Trivia / The Solve-It Squad: Back in Biz

• Acting for Two: Brian Rosenthal plays several roles as "Everyone Else" again, and each of the Special Guests is also cast in at least two roles. (Jiavani Linayao and Joanna Sotomura play the most roles, each playing all the female characters in their episodes while Brian plays all the male ones; Robert Manion plays Gwen's husband Nicholas and her daughter Paris in his episode, and Darren Criss qualifies for his extremely brief appearances as Scrags' hallucination of a talking shrimp and one as the judge at the end, alongside his role as Tucker Bossman.)
• Blooper: Unfortunately Zoom being a finicky piece of technology as always meant that Back in Biz was beset by its fair share of technical problems, lag, people talking without realizing they were muted, etc. Luckily, most of the technical glitches weren't on the livestream readings themselves but on the Q&As afterwards; the first Q&A had some truly bizarre glitching with windows displaying when they weren't supposed to, including making stage manager Tammy Babich briefly and unintentionally visible, and the second livestream had so much lag (possibly due to buggy code with the fake Instagram react emoji function) that the Q&A started a half-hour late.
  • Thanks to this Zoom automatically muting and hiding people who weren't involved in a scene, actual Corpsing wasn't much of an issue (with people praising Corey Lubowich, The Narrator who's onscreen at all times, for being a "rock"), but Robert Manion revealed that he muted himself and accidentally stayed muted at the beginning of a scene of "Takes a Chill Pill" specifically so no one would hear him uncontrollably cracking up at the "Hall of the Mountain King" "rage room" scene before he came back on as Paris.
  • There's a bit of unintentional comedy where Darren Criss falling completely out of frame after Keith defeats him in "Cashes Out" causes his "smart" Zoom background feature to flicker the background image off entirely and reveal what his bedroom looks like.
• Corpsing: Robert Manion revealed he had to mute himself to avoid letting anyone hear him laugh in reaction to the "rage room" scene, leading to him being muted as Paris in the next scene. The whole rest of the cast, in turn, was struggling with this during his tearful breakdown as Nicholas at the Lonely Man storage facility.
• Descended Creator: As with Nick Lang for Team Starkid's Nightmare Time, the role of The Narrator (reading the stage directions) in this show is taken by writer/director Corey Lubowich himself.
• No Budget: Back in Biz tries to be more sophisticated than past Zoom reading shows like Team Starkid's Nightmare Time but, as Corey Lubowich admitted in the Q&A, is still fundamentally people talking at webcams from inside their house with the only "costumes" and "setting" coming from whatever wacky props they had to hand. (In the Q&A they cracked a joke about budgeting to reimburse everyone for the various glasses they wore as their main way of establishing their characters.) Part of the reason this show had such a limited release is that an actual animated series is very expensive to produce and the Tin Can Brothers needed a strong idea of how much support this concept had before making any plans to launch a Kickstarter.
• Production Posse: This show reunites the whole team from The Solve-It Squad Returns!, with Special Guests Robert Manion and Darren Criss having worked with the members of the Tin Can Brothers on Team Starkid's productions, Joanna Sotomura being a colleague of Ashley Clements via Pemberley Digital's "LBD-verse" and having appeared in the TCBs' last project Wayward Guide for the Untrained Eye, and Jiavani Linayao being the first true newcomer to the cast.
• Promoted Fanboy:
  • Meg Lloyd is a fan of Team Starkid since the A Very Potter Musical days who had several pieces of Starkid fanart on her Instagram before she was asked to do an official Title Sequence animatic by the Tin Can Brothers.
  • Also always worth mentioning that Robert Manion, before he became a fan favorite in the Friendly Fandoms of Team Starkid and Tin Can Brothers, started out as a teenager from Australia who won a fan contest to design artwork and write a song for A Very Potter Senior Year.
• Throw It In!: Darren Criss does a lot more minor rephrasing and Improv with his lines than the other actors, as has been his wont since the A Very Potter Musical days.
• Word of Saint Paul: The Back in Biz livestreams featured Q&A's with the actors afterwards where they were able to drop some headcanon about their characters to the fans:
  • Ashley Clements revealed the Hypocritical Humor that Gwen dreads and hates her school's bake sales even though she never actually bakes anything for them and just gets store-bought pastries she passes off as homemade (by having the nanny pop them in the oven to warm them up just before bringing them over).
  • She also revealed that Paris is Gwen's "favorite" child, in the sense that Paris has been the target of Gwen's insecurities since she was little and Gwen desperately wants her daughter to admire her and follow in her footsteps, whereas she mostly ignores Cam completely.
  • When asked about the specifics of Keith's Drama Club Broadway obsession and what musical Keith would produce and star in if all his dreams came true, Gabe Greenspan eventually decided the most interesting answer would be something like Chess.
  • When discussing how this is a show where There Are No Therapists (or, at least, the Squad refuses to get real mental health treatment) the cast ended up going around deciding what their characters' mental health diagnoses would be:
    • Scrags is already stated in canon to have a (self-diagnosed) anxiety disorder, specifically panic disorder, along with PTSD from Cluebert's death, which partly manifests in his compulsive eating disorder.
    • Keith has a serious inferiority complex, along with being an alcoholic, and a lot of his behvaior also clearly verges on borderline personality disorder.
    • Gwen is a textbook case of narcissistic personality disorder, along with hints of being bipolar.
    • Esther's extreme substance abuse problems stem ultimately from their self-medication for what may be severe OCD and/or ADHD. They also show some very strong signs of antisocial personality disorder (i.e. being a "high-functioning sociopath").