Monica Sotto’s Emmy-nominated vision for Drunk History’s “Bad Blood”

Emmy-nominated production designer Monica Sotto talks about the vision behind “Bad Blood,” the Drunk History episode that takes us from the 1900s to 51 B.C.

The year of Corona has taken many things from lives to livelihoods. Among those losses is Comedy Central’s Drunk History, an irreverent television series that retells history through the slurred storytelling of Derek Waters and Jeremy Konner’s guests. Drunk History takes its audience through the hallowed halls of time, dusts off the historical figures we’ve cast in amber, and reanimates them into people with the comedic dial turned all the way up.

Due credit goes to the writing for this transformation, but it’s the work of production designer Monica Sotto and her team that transports us to another time and place. Sotto demystified the process with Culturess in a chat about the nuts and bolts that make-up the way back machine her designs create for Drunk History‘s audience. It begins, as most things do, with research. A lot of research.

“We study,” Sotto says noting that period work in film and TV is a definite challenge. “We study like the best academic students we can be. We scour the internet and books, and articles and maps. Any media I can find on that topic.”

Accuracy is important on Drunk History, but the series cut its teeth as a lower budget show and embraced a community theater aesthetic early on. It’s an aspect of the series that Sotto finds fun because she can really lean into figuring out whether the team wants to make the artwork more playful by doing painted backdrops, or painted set pieces, or whether they want to play it straight.

“The nice part about being in the art department,” Sotto says, laughing, “the comedy isn’t fully our responsibility all the time. That’s the contribution of our performers.”

Describing herself as the straight man among comedians, Sotto enjoys bringing to life the gags Konner and the producers come up with. If you laughed at the giant vat of vanilla ice cream Typhoid Mary dragged around with her in “Bad Blood”–the Drunk History episode with which Sotto earned an Emmy nod–that’s Sotto’s work.

“I remember asking Jeremy how much ice cream,” she says, explaining how the vanilla ice cream gag came to be. “He held his hand out as if he was like ‘uh, well I want it to be like a pile of ice cream.’ Like the pile would be as big as a small child. So we really went for it.”

The team provided a vat that wasn’t historically accurate for 1900, but the beauty of Drunk History lies in both the details and the ability to sidestep them for a laugh.

Sotto has a shrewd eye. She can land a visual punchline, and she can stop you still with her set design. Her ability to walk the knife’s edge of comedy and history keeps the story being told from falling apart visually, and she does it with very little time.

Once the drunk narration is written into a shooting script, it is as if Drunk History is off to the races. Everything is typically shot in one day including any family photos that need to be taken for an episode. Sotto sees it as a fun challenge to move so fast and yet still remain as accurate as possible.

Flexibility and versatility are a must for Drunk History, they are a part of what made the series so immersive to its audience whilst teaching them about the history they may not have been aware of prior to tuning in.

In Sotto’s words:

"I do like to think that Drunk History is one of the last educational shows on TV. You think you’re just watching some cute idea. Listening to drunk people can be pretty funny, let’s listen.But in that you’re learning really heavy weight stuff. Stuff that mainstream history…I don’t know what mainstream history is…but a lot of [stuff] basic history books skip over. So it’s really nice to go back and get a different point of view through comedy."

With “Bad Blood” the history being told is about Typhoid Mary, an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid fever who infected her clients through her cooking. And Arsinoë, the younger sister of Cleopatra who used her wits to oust her sister off the throne, and defeated Julius Caesar in battle before being betrayed by her own officers who traded her for her brother Ptolemy, starting at the ripe age of 11.

Visually, the two stories are in contrast to one another. Typhoid Mary takes place entirely inside as Mary’s cooking and infectious disease is carried from house to house. Arsinoë’s story is one told throughout Alexandria from the palace to the camp of Achillas (not to be confused with Achilles). But they are tied together by an exploration of what it means to be a woman who does not comply with the standards of their time at the detriment of others or the empowerment of themselves.

Sotto and her team are very capable of doing a straight period piece as seen in Typhoid Mary’s half of “Bad Blood.” But they truly shine when given the space to stretch creatively, as with their creation of Arsinoë’s Egypt, which takes inspiration from Assassin’s Creed thanks to the game’s influence on Konner.

Sotto married a video game level of art direction in their set dressing with a more classical take in post-production via the digital painting the team did for Caesar’s boat, the lighthouse of Alexandria, and the temple of Artemis.

Drunk History‘s work environment encourages the sharing of ideas, no matter how silly or stupid, because they could be the idea that helps tell the story better or provide a laugh to the audience as they learn. Ideas like the fake abs of Achillas or the skin cap of Ganymedes. If it’s Party City then it’s Party City.

“I hope that’s validating,” Sotto says. “We have a lot of fun with it. Derek loves to work with the idea of ‘Is it funny? I don’t need it to be cool all the time. I need it to be funny.’ That’s a really good direction and philosophy to go with.”

It’s the kind of work culture that helps the team not take their work so seriously that their heads are too wrapped up in it which can happen in film and TV.

Sotto and her team take the low with the high along with techniques considered obsolete by others in the industry like the painted backdrops she described earlier, forced perspective, and miniatures. They also try to avoid green screen, a technique they had to use for Alexandria over the three days that it was shot, but kept true to their aesthetic by giving it an old school effect.

“We’re all cinema nerds,” she says. “We’re all fascinated with old school, in-camera special effects. We do a lot of ghosts on fishing lines. Derek and I are obsessed with Disneyland, so I’m always trying to put in gags you’d see on the rides like fake fire.”

The point of their work, from a visual perspective, is fun. Each episode attempts to recapture the wondrous magic of childhood whimsy and fantasy for its audience, reminding viewers that aging does not mean losing one’s imagination.

It’s because of the vision behind Drunk History, the intent of its team, and the execution of their storytelling that brought humor into education that the series will be missed. Sotto, like fans of the show, is sad about the news of its cancellation even though she is grateful for the time she had being a part of it and hopes to work with the team again in the near future.

Drunk History changed her life. In all honesty, it’s changed the lives of its viewers with each episode that told a story that for too long had gone untold. Like Teddy Roosevelt’s trip to Yosemite depicted by an inside forest Sotto installed with the park projected on LED screens, the abstract, hippy-dippy white bedroom of Yoko Ono and John Lennon, and the pool Sotto’s team built for an episode on dolphin experimentation.

Whether you were inspired by the writing or the art, Drunk History will be remembered for its irreverence and its storytelling. It is a history unto itself, and Monica Sotto has left her mark on it

Monica Sotto is nominated for an Emmy in the Outstanding Production Design For A Variety, Reality Or Competition Series category. Tune into ABC on September 20 at 8 pm EST to see who wins.