Western Animation / Ugly Americans

One nation, overrun.

A Comedy Central animated series that premiered March 17, 2010.

Take New York City, add every horrifying beast, sci-fi freak, and fantasy fairy you or anyone else can think of, shake thoroughly, and you've got Ugly Americans.

The show is set in an Alternate Universe version of New York City where all supernatural creatures exist and have integrated with humanity. Mark Lilly is a new employee at New York's Department of Integration (the "Token Bleeding Heart"), whose job is to help immigrants fit in with American society as well as help monsters fit in human society in general. Unfortunately for Mark, his co-worker Leonard is a drunk wizard, his literally demonic boss Twayne couldn't care less, and he is at odds with the head of the law enforcement division Frank, who would rather see them all deported. Rounding out the cast is Mark's other succubus boss Callie, who he is having a sorta relationship with, and Mark's lazy zombie roommate Randall.

Sadly, the show ended after two seasons due to lukewarm ratings. The network tried to find outside financing for it, but that fell through. It was finally revived as an app for iPhone and iPad.

Not to be confused with The Ugly American or "Ugly American" Stereotype.

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This animated series provides examples of:

• Actor Allusion: Michael-Leon Wooley, the voice of Twayne, once provided the voice for Audry II, the man-eating plant from Little Shop Of Horrors on Broadway. In the episode Little Ship of Horrors there is a species of plant people resembling Audrey II running a flower shop. Wooley provided the voice of the shop owner.
• Aerith and Bob: Great Brain's fiancée is named Dolores.
• All Girls Want Bad Boys: Inverted- Callie is a succubus (a bad girl) who is dating Mark, a nice, normal boy.
• All Just a Dream: An In-Universe example. In the episode "Ride Me to Hell", the ending of the show "Dishonorable Discharge" reveals that everything was just an angel's dream.The whole episode itself truns out to be an angel's dream at the end.
• Alternate History: It seems there was a "zombie civil war" in the 60s instead of all that Vietnam business.
  • Bill the Butcher was a vampire, who currently runs a pizza parlor.
  • Abraham Lincoln came back as a zombie, afterwards he founded a couple charitable foundations and invented the sunroof. Also, he's dating Jessica Alba.
• The Antichrist: Callie is implied to be this, as her father is the (current) Devil and she is the catalyst for the end of days. However, she seems somewhat ambivalent and unsure about the whole thing. Played With as it's later revealed while her father is a powerful demon he is not in charge of hell as it's ruled by Japanese businessmen.
• Arranged Marriage: Callie and Twayne are set up in one by her father, even though she finds him an Abhorrent Admirer. When she doesn't go through with it in season 2, he creates Lilith just for that purpose, even having her go through Rapid Aging to make it possible.
• Art Evolution: The first few episodes' art and animation are just that tiniest bit more similar to Superjail! than later episodes.
• Baby Talk: Callie did this when Mark had to take care of a demon baby.
• Batman Gambit: In "Hell for the Holidays", Mark creates a clone of himself, and relies on a quick betrayal by Twayne in their fight to the death to avoid its discovery.
  • And in "Wail Street" Mark takes care of his organ-crushing soul problem, gets Callie's father to stop trying to steal his massive soul, gets a few thousand dollars richer and manages to keep his soul by buying stock in a competing demonic company, devaluing his soul through a night of debauchery, selling his soul when it is so small that Callie's father just tosses it out, and digging through medical waste for a few hours until he found it again.
• Bed Sheet Ghost: Walking a bed sheet dog.
• Berserk Button: "SHARK WEEK IS A NATIONAL TREASURE!"
  • "Would you like mustard on your knish?" "I'm sorry, I do not like mustard." "Are you fuckin' kidding me? EVERYBODY LIKES MUSTARD! *starts force-feeding Mark mustard* SUCK THAT, YOU PILE OF FILTH!"
  • And Mark now has an egg fixation - to the point that he gets a monthly magazine about them.
  • Do not mention that you enjoyed the series finale of Dishonorably Discharged within earshot of Grimes.
• Beware the Nice Ones:
  • Doug the Koala Man is proficient in knifing people. He was once an international assassin.
  • Apparently Croatian Man is a self-admitted sociopath.
  • Do not startle Doug, even if it's for a surprise party.
• Big Applesauce: The series takes place in New York but inhabited by supernatural creatures.
• Big "NO!":
  • The Brain uses one of these in "Kong of Queens" when social services gets shut down temporarily. Given what becomes of the group, it is entirely justified.
  • Used again in the same episode when Randall gets cut in half by a passing bus, the sudden traumatic injury wasn't what brought it on, it was the fact that the bus was headed to Jersey City.
  • When Mark tells the guys that Callie sleeps around, Croatian Man's response is "IS NOOOOOOOOOOOO!"
• Big Red Devil: All demons have red skin. Callie, who's a half-demon notably has pink skin.
• Bilingual Bonus: Mark and Randall's apartment is next door to a restaurant named 魚男寿司 ("fish-man sushi").
• Bird-Poop Gag: In the pilot episode, a Manbird poops on the shoulder of a man outside the Department of Integrations.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: In the series, wizards as depicted as looking like humans, but in the episode "Wet Hot Demonic Summer", it is revealed that they reproduce laying eggs and age very slowly. They also are apparently a One-Gender Race, since all of them are shown to be male.
• *Bleep*-dammit!: Played straight and subverted in the same line in "Trolling for Terror", where it's explained that good reality TV has the three Fs: "fighting, f[bleep]," and the mysterious "fi[bleep]". Another non-humorous example in the same episode is Leonard referring to h[bleep]jobs.
  • He said fight-[bleep]
• Body Horror:
  • Randall on a regular basis, though being a zombie,it's not that big a deal.
  • Mark being drugged and given 'reverse liposuction' against his will.
• Bookends: The Pilot begins and ends with Callie leaving Mark Chained to a Bed and his bedroom destroyed after sleeping with him.
