South Side creators are looking forward to using profanity now that the show is on HBO Max -- but will they tackle the coronavirus?

Chicago Tribune

"Oh man, we can do so much stuff!" co-creator Bashir Salahuddin said of the recent move from Comedy Central to HBO Max. Fellow co-creator Diallo Riddle points out, though, that "we finished the writing for Season 2 of South Side pretty much before the quarantine. Those scripts were obviously written at a time before the world fundamentally changed, so the big conversation now with our show — and many shows — is: Do we try to shoot the season as conceived and leave our vision pure? In other words, do we wait for whenever there is a cure or a vaccine so that we can shoot scenes with a lot of people in them?" Salahuddin adds: "We had written a huge episode around the Bud Billiken Parade and the Bud Billiken people were incredibly helpful and super supportive — we were going to do a float! — and then it was like, God dammit." One idea that they're considering is holding off on tackling coronavirus, saving the pandemic for a one-off special. "We’re sitting with our writers room and having an honest conversation about it. Sometimes with TV shows you don’t want to be too topical because those are the episodes that don’t age as well," says Salahuddin. The pair area also trying to figure out how the coronavirus will affect their other show, IFC's Sherman's Showcase. "We’d like to bring Sherman’s back in the summer but that might be aggressive, even though the show is much more contained because it shoots entirely on a soundstage," says Riddle. "I think what we have to do is figure out how we are going to shoot safely with characters singing indoors. So that’s in a bit of stasis as well."