What led to the creation of Amazon's Fairfax?

Los Angeles Magazine

Teddy Riley, Matthew Hausfater and Aaron Buchsbaum's adult animated series follows four middle school best friends on their never-ending quest for clout on Fairfax Avenue -- LA’s pulsing heart of hypebeast culture that was formerly a quiet immigrant Jewish neighborhood. "At the time when we were creating Fairfax, it was really when we saw Supreme go from skateboard company to Jerry Bruckheimer wearing Supreme Louis Vuitton sweatshirts," says Hausfater. "And they are now sort of in on their own joke selling bricks, and it became this moment of like they’re in on the joke and there is something inherently funny about this. But what really made it work for us—and my hats are off to Aaron and Teddy when they realized like—it’s a lot bigger than streetwear. We like to think that Fairfax is Springfield in that it is all encompassing of what it means to be a kid in 2021 where you have meme and influencer culture at your fingertips. You’re seeing what everybody is doing all of the time. Things like FOMO are something that you really have to deal with. And you know, Fairfax to us can be anything from Esports, to health conscious food stores like Erewhon to a company like Latrine that is selling T-shirts with Dr. Phil on them, where the kids are chasing them even though they have no idea (who) Dr. Phil is because they want to get clout on the internet. Which is something that we didn’t have to deal with growing up. We just had to deal with getting clout in our junior high school cafeteria. But that’s what made it interesting to us is that so much has changed where you are now a 12-year-old who has to know who you are and define yourself when we all know that is not something that happens for a long time. And it’s, you know, still evolving as I sit here as a 36-year-old." Riley adds: "There was a transition right around the time we were developing the show where it felt like it was going from subculture to just culture. Like Barney’s started carrying streetwear. People that weren’t huge streetwear heads were starting to collect Jordans. You know, it just became really topical to us in a way that we felt, ‘Okay, there’s a larger audience that can connect to this show, not just people who are kind of obsessed with the subculture of it.’"