• Bowling for Ratings: The plot of the episode "Attack of Mark's Clone".
• Boyfriend-Blocking Dad: In "Callie and Her Sister", Mark becomes extremely protective of his adopted daughter Lillith (despite only raising her for a few days). He has Randall hand over his penis before allowing them to go on a date, and is horrified to discover Lillith is going to be Twayne's bride in an Arranged Marriage.
• Boy Meets Ghoul: Standard fare in the Ugly Americans universe.
• Brain Food: Randall repeatedly mentions eating Mark's brain, and even has an incredibly elaborate plan to do so. For now he is subsisting on artificial flesh made out of tofu (and rat ovaries.) On top of that, whenever he goes out to eat, he carries a "zombie ziploc", just in case he can't get any good brains.
• Breast Expansion: In the "Demon Baby", swell when she comes near the demon baby that Mark is caring for, as a result of My Biological Clock Is Ticking. Then they start to lactate fire.
  Mark: Um, did your boobs just grow when you touched the baby?
  Callie: No.
  Mark: Are you sure? 'Cause I could have sworn. There, it happened again.
  Callie: Stop staring at my boobs!
  Mark: I can't, so I'll go.
• Brick Joke: It's a bit hard to forget Twayne's "Mating Bone" from Season 1 (especially what happened at the end of that episode). Well, as shown in "Wet Hot Demonic Summer", the male demons can weaponize the thing.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Basically everyone except Mark. Callie seems relatively normal most of the time, but even outside of the occasional demonic outburst she still keeps odd traits about her. For example, her maternal impulses for the demon baby were less caused by a desire to have children than to raise future soldiers for Satan's army.
  • Leonard seems to be a useless drunk but is apparently the only one who knows how to work PowerPoint.
• The Burlesque of Venus: After the succubus Callie finishes molting, she is posed similarly◊ to this painting, with her standing over her former "skin", her hand and [[GodivaHair hair covering her breasts and genitalia, her hair blowing in the wind, two people on her left, and Mark on her right rushing to throw a cloth over her.
• The Cameo: Mechagodzilla, Ro-Man, Dren and all sorts of fantastic creatures.
• Canon Immigrant: Twayne, Callie, Leonard and Randall come straight from the creator's previous series, the online 5-On. In design and name only though.
• Cannot Tell a Joke:
  • Croatian Man, inspired by a troll who speaks in riddles, gives us this, ahem, gem: "What taste like terrible food? Is my wife's cooking!" Doug (Koala Man) thought it was funny, though.
  • Twayne, as demonstrated in "Kong of Queens."
    Twayne: What's the difference between a demonic council and a room full of chickens with their heads cut off? The chickens have far superior mid- to upper-level management skills! HI-YO!
• Captain Ersatz: King Kong, Max Schreck, Rosemary Woodhouse, Criss Angel, Gandalf, and Edward Cullen, among others.
  • "YOOOUUU SHALL NOT SUUUEEE!"
• Cat Girl: Sabrina Maroney is a Catwoman Expy, who leads a gang of thieving Cat Folk.
• Casting Couch: Randall has apparently tried this tactic.
• Catchphrase: Mark's "Wait, what?" and Randall's "Craaaaaap".
• Cat Folk: Some cat people appear as the antagonists of the episode "The Dork Knight".
• Chained to a Bed: The Pilot episode begins with Callie leaving Mark chained to his. Randall needs to come in to get him out. The end of the episode has [[Bookends the same happening]], just this time he's duct-taped to bed.
• Child Supplants Parent: In "Callie and Her Sister", Lilith was adopted by Mark and Callie when she was six (for 12 days, since she grew a year older every day). Come her wedding day with Twayne, Lilith reveals that she plans to kill both Twayne and Callie so she can consummate her marriage to Mark immediately after... in front of an arena full of demons. Though whether this is because she's just that evil or if she's genuinely attracted to Mark is unclear.
• Cloning Splits Attributes: In "Kill, Mark... Kill", Mark Lily snaps his friend Leonard Powers's wand causing the wizard to explode. Before Mark can gather up Leonard's remains into an urn as instructed, the little blobs of flesh suddenly morph into dozens of miniature Leonards, each only possessed of a fraction of the original's sense of maturity and cynicism. As it turns out, the only way for OG Leonard to come back is for each of the minis to die, causing the others to inherent their portion of Leonard's soul until there is only one left.
• Cold Opening: Most episodes start with a sequence that seems like something out of a horror movie, only to subvert it seconds later. Often ending with Frank arresting the monster who then acts as Mark's client of the week. Another notable one being the pilot, where Randall is introduced looking like a monster about to devour a bound and gagged Mark, before ripping off the gag and criticizing his taste in girlfriends.
• Cold Turkeys Are Everywhere: When Randall's penis runs away, Randall sees a sausage salesman, a train going in and out of a tunnel, a wiener-dog and its long-necked owner, Vince Foster using a pink-handled product, and "Penis: The Movie".
  Randall: Man, having no penis sucks dick!
• Continuity Nod: Twayne surprisingly still has his "Mating Barb, or what's left of it, from "Demon Baby" in "Sympathy for the Devil".
  • The same Limo driver who had his arms ripped off turned up again in The Manbirds. And it looks like he might hold a grudge.
• Corrupt the Cutie:
  • Seems to be the rationale regarding Callie's Single-Target Sexuality with Mark.
  Callie: Oh Mark... so innocent. It just makes me want to *demonically* corrupt your soul and drag it through the bowels of Hell!
  • Though, if anything, Mark is the one influencing Callie to be a better person for his sake.
  • Season two ended the hints that Mark and Callie's relationship was caused by a higher power to play out that Mark just might be more corrupt than Callie.
• Creepy Family: Callie's family (from her father's side) is made of demons.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Callie vs Randall. Too bad, really; it could've been so awesome...
