It’s nothing short of a stroke of comedic genius to take all the ridiculousness of little girls and pour it into a full-grown man with a five o’clock shadow. It’s the premise behind “Convos With My 2-Year-Old,” the first season of a Web series that re-enacts actual conversations between the now 4-year-old Coco and her father, creator Matthew Clarke. The Canadian actor-writer-director-daddy realized that small, adorable humans get away with a hell of a lot more than their adult counterparts, and his daughter’s wild (by grown-up standards) behavior inspired him to start jotting down their interactions. Before long he’d amassed a collection of loose scripts and enlisted his friend and fellow actor David Milchard to play Coco.
With utter seriousness (“You can thank Bill Murray—I’m just copying him”) Milchard delivers lines like “I need to go to the store to get some gas prices” and “Where’s my princess purse?” before doing things like wrestling Clarke or straddling him on the couch.
“Dialogue-wise we try and keep it to a minimum because it’s a nice limitation to set for ourselves,” explains Clarke. “Sometimes it would be easier to go wild on the improv and ad lib.” Milchard has an extensive background doing improv theater in Vancouver, B.C., and says there’s rarely verbal improv but plenty of the physical kind. Although, he admits with a laugh, “Yeah, me wrestling [Clarke] is probably something Coco doesn’t do.”
Now in its fourth season following Coco into her fourth year—with the preschooler sometimes taking on responsibilities of manning the slate and yelling “action” on set—the actors have established a huge fan base, their first episode having topped 11 million views. They’ve had cameos from actors like John Ratzenberger; founded their own production company, Coco Milk Productions; expanded the brand to include a merchandise line of T-shirts, hoodies, and mugs with one-liners from the show such as: “Because I’m naked I’m the boss,” and “Nobody wants to wear pants; that’s just the way the world works”; and secured sponsorship from Geico.
“It helps that the show existed for a while on its own and people knew what they were getting into and knew what the show was,” Clarke says about having the brand come on board. “What the episodes are script-wise hasn’t changed; [sponsorship] just opened us up and gave us the production budget to do things on a larger scale.”
And they welcome any other brands that want to get in the mix. “Yes! Like, we want to do a tropical island episode. Maybe Manhattan? And in an Upper East Side penthouse? A European vacation episode would be great,” Clarke says facetiously. “Travelocity! Come on board!” Milchard says he’s willing to consider having kids of his own if Pampers would be willing to sponsor. He later changes this to Fisher-Price “ ’cause then there’s toys I can play with. Diapers sound like not so much fun.”
Now that the fourth season has wrapped, the two are working on another family-friendly series called “Toddlers Tonight” as well as a more adult-focused sci-fi genre series called “Paranormal Solutions Inc.”
What advice do the now-seasoned creator-directors have for first-timers? “Don’t tell people you’re a first-time director,” says Clarke, laughing. “The best way to learn to be a director is by doing something,” adds Milchard. “Reading a book only helps you so far but if you actually shoot something and have to cut together your ideas of what you thought you shot—that’s more of a learning lesson than you can ever ask for. Learning lesson. That makes no sense, but you can quote that.”
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