The first season centers on the creation of a new product, the "Gruntmaster 6000". The first three episodes involve the idea process ("The Name", "The Prototype", and "The Competition" respectively); the fourth ("Testing") involves having it survive a malevolent company tester named "Bob Bastard", and the fifth ("Elbonian Trip") is about production in the famine-stricken fourth-world country of
Elbonia. The prototype is delivered to an incredibly stupid family in Squiddler's Patch,
Texas, during the thirteenth and final episode of the season, "Infomercial", even though it was not tested in a lab beforehand. The family's misuse of the prototype creates a black hole that sucks Dilbert in; he instantly wakes up in the meeting seen at the start of the episode, then locks his design lab to keep the prototype from being shipped out. The second season features seventeen episodes, bringing the total number of episodes to thirty. Unlike the first season, the episodes are not part of a larger
story arc and have a different storyline for each of the episodes (with the exception of episodes 29 and 30, "Pregnancy" and "The Delivery"). Elbonia is revisited once more in "Hunger"; Dogbert still manages to scam people in "Art"; Dilbert is accused of mass murder in "The Trial"; and Wally gets his own disciples (the result of a complicated misunderstanding, the company launching a rocket for NASA, and a brainwashing seminar) in episode 16, "The Shroud of Wally". The theme music, "The Dilbert Zone", was written by
Danny Elfman. It is an abbreviated instrumental rewrite of the theme from the film
Forbidden Zone, originally performed by Elfman's band, The Mystic Knights of the
Oingo Boingo.
Conception Scott Adams, the creator of
Dilbert, decided to create the series for UPN because the network promised 13 episodes on air, while other networks would only consider the series against other programming options. Adams added to that "If we had gone with
NBC, they would have given Dilbert a love interest with sexual tension." UPN was the sixth-ranked network at the time and picked up the show in hopes of broadening their appeal and to prove they were committed to riskier alternative shows. Adams stated about turning
Dilbert into a series "It's a very freeing experience because doing the comic strip limits me to three (picture) panels with four lines or less of dialogue per issue, in the TV series, I have 21 minutes per episode to be funny. I can follow a theme from beginning to end, which will add lots of richness to the characters." Adams wanted the series to be animated because the live action version shot previously for
FOX did not translate well. Adams added to that "If Dilbert's going to be at the top of the Alps, you just draw it that way and you don't have to build an Alps scene. You can also violate some laws of physics, and cause and effect. People forgive it very easily. So it's much more freeing creatively."
Cancellation On November 22, 2006, when Adams was asked why the show was canceled, he explained: On June 28, 2020, Adams claimed on
Twitter that the show was cancelled because he was white and UPN had decided to focus on an African-American audience, and that he had been discriminated against. ==Cast==