It was kind of a dumb movie in 2001, but “Wet Hot American Summer” was full of a lot of future stars, from Bradley 
Cooper and Paul Rudd to Amy Poehler, Ken Marino, Janeane Garofalo, Mike Showalter and Michael Ian Black. They all agreed to come back for an eight-episode new series “Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp” (Netflix, streaming) that, like the title indicates, doesn’t accommodate the 14 years in-between, but rather is set on the first day of that summer and not the last. Joining in on the fun for the first time are Jon Hamm, Kristen Wiig, Chris Pine and Jason Schwartzman.
Showalter, who faced writers on the first day of TV Critics Association summer press tour earlier this week, said it wasn’t hard to get the original cast back — even with their increased demands today. “The time commitment for this cast is really quite accommodating,” he said. “The original movie was written that way. The feeling is that we’re interested in creating an environment that is inclusive and making it easy for people to say yes to doing it. And we certainly took that approach this time around, and I think we would continue with that.”
And it’s not as if they didn’t discuss it over the years.
“We’ve all been in touch for all this time that we haven’t done another ‘Wet Hot,’” Showalter says. “Many of us have worked together multiple times in between. We’re friends. So the majority of the cast, with almost no exceptions it wasn’t, like, 15 years out of the blue, ‘Hey, remember me from 15 years ago?’ We’re in touch.”
So the response was good, he said. “We sent an email to the entire cast, one big group email. And it was, you know, 25 people on the email.”
The text read: “We’re thinking about doing this. Would you want to do it?”
At the time, Showalter says, “There was no Netflix in the equation yet. It was just ‘We’re thinking about, kind of, like, putting the band back together, so to speak. Is that something you would be interested in?’ And it was like a unanimous yes. It was just a kind of a rousing, ‘Yeah, that sounds fun. Let’s do it. Where and when?’
They wanted to make sure that if one of them couldn’t make it, they wouldn’t feel the pressure of having to do it in order for the project to get done. But it turned out they didn’t have to worry.
“We took the attitude that we wanted every single cast member back in this,” he said. “And every single cast member is in this, including the indoor kids — the little kids who are David Hyde Pierce’s campers who are now adults. They were kids when we made the movie. They’re now adults. They’re in it, too.”