Picture Credit: Ashly Burch and Netflix
Ashly Burch lives a creative life. She works across comics, shows, and video games, some days performing motion-capture for the gaming world or, once upon a time, directing episodes of Mythic Quest. Burch, in usual fashion, wears many hats for a new animated half-hour comedy, Mating Season. She’s a writer, co-executive producer, and voice actor for the series from the Big Mouth creators.
Burch wrote episode four, “The Truth About Canada,” and the season finale, “The Wolf Wedding.” For the former, she does a very entertaining spin on The Fox and the Hound. In a nutshell, imagine the charming R-rated, romantic comedy version of the Disney classic.
Recently, the screenwriter spoke with What’s On Netflix about writing the episode, her experiences in writers room, and the story she dreams of telling one day.
You get to reimagine Disney’s Fox and the Hound in episode four, “The Truth About Canada.” Since the show explores some pretty fun and honest relationship experiences, what was the story you specifically wanted to tell in that episode?
Romeo and Juliet meets Fox and the Hound. It’s arguably our most dramatic episode, although it’s still funny. We know that Penelope is from Canada, and there’s always this question of, why did she leave? What happened? So that was the impetus behind it.
Were you in the writer’s room for Mating Season as well? How long was that process?
I want to say 10 weeks, but they did it a little differently than I’ve done in other rooms. We were sort of assigned episodes and kind of crafted them individually rather than collectively. We would come back and do punch-ups, but a lot of the writing of that episode, I did the outlining and the scripting and stuff. I talked about it with the EPs, then I kind of went off and did it on my own.
When you begin an outline for a television show, how do you initially approach it?
I usually will think about it in very, very broad beats first. I tend to roughly think about what the progression of the story is going to be. In this case, I knew that it was going to end with – I mean, spoilers – Summer and Penelope not being together. Obviously, it’s a flashback and we know where Penelope is during the events of Mating Season.
It was a bit of a tragic love story, but I also was very conscious of not wanting it to be a fridging the gays trope. Not that we would kill anyone outright in a dramatic way in that show, but I wanted a choice that was being made. I liked the idea that Summer freaks out, it’s moving too fast for her, and chooses not to go with Penelope. Knowing where my ending was, I backtracked and thought about the trajectory of a doomed star-crossed lovers thing and baked that in.
Mating Season: Season 1. (L-R) Laurie Magers as Forager #1, June Diane Raphael as Fawn, Aidy Bryant as Nancy, Sabrina Jalees as Penelope, Lena Waithe as Alex, and Aidy Bryant as Lesbian Friend in Mating Season: Season 1. Cr. NETFLIX © 2026
Even though they’re animals, did you approach them just as you would a human character?
The fun of this show is to showcase real relationship stories, but the humor comes a lot from the fact that they are animals. We knew that we didn’t want to get into the thing of the literal anatomy and mechanics of, if a horse fucks a bunny, well, you know what I mean? That conversation was brought up sometimes, but let’s not worry about it. I thought of them as basically sitcom characters and then some of the comedy would come in from the fact that Dylan is reading the memoir of The Big Bed Wolf, who comes out as trans. It’s a human plus animal joke shaking hands in that one.
You’ve written for Adventure Time, The Legend of Vox Machina, and Glitch Techs, so you’ve been a part of major world-building. What are some of the joys in crafting the ins and outs of a world?
The joy of it is creating a space where people can easily picture or imagine existing. When I watch something that has good world building, I can imagine that there was a story before and a story after whatever I’m reading or watching. It feels lived in, almost feels inevitable. The fun of world building is effectively trying to capture and create a legitimate world that people want to exist in. The way that Lord of the Rings felt to me, like, “Oh, the Shire is a real place. I just believe that it’s a real place.”
You’ve been a part of major worlds in other mediums, too. There are [the video games] Borderlands, The Last of Us: Part II, and Horizon: Forbidden West. No matter the medium, what else do you think solid world-building requires?
Having an internal logic. Whatever rules you put on the world – making sure that they’re consistent and make sense. Again, using Lord of the Rings as an example, the hobbits as a species have an internal logic. In Mating Season, the EPs decided early on that we would bring a lot of animal aspects into the design of the watering hole, where they live, and not everything a human should probably live there. They’re wearing human clothes, but it’s still very animal-like. They drink little acorn cups.
At the bar, which is very sitcom-y. Could you ever see the animals going on a big quest in the series?
