Hasan Minhaj discusses how his Patriot Act looks so good in quarantine and his police episode from nine months ago

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"We wanted to figure out how to deliver Patriot Act and make it feel like it’s not just live from my living room," Minhaj says of his quarantine-filmed shows. "We have such an amazing animation and graphics department, they won an Emmy last year, they really create the world that fans see every week. We showed the proof of concept to Netflix, we set up a green screen in my living room, we shoot it all on 4K cameras and then we deliver the raw files to VFX and graphics team and they edit it remotely. This wouldn’t have been possible without our graphics team and cloud computing." Minhaj also discussed tackling "The Broken Policing System" in a September 2019 Patriot Act episode. "It’s interesting to see that episode get a lot more love, not just on Netflix, but it got a resurgence on YouTube, where we saw more than 1M people sharing it all over again. Ironically, one of our case studies was in Minneapolis. If you want to learn more about qualified immunity, why it’s virtually impossible to sue a cop, police unions, warrior training, we covered that. When we did that episode, police unions and policing was still a very divisive topic, there were people that had a general apathy towards it that now are marching. I had a hesitation because I thought we’d lose a lot of the audience, a lot of people don’t have a negative relationship with law enforcement, they’ve been privileged not to have run ins with them, how do I explain this world to them. Now because of the sheer brutality of the killing of George Floyd and the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, people are willing to listen. One of the beats that we had in that older episode was about the defund the police movement, we didn’t include it because we thought we were already going hard and what’s interesting is that if we did that episode now, I would probably add that beat."