• Dark Is Not Evil: Subverted in that many of the more supernatural creature characters do some pretty despicable or creepy things, yet in the same breath the show allows you to sympathize with them as they sometimes are actually trying to do the right thing.
• Deadpan Snarker: Usually Mark and Leonard, but most of the cast is pretty apathetic like that.
• Deal with the Devil:
  • How Callie's mom had her to begin with.
  Mack: You rub my back, I'll impregnate yours!
  • Deals with devils are prevalent enough that there's a "soul market" based on the stock exchange.
• Destructo-Nookie: Mark's sex with Callie usually usally has her injuring him or destroying the entire room. Apparently, it's worth it.
• Did I Just Say That Out Loud? - Grimes does (and lampshades) this twice in Episode XX: Attack of Mark's Clone. Apparently he's fantasized about Callie a bit.
  Grimes: Again with the talking!
• Disappeared Dad: Both Mark and Twayne suffered this. Mark's has been "stuck in traffic" since he was five, and Twayne's father left after seeing Twayne kill and eat his siblings in the crib. One of the few instances where this trope is actually justified, really.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?
  • Homosexuality: In "Blob Gets Job", Randall's dad is a gun nut with a hatred of zombies. Mark unwittingly "outs" Randall to his parents, but much fun is had by all when his dad realizes he can use him for target practice (and Randall doesn't mind as long as he doesn't get shot in the head).
    Randall's Dad: I love having a gay zombie son.
    Randall: Wait, who's gay!?
  • The Holocaust: "So, You Want to Be a Vampire?" draws parallels between Jews and vampires, who are more disliked for "controlling all the blood banks" than for sucking blood. The vamps are still recovering from a tragedy in the 40s when they were nearly wiped out by Van Helsing (who wrote an autobiography entitled "Mein Vampf"). Vampires even have Jewish-style weddings.
    • Also, a vampire street vendor shows up in several episodes selling knishes.
  • White Flight: Callie's father's plan to increase the creature-to-human ratio in New York.
  • Pregnancy: In "Wail Street", Randall panics about Mark's condition (who goes to the hospital due to mysterious abdominal pains and sudden weight gain) as if he's an expecting father.
  • Jonestown/Scientology: The New Paltz Zombieology Center is run by Xavier Gates, who- with his aviator glasses, slicked black hair, and clergy-like outfit- bears a striking resemblance to another famous cult leader, Reverend Jim Jones◊, who led the infamous Jonestown mass suicide. Plus, after Randall's stay at the center, they tell him to pay "like 500 bucks"- reminiscent of Scientology, an organization often accused of being financially motivated.
• Don't Explain the Joke: "Haha, nice one! He thought we were serious, but we were in jest! In jest!"
• Downer Ending:
  • First season mid-finale: All of Mark's work has helped bring the apocalypse closer.
  • First season finale: Albert the Man Bird will be forever shunned by his species, lacking anyway to communicate with them, and his Fathers dying breath was used to disown him.
• Down on the Farm: For some reason, in "Treegasm", Wichita, Kansas is depicted as a farm.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Twain's Alpha Male personality in the first few episodes is a harsh juxtaposition with his later, more effeminate personality that grows stronger each episode.
  • Even weirder Callie's father respected him and wanted him to be with Callie compare that to later episode "Callie and Her Sister" where it's stated if it weren't for the debt between their families, Twain wouldn't be allowed in 100 feet of Callie, and apparently that's a generous amount.
• Enfant Terrible:
  • The eponymus demon baby in "The Demon Baby", who constantly eats innocent animals or attempts to harm people.
  • Callie's newborn sister Lillith tries to kill her mother the minute they're left alone, forcing Callie and Mark to adopt her for a few days, thanks to Rapid Aging.
• The End of the World as We Know It:
  • The ultimate goal of all demons. Callie lists it as one of the only two pluses to marrying Twayne.
  Mark: "The end of days" is a plus?
  Callie: Well, not for you. Kind of a gray area for demons.
  • The End of Days is a religious belief for demons. Apparently they've tried many times in the past, and it's always turned out horribly (The portal to hell actually led to a Sandals resort), and every year they host a pre-enactment.
• Driven to Suicide: Played for laughs with Randall after his penis goes missing.
• Easy Sex Change: Callie in "Mark Loves Dick", s/he even changes back at the end.
  • Not all at once, notably in the last scene we have mostly female Callie with her penis still poking under the covers.
• Evil Costume Switch: Inverted in "The Ring of Powers". Mark commands Callie to be nicer, and among the changes is from her normal tight, revealing office outfit to a more modest one-piece dress.
• Evil Plan: Callie's father has one, explained in "Kong of Queens," to increase the creature-to-human ratio in New York, thereby depleting the human population and bringing about the "End of Days."
  • Twayne apparently doesn't know or care about this plan, since in "Pilot" he lays off almost the entire Social Services division and gives their budget to the Law Enforcement division.
• Exact Words: Before the second ordeal starts in "Soulsucker", Callie tells Mark that she'll make his dreams come true. The second ordeal is to live last night's dreams in reality.
  Grimes while wearing a saddle, in his underwear, being ridden by Doug: You should be ashamed of yourself for dreaming this!
  Mark: I've been under a lot of stress lately!
• Exotic Equipment: In a city populated by wildly disparate creatures, finding someone with whom your "parts match up" can go a long way toward making a relationship work (three-hole notwithstanding).
• Expy: In a show with fictional monsters running around, there are plenty.
  • There are two different Harry Potter send-ups—the first being a bratty prankster, the second being Leonard's son/apprentice.
  • As well as the wizard of copyright infringement: "YOU, SHALL, NOT, sue!" Who apparently doubles as front-desk security at the Wizard's Guild: "YOU, SHALL, NOT, PASS! Until you sign in. It's policy."
  • "Wail Street" features a Dustin Lieber.
• Eye Scream: MAGGOT EYES!
