‘Bob’s Burgers’ Co-Showrunner Loren Bouchard Is Cooking Up More Ideas

Bob’s Burgers might be known for its laugh-out-loud humor, but the long-running animated comedy series loves to dabble in more emotional moments as well.

“It’s really nice to be able to do these episodes that feel a little heavier,” series creator and co-showrunner Loren Bouchard tells The Hollywood Reporter. “They have a little more oomph to ’em. We don’t do it casually.”

One such episode, “They Slug Horses, Don’t They?”, was the Fox show’s submission for the 2025 Emmy Awards, earning it a 13th nomination for outstanding animated program. The season 15 entry features Tina and Louise, the daughters of Bob’s Burgers owner, Bob Belcher, getting into an episode-long argument over toy figures, with their Aunt Gayle, sister to mom Linda, pleading with her nieces not to let a silly disagreement ruin their relationship like it did for two sisters she and Linda grew up with.

“We know that we have a job to do, which is to be a comedy, but it is nice that we’ve got fans who will go with us if we feel like we have a story to tell that really is worthy of maybe a slightly more serious moment, a little bit more emotion,” Bouchard says, noting that co-showrunner Nora Smith, who wrote the episode and often writes original songs for the show, had a clear vision for the storyline as well as the song featured in the end credits, “Drift Too Far,” sung by Smith herself.

“She was thinking about Tina and Louise and what it looks like when sisters fight like this,” adds Bouchard. “She was thinking all the way into the future about how you teach them to not ever get too far apart.”

After more than a dozen outstanding animated program nominations (and two wins), one would think the process of selecting an episode to highlight for the Emmys would get easier, but Bouchard equates the process to picking favorites. “Your favorite is always the last one you just finished,” he jokes. “At the end of the season, sometimes we do a little bit of pulse-taking and vote-counting, and we try to make sure that we have a consensus on which one we think is the one we want to submit.”

It’s important to the series creator that the drama of any given episode, whether submitted for an Emmy or not, doesn’t overshadow the fact that the show is genuinely funny. “You’ve got to know you have something you want to say. If you’re just going to try to have a sad song and have people be sappy at the end of an episode, that’s not going to work,” Bouchard adds.

Bob’s Burgers, unlike many television shows, is in a particularly secure position. Earlier this year, the animated series was given a four-season renewal order, taking it through the 2028-29 season. “It’s lovely to have a four-season pickup, don’t get me wrong, but we’ve been in a very lucky position for a very long time,” Bouchard says. “We were really sweating it for a while. Any show that’s not a smash hit — and we were not when we started out, I think it’s fair to say — we were on the bubble, and we treated every single moment like it.”

Things haven’t changed much with the renewal news, but Bouchard does look back fondly on the show’s early days, when “it was survival.

“That’s kind of fun, in a way. It’s like firefighting or something,” he says. “Every fart could be your last fart, so you’ve got to really put it in the right place.”

As Bouchard looks to the future, there’s plenty in store, which the writer previewed at Comic-Con earlier this summer in San Diego. On Sept. 23, the team is rolling out an Art of Bob’s Burgers book, along with a new release of the show’s burger recipe book.

“Every once in a while, I see a piece of art from the show printed out, and I just say, ‘God, it’s gorgeous,’ ” Bouchard says, adding that the team has been looking for a way to celebrate the art from the series for “a long time.”

“I don’t experience it as pride. I work with these artists. Somebody painted it, somebody drew it,” he explains of the artwork. “It’s just impressive to me that some of these images, when you take them out of the context of the show and just print it on a big 11-by-17 piece of paper, they can really pop in a way that is very gratifying.”