SPOILER ALERT! This post contains details from the first two episodes of Dave Season 3.
“Can Dave Burd find true love in a sea of Lil Dicky fans?”
Dave co-creator Jeff Schaffer posed the question as he discussed the themes of the FXX series’ third season, which debuted Wednesday. Over the past two seasons, the comedy series has given a fictitious look at Burd’s exploration of his relationship with his own self, as well as with his friends and collaborators. Now, Dave will focus its attention on Burd’s relationship with his fans as he heads out on his first tour.
“What does his real music say about his real fans? What does it say about him? And can he change it? Does he like it? Is he now stuck in this thing that he’s made? He’s now getting more and more famous. Is he becoming famous the way he wants to be?” Schaffer told Deadline. “We’re not doing it as some sort of allegory. He’s really talking about it, which I think is remarkably brave and responsible in a weird way.”
Episode 1 dives head first into those questions as it opens on Burd hooking up with a fan. Following his half-hearted attempt to win back his ex-girlfriend Ally last season, it’s clear he’s searching for a deeper connection, only to find out this new woman is more interested in bragging about her sexcapade with Lil Dicky to her friends than she is in actually getting to know the man behind the persona.
During a tour stop in Texas, he’s once again fooled by the prospect of true love when he runs into a woman outside one of his shows who claims not to know him. After chatting in the parking lot, she invites him back to a house party, where he eventually discovers that the woman had bet her friends she could bed Lil Dicky.
“He rushes towards it with his unbridled enthusiasm. It’s like ‘Dude, nothing’s real on this tour. They’re here to see Lil Dicky. You’re not gonna find a soulmate,’” Schaffer said.
It was only a matter of time before Dave started grappling with fame. Burd and Schaffer have been holding on to some of these stories since they began working on Season 1, until the time was right to put them on screen.
“There are all these stories that were happening to him right then when he had some level of fame that made no sense to do in Season 1 and even in Season 2….because TV Dave’s level of fame is starting to approach real Dave’s [at that time],” Schaffer explained.
It takes a certain level of deftness to grapple with that story in the same episode where Burd tries out a scroguard before a sexual encounter (“Yes, Dave really does have a scroguard. Yes, that is the real ad. And yes, they are out of business,” Schaffer confirmed.) But somehow, the comedy series manages to ride a tonal line that allows it to be both hilarious and, at times, quite deep.
“Authenticity has been the north star of the show, and a lot of times he’s using things plucked from his real life, but he’s looking at them in new ways, now that he’s growing as a person too,” Schaffer said, pointing to the second episode of Season 3 as an example. “You’re seeing the character grow as a person, because Dave was willing to look at this event from a different perspective.”
The episode follows Burd and his crew as they shoot a music video in Philadelphia, primarily inside his childhood home. The song tells the story of his best friend and first love, Brittany, who he says broke his heart as a teenager. Burd’s version of events ends with him being the 33rd wheel at a dinner before a school dance. He arrives expecting to take Brittany as his date, only to find out she’s ditched him for another guy.
That doesn’t exactly hold up though, because after Brittany stops by to see the production and gets roped into starring as herself, she realizes that he’s making her out to be the villain. She calls him out on it, revealing that the pair actually did date after that school dance, though the relationship ended within a month. Brittany quits the music video, and Burd has a revelation that completely changes his perspective about that romance, prompting him to rewrite the end of the song.
As it turns out, the moment went down quite similarly in the writers room, according to Schaffer.
“Dave always wanted to do the story about being the 33rd wheel, and it was a story about how he was basically the victim and the martyr and everybody made fun of him and he felt terrible,” he remembered. “And he was talking to us about it. And it’s like, ‘Wait, you guys dated afterwards?’ It was like this revelation that he was willing to explore in the writers room, which became the DNA for the script.”
But we can’t forget who we’re dealing with here. This is Dave Burd aka Lil Dicky. The slightly self-centered and always awkward rapper who made a career out of his deficiencies. At the end of the day, he’s always willing to be the butt of a good joke, which has worked to his advantage as the series has progressed, Schaffer said.
He insisted Season 3 “probably our funniest season,” coming off the heels of a Season 2 that was riddled with tension and angst as Burd hit a creative wall.
“He was just a stress monster,” Schaffer said. “We took everybody on a pretty dark path, which I think paid off massively at the end, but it’s still a dark path. This is a much more fun season. There’s not intra-gang squabbling. They’re all in it together, going to places they’ve never been before. This is the right time to do it for his career, his art and the right time to do it emotionally for our gang.”
Season 3 also boasts a list of high-powered guest stars including Usher, Rick Ross, Demi Lovato, Don Cheadle, Machine Gun Kelly, Megan Fox, Killer Mike, and Travis Barker.
When asked how, exactly, they convinced someone like Usher to make an appearance on the series, Schaffer referred back to the show’s preferred punchline — Burd himself.
“I think everyone knows that when they come on, because we have two seasons of proof, they know that they’re not going to be the ones that look stupid. Dave is more than willing to pick up that slack,” he said.
It’s worth remembering, the series is inspired by Burd’s own life. Eventually, everything becomes a bit.
Case in point: Episode 1 was primarily shot in Piru, California — a small, unincorporated town in the southern part of the state that Schaffer swears has “only four buildings” on the main road. As they prepared to shoot the final scene of the episode, when a naked Dave jumps over a fence and sees the massage parlor where he goes to seek help (and a happy ending), things took an unexpected turn.
“Right before we can shoot it, we’re setting up and a guy gets pulled over by the cops. There are four buildings in Piru. He gets pulled over in front of ours. It’s the longest, slowest DUI,” Schaffer said. “We’re waiting. We can’t do anything. You can’t ask the police to just move around the shop. And he’s just drunk sitting there going, ‘I must be wasted, because it looks like there’s a film crew here.’”
Maybe that encounter will end up in Season 4.
New episodes of Dave debut on FXX on Wednesdays and will be available to stream next day on Hulu.
