A24 Comedy ‘Hazbin Hotel’ Falters in Jump From YouTube Pilot to Full-Fledged Series: TV Review
18.01.2024 - 19:15
/ variety.com
Alison Herman TV Critic The animated comedy “Hazbin Hotel” has a feel-good backstory belied by its grim premise: a horde of demons suffer eternal damnation in Hell, their ranks periodically culled in mass exterminations led by armies from Heaven. Creator Vivienne Medrano, founder of YouTube channel VivziePop, independently produced the pilot with money from her Patreon, and posted it to the streaming site in 2019.
Over 90 million views later, the concept has been picked up by the ultra-prestigious studio A24, built out into an eight-episode season, and is now set to premiere on Amazon Prime Video. The musical series is the kind of original idea and grassroots success it’s easy to root for, especially when both are in ever-shorter supply on TV these days.
But while “Hazbin Hotel” has the aesthetic accomplishment one would expect of a longtime animator given the chance to realize her vision, it’s less successful in translating the pilot’s big, abstract ideas into a legible world with a cogent tone. As a prologue, protagonist Charlotte Morningstar (Erika Henningsen) gets us situated: she’s the Princess of Hell, the realm her parents Lilith and Lucifer (Jeremy Jordan) accidentally unleashed when they introduced free will to mankind via the tree of knowledge.
(If you recall your Genesis, Lilith was Adam’s first wife, before Eve.) Both Lilith and Lucifer are now MIA, but Hell still has to endure annual assaults from Heaven to keep its potential power in check. All this exposition is delivered over a striking montage that renders cutout silhouettes in a stripped-down color palette.
Medrano is a veteran of DeviantArt, and you can see the virtual community’s influence in the series’ Gothic maximalism. Charlotte’s girlfriend,
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