Why cult favourite TV show Dr Katz Professional Therapist matters

We speak to the iconic show’s art director Annette Cate about its makings – namely the development of Squigglevision – its lowkey, slow-paced style, and its lasting influence on cartoons for grown-ups.

Words: Paul Moore
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Date: 18 June 2025
Tags: Features
Animation
Illustration
Art Direction
Process
History

In the early 90s, animator and writer Tom Snyder and his former student Loren Bouchard bumped into each other after a decade and somehow got into creating animated shorts together. They were interested in finding a way to do “unscripted animation”. As they found connections through HBO and Comedy Central, they teamed up with comedic actors Jonathan Katz, H. Jon Benjamin and Laura Silverman to play a fictionalised version of themselves for the central trio of what would become an alternative animated sitcom fixating around a therapist named Dr Katz, his whimsical and chronically unemployed son Ben, and Laura, Katz’s sardonic and acidic secretary. Each episode featured two celebrity guest stars as Katz’s chief patients, including Emo Phillips, Dom Irerra, Mitch Hedburg, Dave Chappelle, Louis C.K, Rodney Dangerfield, Kathy Griffin, Winona Ryder and Lisa Kudrow among them.

The result is my favourite television show, the mouthily-titled Dr Katz, Professional Therapist. Whenever I tell someone this is my ultimate comfort show, they say something along the lines of “What?” Then I tell them again, it’s Dr Katz, Professional Therapist. My friends have heard me say this strange phrasing of words so many times that it has almost become a genteelism for something nobody cares about or even knows if it exists or not. Well it does, and it doesn’t matter if I’m talking to someone my age or much older, it seems like the show has been hidden underneath a rock for the past 30 years. This is the part where you find out about Katz, your new favourite television show, with insider knowledge on how the show’s animation style developed from its art director Annette Cate.

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Dr Katz Professional Therapist titles

Even for a series loaded with generational talents, it was mainly elements of the visual, narrative and writing design that defined the show and helped turn it into one of the most quietly genre-pushing animated series of the 90s. First of all was the invention of Squigglevision, a loop-based animation style masterminded by Tom Snyder. “In this method, the animator loosely traced the outline of each cartoon image several times and when these separate images ran together as a loop, the image would appear to be vibrating,” says Annette. Lacking the budget for traditional animation, this method allowed the image to possess the illusion of motion, much like the microscopic movements that happen in our eyes, without animating a metric ton of finicky animation frames. Similar to “Jittercam”, the antonym of Steadicam, the “boiled lines” effect also helps create a documentary-esque vibe, as if the characters are being filmed with a handheld camera.

Annette, Tom and their team found their animation style through Autodesk Animator, a clunky painting program developed in 1989 for the MS-DOS, which the team had previously been using for its original intention: creating educational math videos. In 1995, traditional 2D animation did not know its future was going take place on computers, but the team behind Katz stuck to what they knew best and set forth whilst smash hits like Toy Story illustrated the massive budgetary differences between the two studios.

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Dr Katz Professional Therapist

Dr Katz, Professional Therapist came around 30 years ago in 1995, part of a decade that is retrospectively referred to as the “rebel” era of animation – shows like Rugrats, Ren & Stimpy, Pinky and the Brain all diverted from the “action figure” era of He-Man and Thundercats, choosing alternative and idiosyncratic animation techniques born from unorthodox programmess and influences. “Katz’s delivery was so different from what was out there, so lowkey and dead pan, I knew that sort of cartoon craziness wouldn’t fit, our show needed a look all of its own,” says Annette. Thus, Katz found itself being an outsider even amongst the rebels. “We couldn’t manage that frenetic traditional cartoon action and energy, but it probably wouldn’t suit us anyway.” Drawing inspiration from her favourite cartoons Speed Racer and Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, the series took on the charming unwieldiness of the former whilst making the most out of small-scale moments as seen in the latter. Annette wanted to try to achieve the black-and-white ink wash style seen in The New Yorker comics, which ended up influencing most of the establishing shots in the series. “I think the black-and-white settings lent themselves to the soothing tone, and because they really did stay in the background, they allowed our character drawings to really pop,” says Annette.

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Fans of Katz (a very small minority of adult cartoon enthusiasts) call the show therapeutic, which is fitting – the humour is dry, characters hardly move, there is no laugh track, and the music accompaniment is muzak-inspired elevator jazz – but all of this was essential in influencing the visuals of the show. Sitcoms traditionally operate in tri-camera setups; multiple static cameras which lend themselves to the calming, non-kinetic atmosphere that usually lulls people into after-work television binges, and Katz takes full advantage of this by mimicking mostly-static cameras with its economic storytelling. “We tried to have good sitcom sensibility with the visual pacing of the art: an establishing shot, then some big talking heads, but not too many in a row,” says Annette. “So much of the show was Katz in his chair, taking notes, looking bored or sleepy. There was a lot of that, which was quick and easy enough to do, leaving us a bit of time and energy for the fun stuff.” The show has a distinctly Gen-X appeal and like the beloved Seinfeld, features the stand-up routines of their stars. Poking holes through the idea of what a sitcom is, Katz eschewed the sentimentality commonly found in the format, winked at the audience with meta-humour and (uncharacteristically, for a show about therapy) prioritised incongruity over reconciliation.