  • And, in "Attack of Mark's Clone", Randall is shown brushing his eye (with Mark's toothbrush) and doing the same to his eye socket because it helps with the plaque buildup.
• Fan Disservice: Many of the girls Randall sleeps with. Is it any wonder his penis ran away?
  Randall: Karen, it's Randall. Did I happen to leave anything over there last night?
  Karen: Nope, just a big sweaty pile of me.
• "Fantastic Voyage" Plot: "Journey to the Center of Twayne".
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture:
  • A Running Gag is pairing up a type of fantastic creature with an ethnicity or subculture commonly found in Real Life Manhatten:
  • Demons are depicted as old money, power-broking, ethnically elitist WASPs, although Twayne is drawn and voiced to resemble a Scary Black Man.
  • Vampires are culturally similar to East Coast, Ashkenazi Jews.
  • Yetis are Eurotrash.
• Fantasy Kitchen Sink: Let's see here... zombies, demons, blobs, werewolves, robots, wizards, faceginas, land whales...
• Fantastic Racism
  • Frank Grimes hates illegal immigrants, but he really hates non-human illegal immigrants... and vampires (aka "hemos")... and Armenians.
  • Callie is shown to have experienced some for being half-human in "Soulsucker", but she's mostly too fed up about it to care anymore.
  • Randall has to hide the fact that he's a zombie from his father, who hates them (given that he fought in the human-zombie war). And there are plenty of others who hate them.
• Fantastic Slurs:
  • An anti-zombie woman muttered "Dirty leg-dragger" to the zombie Randall. Randall insulted, replied "Hey that's OUR word!"
  • Frank's hatred for vampires is partly justified by the fact that his wife left him for a vampire.
• For the Lulz: The guy who originally brought man-birds to New York and subsequently influenced their entire culture to behave like complete assholes said that he did so because they were "fucking hilarious."
• Fiery Redhead: Callie. Helped by her red hair literally looking like fire.
• Fire and Brimstone Hell: Possibly averted, as what we've seen of Hell seems to be another bustling city. However, underneath it is "Old Hell", which plays this trope straight. Apparently it's due to Yamaguchi enterprises buying Hell in the 2000s.
• Freudian Threat: When Callie sees Mark flirting with girls the night after the slept together, she threatens to burn Mark's penis until they resemble a bag of marshmallows.
• Fun T-Shirt: Two-headed worm creature Martin has one that says "2 Legit"
• Fun with Acronyms: Callie's Painful Mortal Shedding in "Treegasm".
• The Game Never Stopped: The demons' end of the world pre-enactment.
• Genderswap: Mark tries to get Randall back from a zombie cult by magically impersonating Randall's ex/stalking victim. Unfortunately, the magic goes "a little" wrong...
• Godiva Hair: Callie temporarily gets this after her PMS in "Treegasm".
• Gonna Need More X: Twayne, faced with having to have public sex with Lilith (Callie's sister), looks at her fully demonic form and utters "I think I'm gonna need a bigger Mating Bone" while said bone goes limp. Fluffers are promptly called in.
• Grossout Show: Plenty of blood, guts, and other sources of Nausea Fuel to go around.
• Head-Tiltingly Kinky - Callie's declaration that she has "at least five holes that need filling" in "Treegasm"... even counting her three-hole, that only adds up to four!
  • We know demon women give birth out the top of their skulls. So counting from the top, that's one, two, three-hole, four... and five.
  • Also, the aforementioned Destructo-Nookie.
• Heroic BSoD: Mark has a minor one in "Kong of Queens" when he discovers that his very idealism could lead to The End of Days.
• Hidden Depths
  • Frank Grimes occasionally displays traits that distinguish him from other Noble Bigots With Badges. For example, in the pilot, we learn that he has a deep and abiding respect for Prius drivers.
  • Despite being generally considered extremely naive, when pressed Mark has shown surprising manipulative skills.
  • Randall can read Latin.
    • Well, it is a dead language.
• Hold Your Hippogriffs:
  • "Demon up, Twayne!"
  • "Thank hell you're alive!"
• Homage: Plenty, including The Wizard of Oz, The Twilight Saga, Harry Potter, and Zombieland (watch out for that yellow Hummer).
• Human Resources: Very benign example. New York gets most of its electricity from the energy of the annual gay pride parade.
• Hypno Trinket: The ring of powers that Mark finds in Leonord's desk. Along with giving Mark Compelling Voice powers, it also causes Mark to begin to act like a stereotypical medieval ages knight, and fall in love with the Grotesque form of Leonard's arranged wife.
• I Have a Family: Spoofed when Randall joins a zombie cult, and the initiation requires him to kill a human. The intended victim begs for mercy, claiming to have a wife and mistress.
• I Have This Friend: When Mark announces the class will be watching a video on sexuality, Erik (the robot) says he has a friend who doesn't have reproductive organs, and asks if he has to watch it, too. Mark tells him he can tell his "friend" that the video is for everyone. Subverted, as Erik then turns to Doug (Koala man) and says, "Sorry, buddy."
• I'll Take Two Beers Too: In "Trolling for Terror", Leonard pours himself and a troll he's coaching one shot each but angrily snatches and drinks the troll's.
• I Love the Dead: Inversion in Randall's squicktacular fantasies of eating Mark, as well as the fact that he is, technically speaking, a corpse who bangs anything that moves.
  • And judging from the bizarre masturbation implements he keeps taking to Mark's room when he's at work, many things that don't move as well.
• Initiation Ceremony: The Man Club (whose members include basically every male cast member) gives Leonard a hell of a hazing. This is all kept secret from founding member Mark, who decreed there would be no hazing.
• It Will Never Catch On: In the "Wail Street" episode, Grimes has a Flash Back to him getting kicked out of Earth, Wind & Fire just before a career-making performance on Soul Train because they do not think his new style of singing called Rap would catch on.
  Band Member: Hey man, listen me and the guys have been talking, and uh, we want you out of the group.
