrestler Bret “The Hitman” Hart may have had something to do with starting him on a path that would ultimately lead him to a writing gig on Netflix’s first in-house adult animated series, Inside Job. The first season’s 10 episodes follow Reagan Ridley (voiced by Lizzy Caplan), a tech genius at the corporation Cognito Inc., which functions as an all-powerful enabler to the world’s most unbelievable conspiracies, encompassing a robot U.S. president, the Illuminati, a secret moon colony and, yes, lizard people.

Created by Shion Takeuchi with executive producer Alex Hirsch (Gravity Falls), the show is a workplace comedy in which the workplace happens to include a sentient mushroom and a man-dolphin.

“It’s like Dunder-Mifflin in the deep state,” says Scurfield in a phone interview from Toronto.

Back to that fateful headlock: It came about when he accompanied his aunt — the Winnipeg Free Press’s own Miss Lonelyhearts, Maureen Scurfield — on a trip to a WWF wrestling event she was covering for the Winnipeg Sun.

“It was pretty alarming and cool,” the Winnipeg born-and-raised Scurfield, 32, says. “She’s great. She’s a real character, that’s for sure.”

Scurfield did not follow in his father’s construction business, nor his aunt’s advice-giving gig, but came to comedy-writing when he attended St. Paul’s High School — “a really great school for future lawyers and doctors” — where he tried starting an improv club, or volunteering to do funny announcements.

“I was on a pre-law track, enrolled in the University of Manitoba for about eight days before I really realized I wanted to take a swing and try writing,” he says. “So I dropped out on the last day that I could get my tuition back from the U of M and took that year to write an application to New York University School of the Arts.

To his own surprise, he got in, and found himself in the Big Apple, training himself not to look up at the tall buildings.

“It’s when you’re fresh off the bus from somewhere like Winnipeg and you’re looking up at how tall everything is, someone will try and sell you a tour,” he says. “I was a huge mark for two months because I couldn’t believe I was seeing buildings that were over 10 storeys high.”

Training in writing for television landed him a job writing for the video game Lego Legacy, which needed a subversive comedy voice akin to the Lego animated films.

“They felt they needed a television writer to come in and bring that to the game,” Scurfield says. “So I was the first narrative designer they put to work for that studio to bring a story arc and character and comedy and make sure that the slapstick was working,” he says.

More work came on the Netflix reboot of Inspector Gadget, his first foray into a Canadian animated series. Ultimately, he ended up in the writer’s room of Inside Job with longtime writing partner Adam Lederer.

“We were in the room writing, so every single episode has a little bit of our DNA in it,” Scurfield says. “We are credited writers on two episodes from the first 10.”

Suffice it to say, a show about conspiracy theories arrives at an interesting time, given that mobs of QAnon adherents would show up on the streets of Dallas to witness the second coming of John F. Kennedy Jr.

“We were writing the show during the last presidency, nine months before COVID started,” Scurfield says. “Ironically, the idea was to create a kind of comforting idea that there would be a hand guiding all the activities in the world to make sure that we didn’t blow ourselves up.

“So even if it’s a comedy of errors where everybody is an idiot, nothing truly terrible will ever happen because it’s not in the interest of these people for it to happen,” he says.

Scurfield says the show skirted the more reprehensible side of the conspiracy world.

“We tried to be very careful about the dark origin of a lot of conspiracy theories and what sort of group they tend to go after,” he says. “It’s not going to be going after George Soros. It’s kind of a madcap version of that world.”

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