The story is inspired by true events that saw a Vice Canada editor recruit drug mules for an international cocaine smuggling operation, including out of the media giant’s offices. Wolfhard will play the Canadian investigative journalist who helped break the story.
NtB Media
The podcast was re-released August 6 2026 with video of the interview.
Matt and Jay discuss fair use in an extended version of the “How Not to Get Sued” interview with TIFF, posted February 13, 2018.
“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.”
Matt guides this conversation with Giancarlo Esposito, presented by the Italian Contemporary Film Festival (ICFF) and the Empire Club of Canada. Conversation starts 30 minutes in.
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.