  Grimes: But I'm the lead singer!
  Band Member: Uh, that's just it: We don't dig your style, this whole "Rapping" thing of yours is going nowhere.
  Grimes: But I'm mixing talking and music It's gonna be huge, I'm telling you!
  Band Member: People don't want to hear rhythmic-talking about street-life, they want to hear jams about boogie-wonderlands and the letting the groove get you to move! Sorry, Grimes.
• The Immodest Orgasm: In "Treegasm", Callie let's out a hellish orgasmic screech when she has sex with Mark just before molting due to her demonic PMS.
• Jerkass: Jimmy. He was a complete jerk to Frank while training him, repeatedly insulting him and putting him through brutal training while expecting Frank to figure things out himself. When Frank appears to get killed, Jimmy refuses to believe it was his fault.
• Jive Turkey: Twayne is super psyched about his new Palm Pilot.
• Joisey: Randall's birthplace, which is full of "Townie" (ie Romero-style) Zombies.
• Kiss-Kiss-Slap/Slap-Slap-Kiss: Depending on whichever Callie's in the mood for. One scene shows Callie arguing with Mark after she catches him flirting with the girl she had shape-shifted into at a bar. She then proceeds to make out with him, bash his head against a table, and finally tell him to forget the whole thing.
• Lethally Stupid: Mark in the episode "Little Ship of Horrors" nearly kills Randal of neglect after Randall turns into a plant by not giving him water or sunlight. When Mark defends that Randall instead asked for human brains, Leonard points out that he asked for them because he is still part zombie.
  Leonard(Angrily): Do you feed a baby candy all day because that's what it asks for?!
• Like Parent, Like Spouse: When Callie is temporarily enamored with Twayne in "Kong of Queens", Twayne rips off a chauffeur's arms in anger. Callie is visibly turned on and mentions that her dad ripped off limbs the same way. Callie makes her "daddy complex" explicit in "Soulsucker."
• Line-of-Sight Name: When the demon claiming to be the father of the demon baby is asked the baby's name, he sees a nearby poster on how to help someone who is choking and responds "Choking Victim?" In the end, it turns out he really was the father and he keeps the baby, but decides to keep the name Choking Victim.
• The Loins Sleep Tonight: In "Treegasm", the male tree is suffering from performance anxiety due to the entire town coming to watch him and his mate having sex. Leonard performs a "viagra" spell to help him... but this causes a different problem.
• Looks Like Orlok: In "So, You Want to Be a Vampire?", Blake's father is obviously intended as an Expy of Orlok.
• The Magnificent: The head of Hell progressed from Satan to Boruta the Omnipotent to Obizoth the Adequate to Harold the Vaguely Intimidating.
• Make Up or Break Up:Mark and Callie's relationship at first.
• Man, I Feel Like a Woman: Randall has to take a "loaner" in the form of some lady legs when he loses his lower body in "Kong of Queens" and uses them to toy with Mark all he possibly can.
• Manipulative Editing: Reality show Night Terrors.
• The Masochism Tango: And again another example of Mark and Callie's relationship, although it is rather one-sided, as Mark is relatively indifferent and Callie is a succubus who flips between hot and cold in seconds.
• Massive Numbered Siblings: Grimes and his ex-wife have fifteen daughters.
• Mating Season Mayhem: In "Demon Baby", both Callie and Twayne get "in heat". Her due to getting into contact with the demon baby and getting maternal urges and him due to smelling her maternal urges. Callie begins sweating all the time, and causes her nipples to combust while Twayne grows a phallyc organ on his chest called "the mating bone".
• Meaningful Name: Mark Lilly (lily-white, innocent and idealistic), Callie Maggotbone (a sound-alike to a war criminal mass-murderer), and Leonard Powers (a wizard, so he has 'em). And Grimes.
• Minor Flaw, Major Breakup Mark dumped his first girlfriend in the hospital due to the fact she was allergic to his favorite food. And she was in the hospital simply because she forced herself to eat said egg for him.
• Monsters Anonymous: The Department of Integration serves this purpose.
• Monster of the Week: A standard plot is one of New York's non-human citizens joining Mark's group, only to cease being their problem by the end of the episode (through death, imprisonment, or occasionally even successful integration).
• My Hovercraft Is Full of Eels: Mark's first few attempts at speaking manbird.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Most of the demons. Callie Maggotbone. Twayne the Boneraper. Of the Connecticut Bonerapers. Such a proud family.
• Navel-Deep Neckline: Cat Girl Sabrina Maroney has such a deep cleavage that almost exposes her breasts.
• Negative Continuity: Blown-off limbs reappearing five minutes later, Mark's Callie-inflicted wounds healing overnight, etc.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: In "Hell for the Holidays", Mark discovers the clone of himself that Callie is making, and reveals it to her father, who promptly destroys it. It is a shame that that clone was meant to save him from a fight to the death with Twayne.
  • Thanks to Frank Grimes having absolutely no sense of how far is too far when it comes to pranks, the next time the serial killing actor gets out of jail he will try murdering everyone at the DOI for real just like he did in the prank on Mark.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: The inevitable Judge Judy clone for the courtroom scenes.
  • Also "Lady Hoo-Ha".
• Noodle Incident: In the finale Leonard's hologram form visits Mark to notify him of his new jobs: Fish Gutter, Knife-Wielding Spray Paint Addict, and an overweight Vietnamese demigod, with no explanation to how he got into those positions.
  Leonard: Yea... I found out that I really need structure.
  • In Treegasm, Leonard explains that the gay pride parade keeps the power grid running.
  • "It's '87 all over again!"
• No Periods, Period: Averted. Not just by Callie's "painful mortal shedding", but also one scene in Randall and Mark's kitchen has a calendar with her actual period marked out on it. It runs for two weeks...
• Not Really a Birth Scene: A second-season episode presents Mark's oversized soul in this manner, complete with Randall acting like a Panicky Expectant Father.
