As Season Three begins, ‘Dave’ co-creator Jeff Schaffer discusses Lil Dicky’s search for love, and the status of the rapper’s latest album.
This interview contains light spoilers from the first two episodes of Season 3 of FX’s “Dave,” which premiered on FXX on April 5, and is streaming on Hulu.
In Season 3 of “Dave,” the rapper known as Lil Dicky is looking for love, probably in exactly the wrong place: on tour.
Liberated from the writer’s block that plagued him throughout Season 2, Dave Burd has gathered his friends and collaborators in a suitably obnoxious pink bus for a nationwide tour — and brought all of his shortcomings and neuroses along for the ride. Series co-creator and “Seinfeld” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm” alum Jeff Schaffer spoke to Variety the show’s two-episode premiere “Texas” and “Harrison Ave,” about where Dave is headed this season after the “weighted blanket” of recording an album was finally lifted, the mechanics of humiliation in a show about a rapper who talks incessantly about his genitals, and the overall series trajectory as Burd grows older — but not always wiser.
How much, if at all, was the show was constrained during Season 2 because of the pandemic — and what position did that put you in as you started Season 3?
The only constraint that the pandemic put on Season 2 from a logistical standpoint was the fact that we lost some days due to people getting COVID. Creatively, we weren’t constrained at all.
But to answer the question in a different way, in Season 2 there’s a lot of angst. There was a lot of strife within the group, because their captain was just a navelgazing anxiety monster because he can’t write, he can’t write, he can’t write. We wanted this season to be very different. I mean, you can’t fall down the stairs twice the same way. So this season is almost the antidote to Season 2, in that there is no group strife. They’re on tour where Dave, as in real life when he’s on tour, he doesn’t have to write music, and when he doesn’t have to write music, there’s this giant weighted blanket that is taken off of him. I think last year’s angst-ridden journey paid off supremely in the season finale. This season starts in a more fun place, and the group’s together, and Dave’s not looking inward. The whole group is looking outward.
It’s clear from the first few episodes of Season 3 that some conflicts still linger. After working on shows like “Seinfeld” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm” where characters really actively resist growth, what have you learned about pushing things forward without it feeling like somebody is falling down the stairs the same way over and over again?
The first season was about Dave and his group of friends, and everyone was supporting Dave. Season 2, everyone’s like, “Wait, I’ve got my own thing,” and it was a zero-sum game. This season, I think everyone’s finding a balance of how to be their own professional life person. Emma is filming a documentary on the tour. Is Dave going to micromanage it? Dave is Dave. But we’ll see. GaTa is now VMA GaTa. He’s gotten a little taste of success, and as the season progresses, we’re going to see him gander. Is he going to try and monetize his mental disorders? Of course he is. It’s all part of the gander. So we’re going to see this season how everyone starts to find their own path, and it doesn’t have to be at Dave’s expense.
Who is the person in the writers’ room who went skydiving and will not stop talking about it? Mike (Andrew Santino) brings it up in every scene of the first episode.
Our writers are very brave, but none of them are brave enough to have done that. But it did happen. It’s a story of a friend of a friend of one of the writers, I believe. But it seemed like the perfect thing for Mike, just to have found what he would call depth. He had an experience. I mean, I don’t know how much of it he’s really absorbed other than I got to tell everybody all the time. It’s frequency masquerading as philosophy.
What the series does extremely well is interrogate Burd’s role in hip-hop, particularly where more than ever, conversations are happening about how much ownership of that community a person can take when they don’t come from it. How much of that is a component of this season?
Building off last season where he was on the VMAs, and now he’s on tour, he’s achieved a certain level of fame, and we finally got to the point where we could explore fame in a way that we could not in Season 1. I remember when Dave and I were talking about the pilot, and he had this list of stories, we literally went through just like, “No, not famous enough.
