Web Video / The Debbie and Carrie Show

The Debbie and Carrie Show is a web based series created by Dale Husband using the animation app Plotagon and featured mostly on YouTube. The series was started by Husband in April of 2021 as a response to a series of animated videos called Become Jehovah's Friend AKA Caleb and Sophia produced by the Watchtower to promote the teachings of Jehovah's Witnesses. Husband, as both an atheist and a member of a Unitarian Universalist church, sought to promote free thinking instead, and frequently made targets of both religious cults and conservative politics with the show's main characters often being persecuted and opposed by their religious and ideological rivals. The main setting in the series was an unnamed Town in east Texas in the early 21st Century.

Dale Husband's channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvL-nauz3BFqWaeq33RsVNQ

The entire saga of the Debbie and Carrie universe is here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrumsQpVQB3x0Av31Nfq01MYQ1XBvoTgh

Tropes

• Name and Name: Debbie and Carrie, along with their mothers, are the Central Characters the whole storyline revolves around. All five are atheists and four of the five are LGBT, putting them directly at odds with the conservative Baptist based values of their Town.
• City with No Name: The Town in east Texas where most of the stories in the series is set is never given an actual name, though other cities, such as Boston, Los Angeles, or Dallas are mentioned by name.
• Fish out of Water: Carrie and her lesbian and atheist mothers move to the Town in Texas from Boston in 2020 and find it difficult to adjust to being surrounded by the far more conservative people that are common there.
  • A more blatant example involved two cave dwelling teens from 100,000 years ago that were taken to live in the 21st Century.
• Noble Bigot: The Rev. Dave Owen, pastor of the local Baptist church, saw himself as this because of his contempt for Debbie, Carrie and their mothers. They see him as a Big Bad, however.
  • But while Dave Owen may have been delusional, the other two Town leaders, Ted Anderson and Leonard Wilson, clearly were motivated solely by desire to make as much profit as possible off their own people. For them, religion was merely a tool to keep the people in line.
• Alliterative Name: Examples include.....
  • The Tuscany Tavern, an Italian restaurant founded by Debbie and Carrie's mothers that becomes a hub of activity for the Central Characters for most of the series.
  • Sandy Smith, Debbie's mother, though her maiden name was actually Sandy Green.
  • Aphrodite Agency, a modeling agency that Debbie was a co-founder of.
• The Bully: One of the worst villains in the series is Ted Wilson, the son of one of the leading citizens of the Town. He is a persistent threat to the title characters and many others in his age group. He is such a Jerkass to everyone else that he ends up ruining the reputation of his father once Ted becomes an outright criminal. His stupidity gets him killed no less than THREE times in the saga, due to time travel incidents.
  • Like Father, Like Son: Indeed, Ted Wilson grew up extremely loyal to his father even to the point of supporting his father murdering his mother when he was a child.....and then killing his own wife and the mother of their infant daughter as an adult.
• Hollywood Atheist: Subverted from start to finish; the whole point of the series was to depict atheists as loving, normal people who were targets of hateful Christian bigots.
• Heel–Face Turn: A common theme in the storyline is people in the Town who were enemies of the Central Characters realizing they do not deserve to be hated and switching sides in the conflicts that those characters are involved in. The earliest example is English teacher Carla Jenkins, a follower of Rev. Dave Owen, whose demand that her students do Bible readings are opposed by Debbie and Carrie. Several years later, Jenkins is converted to atheism.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: The attitude of the Central Characters towards the corrupt and bigoted Town leadership early in the saga. By contrast, those leaders were motivated by a Might Makes Right attitude fueled by religious bigotry.
• Easily Swayed Population : Subverted, in that the corrupt leaders of the Town never imagined that they would ever be defeated, especially by "outsiders" like the Central Characters. But there were certain stunts they pulled or at least tolerated that most of the townspeople found too terrible to accept, such as Ted Wilson sexually assaulting one girl and then beating another nearly to death, and later the Town's own police chief (and son of the Town's mayor) attempting to destroy through arson a restaurant that provided jobs and food to many people in the Town. The blatant hypocrisy became too obvious to tolerate.
  • At one point, the Central Characters visited the Baptist church that dominated the Town, and gave detailed statements before the congregation to explain why they were atheist and why they fought for LGBT rights. In response..... most of the church members abandoned the Southern Baptists and became Unitarian Universalist, something even the Central Characters never imagined would happen.
• Bad Is Good and Good Is Bad: The very things that the Central Characters consider good, including atheism, freethinking, sexual liberty, and equality of all peoples, are abhorred by most of the Town's people at the beginning of the saga as being anti-Christian. The common Christian and conservative values of the Town are in turn seen as harmful by the Central Characters.
• I Did What I Had to Do: Sandy left the Town and moved back to Tulsa to marry her second husband, Steve Miller. But only a few months later, Sandy left Steve to return to the Town......to run for mayor with the goal of ending the corruption and abuse of the Town's leadership that was harming her friends. Steve agreed to let her go and they were later divorced after Sandy became mayor.
• Amicable Exes: What Steve and Sandy became after their split. Sandy even went so far as to find Steve a new wife for him.
  • Debbie and Carrie also were this for a while when Debbie was dating another girl, Laura Park.
