Hazbin Hotel, Season 1 (2024)
Animated series based on a pilot released in 2019 that was subsequently picked up by A24 and distributed by Amazon. Although not without practically its entire voice cast being replaced in the meantime, mostly not for the better, but they did bring in Keith David so at least there's an upside to it.
HH presents an 8 episode animated adult comedy about Charlie Morningstar, the pathologically optimistic daughter of the devil, and some of her buddies, opening a hotel in hell to help its denizens redeem themselves and spare them from the wrath of heaven which periodically sends its army to cull them.
The primary selling point (and by extension, what will probably render it insufferable to a lot people) of Hazbin Hotel is that it feels a lot like a late 00's DeviantArt webcomic. The entire vibe of it is this mall goth chimera of 90's Tim Burton, Disney Renaissance, Jhonen Vasquez cartoons, Scene Kid culture, Furry Fandom, a touch of anime and a whole lot of "I'm fourteen, live in a suburb and think this passes as provocative", which it doesn't, but it's kind of quaint that it thinks it does... well, you get the idea.
There's something charmingly innocent about it, which, looking at it as a cynical middle aged man, I find kind of disarming. It really puts you in the mindset of, like, a 16 year old girl in 2011 who just saw the newest Disney Princess movie and thought "I'm gonna make something like this, but it's gonna be set in HELL and it'll look like NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS crossed with INVADER ZIM and the characters are gonna SWEAR and HAVE SEX and be GAY and the angels are gonna be the BAD GUYS" and... I dunno, I'm not enough of a prick to try to critically eviscerate something like that. If I got to make a TV show out the sort of stuff I wrote as an angsty teenager I'd commit to it too.
From the premise you'd assume that most of the show would be about those different characters staying at the hotel having comedic misadventures as they try to become better people but there's surprisingly not that much of that. There's more plot to it than you'd expect, so a good deal of it is devoted to world building and setting up characters that'll presumably play bigger roles in later seasons and playing out a seasonal arc that culminates in a battle between heaven and hell, complete with anime fight scenes, obviously... The issue might be that the season is only 8 episodes long, so having it both ways with both a season long story arc and goofy disconnected character driven episodes inbetween might not have been an option but I feel like it would have benefitted from some of those. It's main asset are probably its characters.
Whether these character are any good... eeh. The main cast is decently likeable and just three dimensional enough for what it is. The cheerful, overly optimistic princess, her supportive straight woman girlfriend, the smarmy pervert, the shady trickster, the gruff barkeep voiced by Keith David, they're fine. They get less interesting the farther you get away from the main characters and at one point the devil shows up voiced by some guy doing an H. Jon Benjamin impression and I felt they were starting to run out of ideas.
There's a lot of musical numbers in this. Are they any good? Eeh... They range from okay to decent, I guess. You asked me to hum any of them right now, I wouldn't be able to. But it's nice to see them being such a big part of an adult animated comedy. Now, whether this comedy is particularly funny? Eeh... I laughed exactly once. At a really good line delivery. Don't take that too harshly though, it's hard to make me laugh.
It was fine. I take it over, like, season 69 of Family Guy or season 420 of The Simpsons or any more fucking Rick and Morty. It's got its own thing going on with a sorta fresh style and a main cast that's reasonably compelling and a setting that has a decent bit of mileage left in it. If they go for longer seasons in the future, this could come together nicely.
