Name: The People v. Gorilla Grodd
Director: Tony Yacenda
Genre: Comedy, Mockumentary
Cast: Skyler Gisondo, Jimmy Tatro, Wendell Pierce, Beck Bennett, Mikaela Hoover

The creative bet at the center of The People v. Gorilla Grodd is not which DC villain gets a spinoff. It is about format. Tony Yacenda and Dan Perrault, who built American Vandal on the premise that a high-school prank deserved the same forensic treatment as a genuine cold case, have been handed Metropolis — and they intend to apply the same logic. Their stated aim is not to make “an entry into the DCU” but “an artifact from it”: a Daily Planet original documentary addressed to citizens of Metropolis who already know the case. That is a structural wager that goes well beyond the premise.

Detailed cosplay of DC Comics villain Gorilla Grodd at WonderCon 2019 — Gorilla Grodd cosplay at WonderCon 2019. Photo: William Tung / CC BY-SA 2.0

HBO Max has given the series an eight-episode straight-to-series order. The logline earns its absurdity with a straight face: a superintelligent ape has been convicted of murdering his father, the King of Gorilla City. Jimmy Olsen — Daily Planet photographer and documentary filmmaker, played by Skyler Gisondo, who first inhabited the role in James Gunn’s Superman — reopens the case, investigating whether Gorilla Grodd was wrongly convicted in one of Metropolis’ most famous murder trials. Jimmy Tatro plays Grodd.

The ensemble brings the Daily Planet desk from Superman intact. Beck Bennett returns as Steve Lombard, Mikaela Hoover as Cat Grant, and Wendell Pierce as Perry White. Mary Holland, Eduardo Franco, Arian Moayed, Dan Perrault, Andrew Leeds, and Tim Baltz complete the cast. Yacenda will direct all eight episodes — the same unified grammar that kept Vandal’s mockumentary voice consistent — and Perrault, who also appears onscreen, brings the deadpan precision that made the original feel like it was discovering something as it shot.

James Gunn and Peter Safran, DC Studios’ co-chairs and co-CEOs, serve as executive producers alongside Yacenda and Perrault. Gunn has pointed to the “fantastic chemistry of the Daily Planet cast” as the engine that made a spinoff feel earned rather than mandated. Amy Gravitt, HBO’s executive vice president for comedy series, described the commission as bringing “iconic DCU characters to HBO Max in a new and unexpected way.” The qualifier carries the argument: what is new is exactly the form.

American Vandal worked because Yacenda and Perrault understood the true-crime documentary machine well enough to weaponize it — the aerial neighborhood shot that proves nothing, the slow-zoom on ambiguous evidence, the interviewer who visibly loses the thread. Their capacity to reproduce the grammar of true crime and let their characters exist fully inside it is what made the original funny and, in its second season, genuinely unnerving. Transposing that grammar into a universe where a superintelligent gorilla is a credible murder suspect is not a joke about DC. It is a very specific question about what diegetic documentary looks like inside a world built on the extraordinary.

Tags: hbo max, James Gunn, DC Studios, Dan Perrault, mockumentaries, Skyler Gisondo