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Dr Katz Professional Therapist

“When I only heard it described as cheap, dirty, irritating or worst of all...ugly, I tried to see it as a strength.”
Annette Cate

Animating the show got easier as time went on, and animators were able to stockpile generic drawings that they could use over and over instead of animating them again. “Every now and then, we would stick in a bit of actual animation, and this was a little challenging, but also very fun for us,” says Annette. Something as simple as Dr Katz playing guitar or Ben riding a bicycle would become a titanic task. “Yes, it was on a computer, but everything was laboriously hand-drawn with a stylus on a tablet.” A key element of the comedy in Katz was the use of “retroscripting”, where a general plot is outlined but the actors improvise around it. Higher budget productions would storyboard absolutely everything and lock it in, but with the off-the-cuff dialogue in Katz, animators could have free rein to do whatever they wanted. “Tom Snyder or Loren Bouchard might pop in here and there while the art was being edited in with the recording and offer some feedback, but mostly we were left to our own devices,” says Annette. When Tom Snyder negotiated with Comedy Central to have complete creative control, he extended that same courtesy to the animators. Melding well with the mockumentary vibes of the show, the use of retroscripting would allow accidental stutters, hiccups and character breaks to stay in, capturing real-life moments which animators could play with. In some episodes, you can even hear people laugh faintly in the background – moments that would be edited out in other shows, but Katz is a different kind of show.

Although some have told Annette that Squigglevision is cheap, dirty, irritating or even ugly, she remains a champion of the innovative style. “What we lacked in movement, I think we made up for in our drawing, especially the subtleties of expression and our artistic embrace of the absurd, which to me felt like a triumph of our imaginations,” says Annette. “Because we were so motion-limited, we worked really hard on our basic storytelling skills, keeping things very clear, very simple. We told tales very clearly, very succinctly – and with poignance.” Squigglevision was clearly sentimental to the whole creative team; Tom Snyder’s non-traditional educational show Science Court used the animation style extensively, so much so that the show was actually renamed Squigglevision in its later seasons. The animation technique remained sentimental to Loren Bouchard too, who carried it into his following project Home Movies, another beloved cult-gem that, like Katz, is mostly only available in low-res rips on YouTube. Although Dr Katz himself would appear on magazine covers along with characters from King Of The Hill and Daria, by the time South Park exploded in popularity, it looked like the humble comedy show’s time was over – the creative team simply couldn’t compete with its equally alternative animation style, brasher humour and pop culture potential. In 2002, the American television world was hurtling towards a massive shake-up following recent political events and as fans of Katz know, the show was a lot more like a lovely afternoon nap or humming radio ambience.

Soon, Squigglevision began falling out of favour, however the creative team went onto new things: Loren went on to create projects such as Lucy, the Daughter of the Devil, Adult Swim’s first computer-animated show, and the smash hit Bob’s Burgers. A second life for Katz was found in an Audible series Dr Katz: The Audio Files, released in 2017, which was a glimmer of hope for the fanbase. Outside of the Bouchard/Snyder universe, you can see Squigglevision in shows like Ed, Edd n Eddy and inside the YouTube animation community such as Jonni Phillips’ feature length movies. Even rare references to Dr Katz are seen in episodes of Family Guy and Space Ghost Coast To Coast.

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So why is Dr Katz Professional Therapist worth caring about 30 years later? After all, this is a TV programme that hardly anybody remembers outside of niche sub-reddits and forums. For fans of animation, Katz matters because Tom Snyder, Loren Bouchard and Annette Cate pioneered a budget-savvy animation style made on the unlikeliest of computer programmes, proving that creativity is something you make happen, no matter what your resources are. For fans of television, Katz matters because it quietly redefined what a sitcom could be with its squiggles, off-the-cuff retroscripting, improvised humour, and fourth-wall breaking, all whilst paying homage to the format itself. For fans of anything niche, Katz matters because it is criminally overlooked, poorly distributed and with almost no merchandise – making it sort of a rare gemstone nowadays. But there is a small, dedicated fanbase that still exists, myself included, for this wonderful television show that speaks movingly about the silliness of life, communicated through the musings of self-satirising celebrities and comedians, offering an ambient catharsis for viewers across multiple generations with timeless humour. Dr Katz Professional Therapist didn’t just offer the idea of media as meaningful therapy for our everyday woes – it offered therapy as a means of also laughing and poking fun at ourselves – perhaps that is why it matters most.

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Dr Katz Professional Therapist

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Dr Katz Professional Therapist

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Further Info

www.candlewick.com/author/annette-leblanc-cate

About the Author

Paul Moore

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Paul M (He/Him) is a Junior Writer at It’s Nice That since May 2025 as well as a published poet and short fiction writer. He studied (BA) Fine Art and has a strong interest in digital kitsch, multimedia painting, collage, nostalgia, analog and all matters of strange stuff.

pcm@itsnicethat.com

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