Peacock Cancels Show After One Season: No Season 2 for ‘In the Know’

Peacock’s In the Know will not return for a second season. The streamer has canceled its first foray into adult animation, which combined animation and live celebrity interviews, after its first six-episode season premiered in January 2024, Deadline reports.

The series was co-created by Mike Judge (Beavis and Butt-Head, King of the Hill), Zach Woods (Silicon Valley, The Office) and Brandon Gardner and featured voice acting from Woods, Judge, Caitlin Reilly, Charlie Bushnell, J. Smith Cameron and Carl Tart.

“Lauren Caspian is NPR’s third most popular host. He’s a well-meaning, hypocritical nimrod, just like you and me. He’s also a stop motion puppet,” the official synopsis read. “Each episode follows the making of an episode of Lauren’s show In the Know, in which Lauren conducts in-depth interviews with real world human guests. Lauren collaborates with a diverse crew of NPR staff. They are also puppets and nimrods.”

The public radio parody followed the making of NPR’s fictional host Lauren Caspian’s radio program, In the Know, during which he interviewed celebrity guests that included Kaia Gerber, Ken Burns, Finn Wolfhard, Norah Jones, Mike Tyson and Hugh Laurie.

Woods opened up to PopCulture about the process of combining animation and live-action interviews ahead of the Season 1 premiere, revealing just how much improv was at the heart of the show.

“The way it would work is, before we did an interview, [the celebrity guests] would only see Brandon [Gardner] and Brandon would say, ‘This is going to be an interview with Lauren Caspian. He’s this NPR public radio host, and you can just act as though it’s a real NPR interview,’” Woods explained at the time. “‘You don’t need to pretend to be offended if you’re not. You can laugh if something makes you laugh. You can give sincere answers. Just treat it like a real interview. The only thing we ask is please don’t mention that he’s a puppet.’”

Then, a photo of Caspian would appear on their Zoom screen, and Woods would improvise the interview with them off-camera using questions submitted by the show’s writers ahead of time and notes Gardner would share live via his iPad. “It was really, really fun,” Woods said of the experience. “People were so game and … a kind of surprising, and for me, very disarming, combination of funny and sincere.”

He continued, “I think because the people we interviewed have been interviewed so many times, there’s a way in which you can get your press talking points and just become a human Teddy Ruxpin where you’re saying the same thing again and again and again. I think something about the format of speaking to a fictional puppet NPR host knocks people off-course of their established lines, and you get into more uncharted territories with them, and you get really interesting aspects of them coming to the fore that you might not otherwise see.”