• One-Gender Race: Martin, and other two-headed worm creatures, are all direct descendants of Mitch, the first of his(their?) kind.
• One-Winged Angel: All demons seem to have a bigger, more horrific form. However, Callie has to remove her human soul to access it, while Lilith, Callie's also half-human sister, simply rips her skin off. It may be that demons have different forms for different contexts.
• Only Sane Employee: Following the layoffs in "Pilot", Mark is the only one left who actually cares about the social work department. Too bad he's a spineless wimp. This is somewhat deconstructed in the later episodes, where his well-meaning morality means very little with supernatural creatures.
• Our Demons Are Different: Red/pink skin with horns. Varying in degrees of evil, but are mostly just apathetic towards humans. They do practice barbaric traditions with their own kind, such as eating their young. They also have bizarre anatomy, such as lactating fire when in heat, giving birth through the top of their skull, being full of live snakes, and males that grow a giant barbed "mating bone" out of their sternum to correspond with the female "three-hole", a big suggestively-shaped glowing portal they can open on their abdomen.
• Our Monsters Are Weird: You have your regular monsters like vampires and werewolves, followed by minor variants like Cyclopses that shoot acid out ot their eyes, you have your more creative things like a sentient (Canadian) brain with one eye, and then you have land whales.
• Our Souls Are Different: They're small, somewhat watery glowing balls that can be physically handled, even by Muggles. Human men and women are blue and pink, respectively while Callie the half-demon has a golden soul. There reside within the body between the navel and lower intestine in an organ called the pooch and can apparently grow with good deeds to the point of crushing other organs. Hell runs a stock market-esque "soul exchange".
• Our Vampires Are Different: The show's Fantasy Kitchen Sink seems to lump several kinds of vampires together without much regard for consistency. Blake is a Twilight-style vampire who looks gorgeous (although he can transform into a large scary-looking bat), while Blake's father is a hideous Nosferatu-style vampire, and it's implied that sunlight is grievously harmful to some vampires, but Blake merely sparkles and Tristan's stepfather tans pretty well after applying a generous amount of sunblock.
• Our Werewolves Are Different: They retain their intelligence (but do gain a love of chasing cats), and the transformation can regenerate missing limbs. They also seem to remain permanently in wolf form instead of changing back and forth.
• Our Zombies Are Different:
  • Apparently they retain full intelligence, but are still rotting and have cravings for flesh and brains. Mark's roommate Randall Skeffington is just one example.
  • The more "traditional" type of groaning, leg-dragging, mindless zombie is seen en masse in "Blob Gets Job". Apparently, there were enough of them to fight in a war against humans in the '60s, and they're still pretty common in some towns. Randall hates them for just reinforcing the negative stereotype of zombies.
• Out-of-Clothes Experience: When Leonard has Mark kill himself to perform his Back from the Dead spell, Mark awakens in a black void sans any of his clothing. The afterlife employer who meets him there tells him people's clothes don't make the transition.
• Painful Transformation:
  • The werewolf guy in "An American Werewolf in America". Not only is the change itself painful, but adding to that is the regrowth of an entire arm!
  • The demon baby in "Demon Baby". Though it shows no sign of being in pain, Randall's description of it sounds very painful, as we humans could only imagine what a vagina eating itself feels like.
  • Callie's "painful mortal shedding".
• Parental Abandonment:
  • Played for laughs, and done with noble intentions, but ultimately subverted in "Demon Baby."
  • And revisited by Mark, when it's revealed that his father has been "stuck in traffic" since he was five years old.
• Parental Sexuality Squick: In "Callie and her Sister", Callie walks in on her parents having Sex with the Ex and is horrified.
• Place Worse Than Death: Randall gets hit by a bus in episode 7, tearing him in half, with his top half stuck to the bus. Because he's a zombie, this kind of traumatic injury isn't all that serious, and he seems only moderately annoyed... until he realizes the bus is heading to New Jersey, at which point he lets out a Big "NO!".
• Planet Of Copy Hats: In the first appearance of a man bird, he says "Suck my balls!" after crapping on a guy. When an entire episode dedicated to man birds rolls around, their entire language is limited to different inflections of that phrase and their culture revolves around being an asshole.
  • Debatable. It could be that the man-bird was apologizing for crapping on the guy (when you gotta go, you gotta go) in his language, the only language any man-bird speaks. The guy, not being a man-bird interpreter, would have taken the phrase at face value and thought the man-bird really was telling him to suck his balls.
  • Also a Chekhov's Gun.
• Platonic Life-Partners: Mark and his roommate Randall.
• Pick Up Babes With Babes: Randall's first reaction upon learning Mark is taking care of a demon baby is to use it to pick up women. Notably, when Mark is taking care of the demon baby at the park, one of the girls there stares at him while blushing.
• Pillow Pistol: Mark starts keeping a gun near his bed when Randall starts to want to eat his toes.
• Pitbull Dates Puppy: Mark is a pretty decent guy while Callie is seriously abusive. Kinda inevitable given that she's literally the spawn of Satan. She's working on not being like that though.
• Poke the Poodle: Callie deliberately incites this while in a competition for who can be the evilest in order the become the ruler of hell, a job she doesn't want. She makes it seem that her idea of evil is taking a soda can from the "recycled" bin to the regular trash bin.
• Product Placement: Pinkberry is touted as the healthy, low-fat dessert of every girl's dreams in "Lilly and the Beast". Of course, Mark also points out the darker side of the product.
• Promoted to Parent: Callie and Mark become Lillith's parents for a few days after Lillith tries to kill her human mother.
• Pyromaniac: Jerry the ant-man.
• Rapid Aging:
  • Callie's sister Lilith aged one year every day. Surprisingly it had more to do with the hormones her mom took than her demonic nature.
  • When Leonard's fiancée thaws out in "The Ring of Powers", she instantly becomes a gray, pimply, drooling ancient mess. However, this may be due to Leonard's freezing spell being terrible.
