In the wake of his two buzzy 2026 movies, Johnson is staying busy. He directed comedian and Tony actor Stavros Halkias’s upcoming Netflix special Uncle Stav. He’s developing a Toronto crime movie starring Finn Wolfhard for Neon, as well as a TSA comedy with Josh Safdie for A24. And he’s currently hard at work on a live-action Magic: The Gathering feature, while also chasing down a green light for the long-awaited third season of Nirvanna the Band the Show.
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“In the past 12 hours since the premiere, I’ve had endless conversations with people asking me what is real and what isn’t,” says Johnson. “The best answer that I can give is that the things people think we faked we really did, and the things that people haven’t even thought of, we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on VFX to make it look like it happened. Now, at the CN Tower, we’re playing all kinds of tricks. … It would have been international news otherwise.”
Each episode follows two zoo animals – excitable monkey Matt (voiced by Johnson) and a quieter bird named Bird (McCarrol) – who attempt to escape into the outside world. Combining hand-drawn animation that recalls Canadian studio Nelvana at its Babar peak with an improv-comedy sensibility familiar to the NTBTS fanbase, Matt & Bird is both nostalgic and refreshing. There is no garish CGI (hello, Cocomelon and Pinkfong), no irritating cutesy performances (stop it, Blippy) and no corporate mandate to push toys (Paw Patrol, Bakugan).
To understand just how much of a game changer nirvanna the band the show is, it’s best to start with describing what it isn’t. It is not a sloppily spelled Kurt Cobain cover group. Nor is it an ode to Buddhist enlightenment. It’s not about a band or even a show, in the traditional sense. Instead, nirvanna the band the show is a new television series courtesy of Viceland – a wild, subversive, mostly unclassifiable work of new-media pastiche that might save its upstart network, cement the bona fides of its polarizing co-creator and, just maybe, revolutionize the Canadian television landscape.
*correction – Barry claims Matt and Jay are the same age at time of writing (32), but we believe technically Matt was 31, and Jay would have been 33.