Skateboarding had a triumphant moment when Epicly Later’d made its small-screen debut on Viceland a couple of years ago. Finally, a major network was broadcasting an authentic look at our culture from one of its premier storytellers. Unfortunately, after just one season, Viceland seemingly dropped the series. Patrick O’Dell gives an update on where things are at with the show in 2020 in a new interview by Matt Broadley for Parade that published earlier this week.
Do you see a return of Epicly Later’d at all? I am sure you get asked this all the time…
I would like to. Vice didn’t seem interested in doing any more, we had talked about doing more. I don’t really mind there being little breaks because we’ve done a lot of them. If they were to want to do another round I’d be happy to do it.
The last ones we did were for television, the problem with television is that it needs to be exactly fifty minutes. So an hour with commercials, and the commercials always have to be in the same place. It can make it hard to tell the stories because you’re having to construct them around these defined time limits. We made eight episodes for that season, some of them should have been shorter and some of them could have been longer. I liked doing them for the internet because they could be any length and it didn’t really matter.
Did you have to consider having a slight hook before each break?
Yeah, exactly. To get people to come back after the break. It was tough, you had to consider all these different things. Like having to have music, which looked good and I was happy with how it came out. When we were doing them for the web we never used music, purposely, then suddenly for television you need to use music and work out a music budget.
I would definitely do them again if Vice asked. I’m sure at some point it will happen. It’s the kind of thing where we’ve taken long breaks before and I come back feeling refreshed and ready to do it. We could just be in the middle of a three year break. Sometimes I’m amazed people even remember it, I think it was two or three years ago the last time we did it and that’s a long time in skate years!
Hopefully Viceland will get its act together and bring the show back from limbo sometime in the coming years. Come one Spike, do it for the culture!