  • When Mark has Leonard cast a spell to make Mark look like Randall's ex in an effort to convince him to not join a cult, Mark begins rapidly aging due to the spell being a curse. The only way to save himself is to have sex with a man to completion. By the time he can find someone he's so old the only person who will do the deed is Grimes.
• Reading the Stage Directions Out Loud: Twayne's speech as General of the pre-enactment army.
  Twayne: My brother died as he lived: angry, bitter and full of hate. He's gone now, and we must carry on as he would have wanted. Release crow in parenthesis.
• Really 700 Years Old: Wizards age very slowly. Leonard is at least 500 years old but looks to be in his 60s, while his apprentice Lionel is 50 but looks 11.
• Retcon: Twayne's Mating Bone grew back just in time for his marriage to Lilith, after it got cut it off in "Demon Baby".
• Retired Badass Doug. No, seriously, he was formerly a highly skilled killer.
• Rhymes on a Dime: Quoggle the troll in "Trolling for Terror".
• Ridiculously Alive Undead: Randall the zombie does not sleep, so he just eats ice cream all night long.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter:
  • Doug (Koala Man). Possibly Ugly Cute depending on how you feel about koalas.
• Rousseau Was Right: Many, but not all, of the monsters Mark helps generally find themselves in better humor afterwards.
  • Averted "The Manbirds", where, although Mark succeeds in raising up the baby Manbird in a more nurturing environment, it causes him to be utterly rejected by his father...on his deathbed, no less.
• Sarcastic Clapping: Frank does this in response to one of Mark's idealistic statements, but then gets irritated when Leonard confuses it with a Slow Clap.
  Frank: [sees Leonard clapping slowly]] No. I'm mock clapping.
  Leonard: As am I.
  Frank: No, you aren't! You're going for that slow, building applause thing, Like all those '80s movies.
  Leonard: There's virtually no difference in our claps!
• Satan: Historically was the original ruler of Hell. The current head of his clan (in this case, Mr. Maggotbone) is referred to as the Devil.
• See You in Hell: Callie leaves this written on Mark Lilly's bedroom wall after they start sleeping together. She wants to introduce him to her parents.
• Serious Business:
  • For Mark, eggs. Very serious.
  • Birthdays, for the entire Department of Integration staff. If the birthday department's budget is cut below 67% the Integration Treaty falls to pieces.
• Sexiness Score: One of Aldremach's many insults to Mark is considering him a "Zero".
• Sex Is Violence: Callie's Destructo-Nookie can sometimes be too much for the human Mark, as she can get extremely violent. Randall once claimed their sex sounds like Mark was being murdered.
  Mark: [Callie is treating Mark's post-coital wounds while in bed] I don't mind it a little rough sometimes, but is it necessary to take actual chunks out of me?
  Callie: Just be grateful I didn't bring my pitchfork. You do not want to know where that has been.
• Sexy Silhouette: Mark and Callie's nude silhouettes behind a shower curtain in "Demon Baby".
• Sexy Surfacing Shot: Callie coming out of the pool in a red bikini in "Wet Hot Demonic Summer", in a Shout-Out of the Pool Scene in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, but when Callie takes off her top it reveals she had an even smaller bikini top underneath.
• Shoulders-Up Nudity:
  • When Marks finds himself naked in the afterlife, the camera always stays above his waist.
  • In "Demon Baby", when Mark and Callie are taking a shower together, the camera cuts just above her breasts and his waist.
• Shout-Out
  • The Zombiology building from Episode 8 is clearly the main building at Pratt Institute, due to a lot of the show's interns going there.
  • Brian Peppers briefly shows up in episode 9 to kidnap one of the Leonard clones.
  • Clark Dungaree is the third person to go by that alias, the first one having retired fifteen years ago, and is now living like a king in Patagonia.
  • Fans of The Flight of Dragons will recognize one of the wizards in the Season 2 premiere - he even shares the same Elemental Powers!
  • The climax of "Wet Hot Demonic Summer" features an enormous, gratuitously bloody fight scene where two of the fighters drop everything to make out.
  • "Callie and Her Sister" includes plenty of The Omen (1976) references, especially a remake of the scene where Damien runs his mother off a staircase landing with his Big Wheel, along with a woman shouting to Callie that "It's all for you, Callie! It's all for you!"
  • The protagonist of Grimes' favorite show, Dishonorably Discharged, resembles Adrian Monk. It apparently has a heavy Myth Arc, and had a controversial Gainax Ending written by Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse.
  • Possibly to the 1976 parody film Murder By Death - several of the names are similar (Twain/Twayne, Miss Skeffington/Randall Skeffington, Marcel/Mark).
  • The schoolgirl in the Tokyo slide during Treegasm is Tsukasa.
  • The funeral home shown in Kill Mark Kill is called Scrimm's. Angus Scrimm played the evil funeral director in the Phantasm films.
    • The same episode features Mark using a sleeping bag that has Pinkie Pie on it.
  • In Pilot, Aldramach Maggotbone's wife is a Daemonette. Figures.
  • The opening of "Mummy Dearest" has a Tomb Raider that starts looking more like Lara Croft the more dangers she faces.
  • In "Little Ship of Horrors", Dren from Splice is seen abroad the ship, and in the audience of Leonard's performance.
• Shown Their Work: Admiral Maggotbone's first name is Aldramach, a play on Adramelech, a pagan god co-opted as a demon by Judeo-Christian mythology.
• Sibling Rivalry: Callie's and her Lillith become bitter rivals, with Lillith doing her best to spite her sister just because. This includes trying to steal Mark away, even though he technically her adopted father.
• Sickeningly Sweet: Demons seem to consider Mark's completely pure good intentions nauseating.
• Single Tear:
  • Doug (Koala Man) is prone to these.
  • Callie let's out a single tear when she decides to marry Twayne to get the demon baby... and her tear sets her paperwork on fire.
