NYT: How 'Government Cheese' Creates a Dream World in the Valley

In a scene early in the Apple TV+ period comedy “Government Cheese,” the show’s Chambers family watches an episode of “The Addams Family” in which a neighbor remarks, “Addamses, you are kooks!”

The sentiment applies to both clans, as well as to the family upon which the Chambers are based: that of Paul Hunter, a creator and showrunner of “Government Cheese.”

“They called us odd,” Hunter said in a video interview from Mexico City. “They said, ‘Oh, you guys are always in the clouds. Do you know what’s going on?’ We knew what was going on. We just really were in our own world.”

Set in the late 1960s San Fernando Valley, “Government Cheese” follows the Chambers, a Black family pursuing idiosyncratic interests — inventions, pole vaulting, eagle feather hunting — with little concern for the realities of the outside world. (The title, taken from the processed foodstuff once distributed to low-income families, also refers to the delicious sandwiches Hampton’s mother made from it, and to the sense of invention and aspiration they embodied.)

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“From the composition to the cinematography, everything is very considered,” said Hunter, a former music video and commercial director perhaps best known for his 2001 Nike freestyle ad. “Nothing is random.”

In separate interviews, Hunter, Carr, Lloyd, the production designer Warren Alan Young, and the costume designer Nancy Steiner discussed several scenes from the first episode that illustrate how they built the surreal world of “Government Cheese.”

Read more here.

Production Design by Warren Alan Young