I thought I would be sitting down with Lil Dicky to discuss the upcoming third season of his FX comedy Dave. But, by the end of our interview, Dave Burd and I are considering the morality of mankind. “I feel like human beings by default are good. Do you agree?” he asks, and he’s genuinely interested in my answer.
We get there by way of Kanye West, as so often happens these days: While the new season of Dave will feature a ton of exciting guest stars, including Usher, Rick Ross, Don Cheadle, Demi Lovato, Machine Gun Kelly, Megan Fox, Killer Mike, and Travis Barker, Burd does confirm that West will not be one of them.
This isn’t shocking given how things have changed for West in the last year, but I’m curious about how Burd feels about the artist right now, as the first two seasons of the show are seeped in references to Kanye as an aspirational figure. Specifically, I want to know how Burd wrestles with the challenge we’re all facing these days: Reckoning with our pre-existing fandom for people who have revealed themselves to be some degree of toxic.
We’re speaking at the Television Critics Association winter press tour, which means Burd is prepared for a full day of journalists asking him questions on this topic. “In any Kanye question that came up today, I was gonna say, ‘I feel like he’s in the headlines enough right now, and I just want to focus on the show,’” he says.
But then, he continues, “a lot of what you’re describing is a lot of the themes within [Dave Season 3]. Like, I’m on tour, anywhere I go, someone could be filming me as I am peeing and having an off-the-record conversation with GaTa about what I look for in a woman. There are good things and bad things about all of it, you know what I mean?”
By “all of that,” he means, “such accountability. I think on the one hand, society only gets better when people collectively treat people better and hold people to standards of kindness and goodness, which I think all of us inherently should just be striving to be good. It depends on the situation, obviously, of course. Everything has different pros and cons. But it’s tricky. I just think everyone should try to be good and we take it from there.”
That’s a pretty solid answer to one of the biggest questions in life — one this writer wants to agree with, at least. Below, transcribed and edited for clarity, Burd digs into a few questions more specifically related to Dave the series, such as what’s going on with his long-awaited second album, whether or not he sees the Dave portrayed on the series as any different from who he is in real life, what else we might expect from Season 3, and how many more seasons he hopes the show might run.
