Both lead actors play a variety of recurring and one-off characters, including "Fred" and "Carrie". "Inside Portlandia", a feature on the second season DVD, producer Jonathan Krisel asks rhetorically, "who are they? Are they going out? Are they just friends? We've done sketches where they live together, they live separately, you know, see we thought of them as this kind of Ernie and Bert, like, what is their sexual preference, who are these two weirdos, who are on these adventures together?"