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Psi Cops ready (?) to take on the paranormal world

Members of the paranormal world, you have a reason to fear … the Psi Cops are here!

Created by the comedy duo of Chris Nielsen and Bart Bachelor, Psi Cops follows the exploits of two of the most unlikely plainclothes cops – Kydd (Nielsen) and Felixx (Bachelor) – who investigate crimes that involve the paranormal world for the secret agency called Psi Cops, which contains a hardcore true believer of a boss named Chief Beef, as well as a crazy salad of so-called experts who aid Kydd and Felixx in their own, oddball way towards solving the crimes they are assigned to in their best bumbling modus operandi, no matter how shocking or politically incorrect it is.

The 26-episode series – in which each one has a running time of 11 minutes – is now available for live streaming and on-demand viewing on STACKTV, as well as Adult Swim Canada; it also has the distinction of being the first original production to air on the latter network.

“We’re huge Adult Swim fans, and getting to create Adult Swim Canada’s first original series is quite humbling for us. And we’re still super grateful to them for giving us this opportunity,” said Bachelor during a recent phone interview.

Nielsen and Bachelor are no strangers to original comedy programming, especially animated comedy, as they are the brains behind such series as World Doctors and Night Sweats. “We did series with the premise of ‘two guys with a job’. For example, World Doctors was about two medical doctors who were also con artists. When we pitched Psi Cops, it was like a take on The Walking Dead featuring two guys with shtick jobs, genre work. And when we decided to add the paranormal angle, we got quite excited about the show,” said Nielsen. “For the cop angle, we were hugely inspired by The X Files, especially David Duchovny and his character’s voice sounding like Sgt. Joe Friday on Dragnet.”

After watching a couple of episodes of Psi Cops (including a personal favorite that had Kydd and Felixx investigating a series of murders caused by an evil, mirror-dwelling spirit named Bloody Mary), one can see the influence of the TV cop shows of the 70s, with a degree of Men in Black with a dark, edgy twist to it. As well, it’s hilarious and a panic to watch.

But one thing comes to mind after watching an episode of Psi Cops: how do they manage to compress so much comic repartee, edgy humour, frightening phenomena – not to mention completely telling the episode’s plot – into a tight, fast-paced 11 minutes?

“To us, speed is of the essence. We learned to speed things up when we did World Doctors for YouTube. We believe that using 22 minutes to tell a story is too much time, so we decided to reduce it down to 11 minutes. It was like a sport to us to see how far we could cut into the bare minimum,” said Bachelor. “And Abbott & Costello’s legendary ‘Who’s on First?’ routine with its rapid-fire, back and forth delivery was a major inspiration to cram every episode into an 11-minute package.”

Another keen observation after watching Psi Cops was that the lead characters of Kydd and Felixx are reflections of their creators. It’s a claim that the two vehemently do not deny at all. “Kydd and Felixx are representations of our split egos. They are a fantastical exaggeration of what we would like to be, and we don’t care what people think,” said Nielsen.

“The pair is more than just police partners. They are buddies who look after each other’s backs,” added Bachelor. “However, they never do things the right or proper way, which proves to be much funnier in the world of Psi Cops.”