• Color-Coded Characters: : Efforts were always made to keep the colors of the major characters consistent throughout the saga. Debbie was associated with cyan, Carrie with magenta, Sandy with red, Lucy with dark blue, Jessica with cyan, Carla Jenkins with yellow and Laura Park with pink. Richard Sims, Debbie and Carrie's son, was usually dressed in white. Jessica and Debbie were also blondes, meaning they had so much in common that it was no surprise that Carrie would fall in love with Debbie.
  • The Hudson Phamily Show, a direct spinoff of the Debbie and Carrie Show, featured an entire family as a living rainbow, with Daniel Hudson (the father) as dark blue, his wife Maria as orange, their elder son Matthew as red, their daughter Suzanne as yellow, their younger son Tommy as green and even Matthew's girlfriend and later wife Carla Movenski/Hudson as violet. Then Matthew and Carla had a daughter, Diana, who was dressed in cyan (foreshadowing her marrying Richard Sims when they are adults).
• Character as Himself: Dale Husband actually had a Plotagon avatar of himself appear several times in the fictional Debbie and Carrie universe. The most notable example of this was the episode "Ex-Religious Discussion Group", in which Dale interacted with many of the characters via a teleconference. https://youtu.be/OR4pCdX-074
• Alternate Timeline :Another common theme in the show is characters going back in time to change their own history to make things better.
  • Continuity Reboot: Debbie of the year 2056 going back to the year 2021 to give her mother Sandy a vaccine so she wouldn't die of a disease in a few years. This later enabled Sandy to become mayor of her Town and cause so many changes for the better.
  • Back from the Dead: Played with. In 2029, Richard Sims's two gay fathers, Michael Jefferson and Charles Mc Kinsey, were murdered by a homophobe. Then in the year 2061, Debbie and Carrie went back in time and undid that event, killing the homophobe before he could get to his targets. As a result, Michael and Charles survived to the 2060s instead.
• Love Triangle: There were several examples of this in the saga.
  • Sandy Smith, her husband Rich Smith, and Rich's mistress Diana Kalli. Sandy's discovery of the mistress led to her and Rich divorcing.
  • Debbie Smith, Carrie Sims, and Laura Park. After tolerating the situation for several months, Carrie forced Debbie to choose between the other two, leading to Debbie ending her relationship with Laura, though they remained friends.
  • James Smith, Penny Bentley, and Whitney Owen. Penny and Whitney not only both loved James, they fell in love with each other as well, taking the concept of Betty and Veronica to an extreme level. James eventually married Penny and then Whitney married someone else.
  • Sandy Smith, Steve Miller, and Denise Kalli (sister of Diana Kalli). Ironically, it was actually Sandy who arranged for Steve and Denise to meet and start a new relationship with each other, as Sandy was ready to divorce Steve and move on. Steve then took Denise to be his second wife.
• Blaming the Victim: Former Town mayor Ted Anderson did this when he made a podcast after the Town was hit by tornados and flooding, claiming that his successor Sandy Smith was to blame because she was an atheist. Ironically, the only person in the Town who died in the disaster was Deborah Flowers, who was a devout Catholic.
• Driven to Suicide: Averted in the case of Carrie Sims in her teens, who slits her wrists while suffering a mental breakdown, but is saved by her mothers. But years later, Rev. Dave Owen kills himself with a gunshot to the head after being released from prison and realizing his career as a Baptist minister was a complete failure.
  • But as an old woman Carrie DID poison herself to death right after Debbie died, deciding she literally couldn't live without her.
• Shout-Out: Several examples, including:
  • An inspiration for the Debbie and Carrie Show was "Caleb and Sophia - All Grown Up", created by the owner of the YouTube channel The JW Chronicles. It was from them that Dale Husband learned about Plotagon. Dale paid tribute to this other creator by having the adult version of Sophia appear as a guest in early episode of his own series.
  • Expy: Diana Kalli, one of Sandy Smith's worst enemies, was directly based on a character named Hermine Benson that was created by Mary Bliss peanutcat1977, who also used Plotagon and uploaded her episodes of her Paul and Vicky/Blazing Beauty series on YouTube. The two creators even collaborated to have each other's main characters appear in their different universes.....somewhat.
  • Dale directly referenced both those creators at the end of this episode.
• Show Within a Show: In addition to Vicky and Paul Jones appearing as "real life" versions of themselves in the Debbie and Carrie Show, Debbie and Carrie, along with Suzanne Hudson and Laura Park, created a web based news series called the America for All network, which was broadcast from the Texas Town as well as from Los Angeles.
• One-Steve Limit: Defied, with newer characters often being named with no regard for other characters with the same name in the past. Examples include Diana Kalli and Diana Hudson, Vicky Sims and Vicky Jones, Paul Jones and Paul Smith, and even a Steve Miller who was not related to an entire family of Millers, because Steve was white and the other Millers were black.
• The Bad Guy Wins: Averted. Sandy's successors as mayor of the Town include Wayne Bentley, Mike Florence, and Matt Lesenski, who are all more conservative than her, but none of them are as corrupt as Ted Anderson was. They even ally with Sandy at times....and one of them honors her after she is dead.
• Feuding Families: There are two cases in the saga.
  • The Greens vs. the Kallis, which included as members Sandy Smith (maiden name, Green) and Diana Kalli. This feud ended only when Diana was killed by Sandy.
  • The Owens vs. the Smiths (including Rev. Dave Owen, Sandy Smith, Debbie Smith, Nicolas Owen, and finally David Owen (Nicolas' son and Dave's grandson). Dave and Nicolas were killed and then David was kidnapped and left to die about 50,000 years in the past.
• Character Catchphrase and Running Gag: Subverted. Dale Husband hated these tropes with a burning passion and usually avoided using them in his works.
• As You Know: Frequently characters would refer to earlier events in the series in conversations. This was intended to bring those who didn't see earlier episodes up to speed on why certain events are happening in the present time.