Meet the local creators and Philly sports fans behind Fox’s ‘Universal Basic Guys’

Mark Hoagies, the main character on Adam and Craig Malamut’s new animated series Universal Basic Guys, should be a familiar figure to people in the Philly area. If you turned on the radio after the Eagles’ loss on Sunday, you know exactly who he is.

“He has the confidence of a WIP caller,” Adam Malamut told The Inquirer.

Growing up as a Philly sports fan in Cherry Hill, Adam would listen to overnight radio callers after every Birds game, hearing everyone go at Donovan McNabb every week. The attitude of the fans stuck with him and inspired the character that ultimately became the protagonist of Universal Basic Guys on Fox.

“I just developed this voice of these callers who thought they knew so much,” said Adam Malamut, 41. “It was that voice that turned into this character of Mark Hoagies, who embodied that sports caller kind of vibe, that confidence and that feeling that you’re an expert.”

But it took years to develop that idea for a TV show. The Malamuts started in animation with a Yahoo webshow called Sports Friends, spawned from what was initially a one-off Baseball Friends animation of Chase Utley and Ryan Howard. From there, the brothers were approached by Bleacher Report to make sports cartoons for them.

The Malamuts launched Game of Zones at Bleacher Report, a Game of Thrones-inspired cartoon parodying events in the NBA. The show was a massive success, running for seven seasons and inspiring several spin-off cartoons at Bleacher Report that the Malamut brothers helped launch, including the still-running Gridiron Heights NFL cartoon.

By 2020, the Malamuts felt they’d made every Game of Thrones joke they could possibly make. They wanted to take another run at pitching their own show.

Getting their start in web series is unconventional in the animation industry. Instead of working their way up through traditional TV and movie pipelines as writers or animators, the Malamut brothers have essentially been showrunners through their entire journey in the industry. With Bleacher Report, the brothers worked on every part of Game of Zones, from the scripts to voice acting to the animation.

“Our grandfather has a saying: If you want to conduct the orchestra, then you need to learn how to play every instrument,” said Craig Malamut, 34. “We were able to learn how to play every instrument on a small scale when we were making a web series. It really prepared us, in a great way, to be showrunners and creators of a larger show, because we had touched every part of the process, and we could dip into each part and speak the language.”

The two already had the concept for their central character, but they spent years searching for the right situation to insert him into. In one version of the show, he recorded an Eagles podcast out of his camper van. In another, he sold hot dogs at Crescent Golf Club. In another, he was an exterminator.

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“We kept trying to figure out what’s the best concept for him, and we finally landed on this concept of universal basic income in this post-work world,” Craig Malamut said. “We thought, you take these guys who call in to sports radio, who sometimes act like they know more than a professional NFL coach, and if you took that confidence and applied that to the rest of your life, what kind of life would you be living?”

This fall, Universal Basic Guys is airing on Fox, starring a cast of South Jersey characters who were laid off from a factory after their jobs were replaced by AI. Mark Hoagies and his brother Hank, the two main characters, are voiced and loosely inspired by Adam and Craig.

The two brothers wanted to ensure the show stayed true to the area — everything from the accents to the scenery.

“A lot of shows that take place in the region don’t do the accent right,” Adam Malamut said. “Obviously the accent, you hear it and think Delco, but that’s an accent I heard everywhere growing up in South Jersey. Getting the accent right and making it sound like the people we grew up around, and our family, was really important to us.”