Oh, sure. As long as it’s grounded in character stuff, that’s really all that you need. That’s the big thing with sitcoms as well is it’s all character driven. If Ray finds something that he thinks is a treasure map, and it’s actually just the back of a cereal box, then they all decide that they’re going to go. You can justify it in any way as long as you understand why the characters want to do it, to go on that quest. We do get pretty high concepts in different episodes. The fun of animation is that you can create rules and then kind of break them without it feeling incongruent.
You were a part of the writing team for Mythic Quest, as well. That was a great show about storytelling. After years on that series, how’d it shape how you write and see story?
I learned so much from the people I worked with on Mythic Quest. Megan Ganz, who’s one of our co-creators, is an amazing writer and methodical. Her, her husband Humphrey [Ker], and I were the main people that broke the murder mystery episode of the fourth season. When you’re in a good writer’s room, you’ve got a bunch of smart people in a room together trying to solve a puzzle. Writing that episode really was that, because it was difficult to make it feel both surprising and meaningful. I think we were able to get there.
It’s a great episode.
Thank you. It was really cool to watch Megan specifically and how her brain worked. She’s a big Agatha Christie head, so it was sort of her dream episode.
The other fun thing about the show is that we did such different stuff every season that sometimes it felt like we were writing a sitcom, sometimes we were writing a drama, and sometimes we were writing an action show.
I really learned how to showrun and how to run a room from the EPs on Mythic Quest.
How do you do it?
I think you have to have a really specific outlook, sense of taste, and be open. It’s knowing our guiding star for these characters or for the arc of this season while also remaining open to the smart people that you’ve hired. I’ve been in rooms where there isn’t necessarily as much openness about where you can take the characters or the stories. I always find it’s the best product when the writers get to really express their opinions. You’re going to take every single pitch that is said, but you hired the folks that you hired for a reason.
The story exists somewhere and you’re all detectives trying to uncover it. In Stephen King’s book On Writing, he talks about that, like, “The story exists and I’m unearthing it.” Mythic Quest was that. I really like the experience where obviously there’s someone running it, someone saying, “Okay, yeah, that’s the right direction, but everyone has a say and you’re crafting this thing together.”
Mating Season: Season 1. (L-R) Joe Wengert as Wolf #1, Zach Woods as Josh, Nick Kroll as Ray, Timothy Olyphant as Dylan, June Diane Raphael as Fawn, and Ashly Burch as Female Wolf in Mating Season: Season 1. Cr. NETFLIX © 2026
As an actor, writer, producer, did you always dream of working in different mediums? Was that the career you always wanted?
It’s interesting because when I was younger, my goal was to be a voice actor. I don’t think I had a lot of examples of female writers that I could look up to. I mean, I wasn’t extremely well read when I was a kid, so I didn’t know that Jane Austen existed. When I watched things, I was like, “Oh, these are all written by men.” I sort of didn’t even consider the possibility that writing could be a career path for me until I started writing on Adventure Time. Then it became one of my great joys to be in a writer’s room. Now it’s one of the primary things I do, and it’s really fun. There’s a reason they call it “breaking story,” because you’re cracking something open. When you’re able to do that, it’s really, really gratifying.
Any anxiety there or pure joy in breaking the story?
Oh my God, there’s always anxiety. Well, it depends. I wrote a book recently. When you write a book, it’s you and the editor, really. On TV, it’s the writer’s room and the executives. There’s lots of folks involved. Sometimes it can feel like, “Okay, we have to hit this specific target.” That can be a little nerve-wracking. Are we going to hit it? Are we going to hit it slightly off the bullseye?
But I’ve done it for long enough now as well that I trust, if I’m in a room and worked with a number of the writers for a long time and I think there’s a shared trust. And so, we’ll get there. We’ll find it. Sometimes it just takes time and the willingness to blow stuff up that you don’t want to blow up.
Mating Season: Season 1. (L-R) Natalie Morales as Cynthia and June Diane Raphael as Fawn in Mating Season: Season 1. Cr. NETFLIX © 2026
Do you have a Mount Everest story in your mind – a mammoth story you’re dying to tell one day?
I have this story that is sort of stuck in my craw that I’m hoping I can make in some form someday. It’s basically Harry Potter meets RuPaul’s Drag Race. It’s a magical school for queer gals. Doing that as a book series or as an adult animated show could be really fun, so that’s probably my Mount Everest.
