Olan Rogers

Through quirky videos and a passionate personality, Olan Rogers steadily charted a course from internet content creator to television producer. Rogers was born in Nashville, Tenn., on June 11, 1987. In school, he enjoyed art classes and making videos, receiving recognition from his teachers for his creativity. Encouraged, Rogers decided to work toward a degree in communications at the University of Memphis.

He graduated and found a job at an airplane repair shop for a time, until he got laid off. Needing a new means of sustaining himself, he dove fully into his love for videography and began looking for freelance work. In 2010 he began posting his work to YouTube. These short videos consisted of monologues about his life experiences, car rides with his friends, and comedy sketches with his cat, Starscream.

One of his earliest videos, "Gary Space," featured crudely drawn cartoon characters in a comedic sci-fi setting. His online viewership grew steadily through the years into the hundreds of thousands. Success on YouTube drove Rogers' ambition. In 2016, he brushed off his idea for "Gary Space" and, with backing from incubator studio New Form Digital, he produced an 8-minute pilot to flesh out the series concept. That caught the attention of several television studios, and Rogers soon inked a deal with TBS to create the animated series that is now called "Final Space" (2018- ).

In addition to writing and producing the series, Rogers provided the voices for two of its main characters. Rogers was also a businessman in conjunction with his entertainment work. He founded online clothing retail company Star Cadet, which began in 2010 under the name Olan Rogers Supply. He opened a soda parlor-arcade in Nashville in 2014.