‘The Tick’ Team Reflects on Live-Action Comedy’s Budget Challenges, Struggling With Fox: “They Murdered This One”

Paul Rudd returns as Ant-Man on Feb. 17 with Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, the second sequel for Disney’s diminutive Marvel character, but he’s not the first actor to memorably portray an insect superhero.

In November 2001, Fox launched the live-action series The Tick, which starred Patrick Warburton as the well-meaning but clueless crime fighter who wore a blue suit with wiggly antennae. Ben Edlund created the satirical comic book series in 1988 while in his teens, and it spawned a 1994 Fox animated series that lasted three seasons. Barry Sonnenfeld (Men in Black), whose shingle landed the character rights, was a fan of the cartoon and saw Warburton as the perfect fit for Edlund’s pilot.

“Ben wrote a fantastic script, and then the joy was casting it,” Sonnenfeld tells The Hollywood Reporter. “I’ve always loved Patrick Warburton’s acting. He’s so flat and handsome and has that — I’m joking — kind of dumb face.”

Edlund remembers feeling exhausted after the animated show and initially rejecting Sonnenfeld’s offer to make a live-action TV version happen. “He just called out of the blue and said, ‘This is Barry Sonnenfeld, and I believe that we should make this live-action Tick thing,’” Edlund says. “And I said no because I just thought it was impossible to make this as live-action.”

Ultimately, Sonnenfeld was tenacious, and Edlund was on board. Warburton heralds the show as ahead of its time and recalls confused Fox execs not quite knowing what they’d bought. “This was before the advent of single-camera half-hour comedies,” the actor says. “They asked questions like, ‘Do we need to wear costumes?’”

Although he directed the pilot, Sonnenfeld was less hands-on in later episodes and felt that executive producer Larry Charles (Seinfeld) focused more on realism. “One of my regrets is not staying more involved because I feel the show went in a slightly different direction than the one I wanted,” Sonnenfeld says.

Edlund doesn’t remember the comedic sensibility being an issue but was challenged by a modest budget and the desire to follow the animated version’s limitless possibilities. “It was extremely hampered by the necessity of filming it in actual life with cameras,” he says with a laugh. “We discovered the show is really the history of a show trying to contort itself into a budget-able enterprise over the course of nine episodes and never really doing it. We just wanted to make something for which the business model could not exist.”

Speaking of costumes, Warburton’s wasn’t easy to put on and take off, with the rubbery compound being quite hot to wear. “I’d have to hydrate because you’re in there, and you’re sweating, so you’re drinking Gatorade all day, but you don’t have to pee because you’re just sweating it all out,” he says. “It’s disgusting, but at the end of the day, that thing would just flip off of me. We had a lovely costumer, and that poor woman had to slather two tubes of K-Y Jelly on me every day to slide it on.”

Although THR’s review praised The Tick as “a well-crafted, rib-tickling treat,” it didn’t survive beyond nine episodes. According to Warburton, Fox’s Sunday night slate — given its irreverent animated offerings — felt like it would have been a perfect fit for the show, but Fox wasn’t sure where it should land.

“They held the show for a year, and then because they had to burn them out, they just popped us up on a Thursday night against year two of Survivor, and it was almost impossible to get the numbers that we would need,” Warburton says. He assesses of Fox, “They murdered this one.”

Years later, the actor pitched a new live-action take on the character, which Amazon debuted in 2016 but with Peter Serafinowicz as the lead. (This version lasted two seasons.) “I really did wish we got to do it,” laments Warburton of not reprising the role.

But he’s grateful for his brief time with his fellow superheroes, including Liz Vassey, who played Captain Liberty. She says, “We all were in love with the show, and that cast, for my money, was one of the best I’ve ever worked with.”

A version of this story first appeared in the Feb. 15 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.