‘Stuart Fails To Save The Universe’ Creators Wanted Green Lantern For Their DC Crossover Episode But Had To Settle For The Flash

SPOILER ALERT! This post contains details from Thursday night’s episode of HBO Max‘s Stuart Fails to Save the Universe.

As the title of this week’s episode suggests, the creators of Stuart Fails to Save the Universe really did want the Green Lantern to be at the center of the show’s DC comic crossover.

Unfortunately, the man without fear was already booked.

“They told us we couldn’t have him because of [HBO’s live-action series] Lanterns, which I understood,” Zak Penn, one of the series’ creators, revealed to Deadline. “Chuck [Lorre] was a little grumbly about it, but Bill and I pointed out to him that Flash was actually the perfect. If we needed something that’s going from dimension to dimension, Flash worked even better than Green Lantern.”

Like Penn says, the episode ultimately sees Stuart (Kevin Sussman) and his friends stuck inside a comic book, where Mr. Freeze is terrorizing Gotham City. To get out of that dimension, they go off in search of Golden Age Flash for help.

“It was half opportunity and half what they encouraged us, but Golden Age Flash appealed to us a lot, just because he’s kind of silly. No offense to Golden Age Flash,” Penn said.

If it seems kind of backward that the gang would trek all the way to Central City to enlist The Flash to help them take on a villain in Batman’s territory, that’s the point. The writers reveled in the opportunity to poke fun at the more far-fetched notions accepted in comic lore.

“Bill [Prady] and I were laughing a lot [about] the whole notion of Gotham City isn’t where New York City is, which makes no sense,” Penn said. “All those things were just kind of built up humor and things that we felt about comic books. So, the next obvious decision was, in terms of a villain, let’s put the villain who seems right and that people know more, and then have our characters comment on the fact that he’s the wrong villain for this piece.”

Penn is surely considered the superhero expert of the group as a Marvel vet who also famously wrote a script for a Suicide Squad film that went unused. However, he says his fellow creators Prady and Lorre, as well as several of the other writers, had their own affinity for DC comics to draw upon for the episode.

He and the writers thought a commentary on how a layperson would navigate a comic locale like Gotham City “seemed like the perfect sense of humor for our show.”

“If you were in the DC universe, it would be pretty boring a lot of the time because you’d just be sitting around waiting for planes,” he laughs, adding that the irony is there’s also a bit about that exact notion in an early episode of Lanterns.

That other DC show didn’t steal all Stuart‘s thunder, though, and in fact there is plenty that the comedy series can get away with that its drama counterparts cannot in that the writers can lean into the quirks of these convoluted superhero universes rather than shy away.

“One of the things about this show that’s really fun is that you know when you work on an actual comic book movie, you really have to be rigorous about the consistency of the reality, because people will pick you apart if you’re not, and on this show we kind of took the attitude of ‘we’re going to purposely break things and then have the characters notice that the multiverse doesn’t work as well as it should,’” Penn explained.

Similarly, Penn says the episode could adopt a visual style more consistent with comic books without asking the audience to do more work suspending their disbelief.

“[Director] Robbie McNeill deserves a lot of credit, because he really added a bunch of stuff, like the way the frames panel at certain points, which is something that I don’t always think is effective. Back in the early days of comic book movies, when people did that, I think it really took you out of it,” Penn told Deadline. “But this show’s sense of humor needs that, so it was really helpful.”

The writers worked closely with DC’s Jim Lee to develop the versions of the comic characters that appear in Thursday’s episode. Lee teased the partnership over the summer at San Diego Comic-Con, assuring the audience in Hall H that the DC IP would be in good hands with the Stuart team.

“Some of the DC characters they have in it, I think are some of the best versions I’ve seen of those characters, and so I’m super excited for you guys,” Lee said at the time.

Penn, who had previously collaborated with Lee and the DC team on Ready Player One, remembered the Stuart reteam fondly: “They were great. They basically said, ‘How can we help? Other than we won’t give you Green Lantern.’”

The series has already been renewed for a second season ahead of next week’s Season 1 finale. Penn tells Deadline he “would be shocked” if the writers didn’t once again mine from the DC universe in future episodes, but Season 2 is still in early stages.

“The writers’ room hasn’t started yet. Next week, we’re going to get back together and start talking about this,” he said.