Katie Rich is about as Chicago as they come—raised on the South Side, an alum of hallowed Chi-town institutions like Northwestern and Second City. Even during her seven-year tenure as a writer on Saturday Night Live, she didn’t give up her Chicago residence. “SNL works in chunks, you know, like three weeks on, one week off. I was like, why don’t I just go out there, and then I’ll come home when we’re off?,” she tells me over the phone, calling from—you guessed it—Chicago. “And then I ended up doing that for seven years.”
It’s no surprise, then, that Rich is one of the co-creators and executive producer of Netflix’s new adult animated comedy series, Chicago Party Aunt. Chicago Party Aunt follows the exploits of Diane Dunbrowski (Lauren Ash) as she adjusts to her rapidly gentrifying city and attempts to cling to her beer-drinking, hard-partying ways. The eight episode season sees cartoon Diane move in with her suburban, gay nephew Daniel (Rory O’Malley) as he takes a gap year from Stanford to find himself in the Windy City. Together, they take the city by storm—taking the El to avoid the marathon and somehow ending up on a garbage boat in the middle of Lake Michigan, performing The Superbowl Shuffle with the 1985 Chicago Bears at the Chicago Art Museum. For every inside Wrigley Field reference—like a spoof on Chicago’s self-serious theater awards “The Jeffs” called “The Beefys,”—there’s plenty for out-of-towners to enjoy about the irreverent animated comedy.
“We made a show that we hope is just like, funny for 22 minutes,” Rich says, somewhat self-deprecatingly, of her love letter to Chicago. That “we” includes co-creators Chris Witaske and John Barinholtz—younger brother to The Mindy Project’s Ike Barinholtz—both of whom are from the Chicago area. Witaske is the one who started the parody Twitter account that inspired the series.
Rich is well aware of how absurd it is to go from viral Twitter account to full-fledged Netflix show. “When you hear it, you’re like, ‘that’s probably a dumb idea,’” she says. “We were sort of tasked with this challenge of taking this character who on Twitter is just ‘a joke, a joke, a joke,’ and fleshing her out into a person who has lived in the world. It was really fun. I’ve never done that before. It was a very interesting way to create something.”
Rich has experienced both the best and the worst of what Twitter can offer. During her tenure as a Weekend Update writer on SNL, she tweeted a joke about then-president Donald Trump’s son Barron the day of his father’s inauguration. The tweet in question caused a right wing media frenzy, with many pundits—and even the president, himself—calling for Rich’s head on a platter. Rich deactivated her Twitter account for a few days before returning to issue an apology for the “insensitive tweet,” calling it “inexcusable”. She doesn’t enjoy talking about the experience much, for obvious reasons—but does say that it changed her relationship with social media and the internet: “It has made me express my thoughts face to face a lot more,” she told me, before breaking into a knowing laugh.
The Twitter firestorm capped off an incredibly difficult period for Rich. “It was just the worst week,” she says. “My mom died the week Trump got elected. So, not only was my individual world upended, the world as a whole was upended.” Looking back, though, she can still wring some humor out of the experience. “The only thing that was good about it was that If I was in public and I burst into tears, no one was like ‘Why is that white girl crying?’ It was like, ‘we get it.’”
While Rich ultimately weathered that storm, it did cause her to reevaluate her priorities. She wanted to be closer to her aging father in Chicago; ultimately, she decided to leave SNL in May of 2019. “For a while I was like, ‘was that the wrong decision? Should I have not left?’” she says. “But I knew that I also wanted to do things that were more narrative-based and character-based, not just topical humor. I think it’s just one of those jobs where you know when it’s time, and it was just time to go.”
As fate would have it, Rich wouldn’t have to wait very long for her wish to be granted. Chicago Party Aunt got picked up the summer after Rich said goodbye to 30 Rockefeller Plaza.
Beyond serving as co-creator and EP, Rich also lends her voice to the hard-working hairdresser Zuzana, and gets to trade one-liners with the likes of Ash, O’Malley,both Barinholtz brothers, and RuPaul, who voices the tightly-wound hairdresser Gideon. “When we created Gideon, [RuPaul] was someone we had in mind,” she says. “When we went out to him he must have been intoxicated, because he said yes.”
Rich is proud to write a character as welcoming and confident in herself as Diane Dunbrowksi. It’s not lost on her that not many women like her anchor television shows. “Even just to get a female lead who is also clearly in her late 50s was something that was sadly easier to do in animation than in live action,” says Rich. And while a single beer-guzzling woman in her late 50s from Chicago may seem niche to some, Rich and her team have tapped into the universality of the character. “We all know this person,” Rich says. “She’s not a person who only exists in Chicago. This idea of your party aunt, everyone has that. Some people have a party uncle. Some people, the party aunt is them. It was more [about] tapping into the universal aspect of the basis of this character, and then turning that into a living breathing human.”
Rich is spending less time online these days, but says she has no plans to completely leave the app that has brought her both pleasure and pain. Twitter is “a screaming match of the dumbest people alive,” she says, “but I’ll never delete it because I still meet cool people there.” She also has no plans to leave her beloved Chicago. “It’s like everyone jokes,” she says, laughing. “Chicago’s never gonna get rid of Katie.”
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