Not only is “The Santa Clauses” building on a phenomenon with a decade-spanning run and, always, Tim Allen front and center as Scott Calvin. It’s also a wildly weird, consistently inventive addition to any Christmas season.

It began in 1994 with Allen starring in “The Santa Clause” theatrical movie, which yielded sequels in 2002 and 2006.  Two years ago Allen and his North Pole cohorts returned in this wacky series form; Season 2 begins, again on Disney+, Wednesday.

“What’s cool about this Santa Claus franchise is that even though it’s from the ‘90s there were a couple of innovative world-building ideas in it,” said award-winning (“Modern Family”) director Jason Winer, 50. “Number 1 is the notion that Santa Claus the legend is a mantle that can be passed on, rather than a singular figure.

“That’s a wild idea that leads to a lot of storytelling permutations. The series takes advantage of that in the way that the mantle was passed to Scott Calvin in the original movie suggests it can be passed to others.

“More than that, Season 2 explores the idea that it has been held by others throughout history. So we just had a tremendous amount of twisted fun inventing the complex history of Santa and the North Pole.”
Which now includes, in a really big way, the bad Santa?

“Yes!” Winer enthused. “The Bad Santa aka The Mad Santa aka Magnus Antas and played with intense glee by Eric Stonestreet. He just honestly, I think, dreamed of playing Santa for a long time. We had worked with him on ‘Modern Family’ and he reached out to us.

“He put the seed in our heads. The Mad Santa is mentioned in the first season as perhaps the darkest time in the history of the North Pole. There’s this hint about it, which weirdly, the audience really picked up on online. People were like, ‘Aha! The Bad Santa’ — they thought it was a little bit of a ‘Game of Thrones’ joke reference. Which it was.

“But we were like, What if we ran with that? And what if it’s Eric Stonestreet?”

As wild and crazy this “Santa Clauses” is, it’s not a case of anything goes.

“Oddly, even though this is a comedy, it has elements of world building like science fiction,” Winer said.  “And like the best science fiction, it adheres to a series of rules inside of itself.

“So even though it’s it seems crazy and you could do anything, there is a logic to everything.” One example: “We’ve carefully planned the layout of the North Pole village, with the wildlife woods in the mountains.”

Season 2 of “The Santa Clauses” begins streaming on Disney+ Nov. 8