  • In "Hell for the Holidays", Mark sheds one of these over the death of the clone he raised. It turned what could have been perceived as a very callous act by Mark (even with his survival on the line) into a reminder of how much he really does care. Though that might be more of "I'm proud that he managed to learn to say 'Wait, what?'" rather than mourning his demise.
• Sleeping with the Boss: Mark's Love Interest is his boss Callie, who's constantly pulling him aside for Sex at Work.
• The Smurfette Principle: Of the six main characters, Callie is the only female.
• Social Services Does Not Exist: Inverted. Not only does it exist, it's being played sympathetically for once.
• Soul Jar: Played With. Breaking Leonards's wand kills him temporarily, but the road to revival is a long and complicated one, involving 500 tiny baby leonards.
• Spanner in the Works: What Mark pulls off in Wail Street after being extorted into selling his soul, the largest one in the Western Hemisphere. After agreeing to the deal, he sinned his ass off in order to screw over Callie's dad and retain his Soul.
• Speed Sex: The mating of the trees in "Treegasm" ends up over very quickly when the male ends up having "premature esapulation".
• Stealth Pun: Man Birds cock fight with their genitalia.
• Swallowed Whole: In the first episode Bart completely swallows and then spits out Mark so he could "know how it feels to be chewed up and spit out by the system"
• Take That!: "So, You Want to Be a Vampire?" was pretty much a mild jab at The Twilight Saga the entire time.
• Tears of Blood: Twayne leaks them whenever he gets... competitive.
• Tertiary Sexual Characteristics: Apparently the only noticeable difference between male and female dragons is eye shadow.
• Theme Naming: Twayne and his siblings all have normal human names that begin with 'W', then with a 'T' added to it.
• There Can Be Only One: How Leonard resurrects after Mark accidentally kills him. Not originally how it was supposed to work, but it still gets the desired result. Well, aside from the Vicodin addiction.
• There Was a Door: Randall's introduction involves breaking down Mark's down, making him look like a feral zombie, only for Mark to point out annoyed that the door was unlocked.
• They Walk Among Us: The show is all about this trope, taking place in a version of New York City that is inhabited by monsters and supernatural creatures.
• This Is Going to Suck: Randall quotes the trope when he finds out Mark accidentally outed him as a zombie to his parents.
  Randall: (sees his father in the living room loading a shotgun, dressed in army fatigues) Yeah, that's dad shootin' gun. This is going to SUCK!
• Toilet Humor: From zombies eating brains and demons eating zombies, to bird-headed people shitting on your shoulder and telling you that you can suck their balls.
• Token Human: Croatian Man, the sole human in Mark's therapy group.
• Too Kinky to Torture: Sorta. When Callie has Mark's clone take over his life, one scene opens up with her tied to a rack and him holding a bullwhip, and she literally states "The other Mark never offered to torture me!" Then it just gets subverted in that she's too mentally distracted to enjoy it, giving out the most monotone, forced moans ever heard even as he's stripping her with the whip.
• Toplessness from the Back: In "Demon Baby", when Callie walks out of the shower, she only has a Modesty Towel wrapped around her waist, but since she has her back to the camera, only her naked back and Sideboob are exposed. At the end of the episode, when she sneaks into Mark's room and strips down, we also on see her from the back.
• Trademark Favorite Food:
  • Mark's love of eggs is actually mentioned very rarely, but it's pretty extreme. He even subscribes to a magazine that's just about eggs. It was also revealed that Mark coldly dumped a girl who was more or less perfect because she was deathly allergic to eggs. And he did it while she was in the hospital after she tried the eggs for him!
  • Randal's craving for human flesh could be seen as a form of this, many of his jokes revolve around eating and/or dismembering people. Apart from his sexual escapades, the deisre to eat people is his most noted characteristic.
• Tsundere: Callie, who flips back and forth, as she's half-human. Unfortunately, she's also half-demon.
  Callie: You're lucky I don't turn your dick into a bag of marshmallows right now!
  Fishman: I would like to see that, actually.
• The Virus: "Mad Larry Disease" converts the infected into Larry King, and is caused by a King taking a combination of Plavix, Adderall, and Viagra.
• Urban Fantasy: If one were to take The World of Darkness and make it the setting for a sit-com, this is pretty much what you'd get.
• Van Helsing Hate Crime:
  • Van Helsing is referred to as a "psycho" by a vampire, and Grimes is a fan (even has the lunchbox).
  • Apparently, Van Helsing wrote a book entitled "Mein Vampf", an obvious reference to Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf".
• Vetinari Job Security: As useless and extraneous as Twayne may appear to be at the DOI, his absence from his post causes Mark to bring the whole of New York to the brink of nuclear annihilation on top of a full-scale interspecies civil war. Twayne fixes the whole mess in five minutes with a birthday cake.
• Virtuous Character Copy: A Whole-Plot Reference of The Twilight Saga has Grimes' daughter and her boyfriend Blake, who are essentially positive takes on Bella Swan and Edward Cullen respectively. Blake lacks all of Edward's controlling and abusive tendencies, and is a Nice Guy who would be the perfect husband and son-in-law; meanwhile, Grime's daughter is a drama queen and a bit of a pretentious know-it-all, but she's significantly more sympathetic and likable than Bella.
• What Does She See in Him?: Platonic version. In one episode a guy reveals he's been stalking Mark for years because Randal picked him to be his roommate instead of him and he doesn't understand why. Turns out Randal wasn't that impressed with either applicants but chose Mark because he heard he worked at the D.O.I and thought he meant "Dudgeon of Intercourse". He was just trying to get free admittance.
• What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway?: In "Wet Hot Demonic Summer", we see that many wizards have normal jobs and powers relating to them. For example, the Wizard of Air is an air-traffic controller but also gets to fly around on broomsticks. Leonard is the Wizard of Social Services, and his power is... being a lazy alcoholic bureaucrat. His apprentice Lionel is not keen on this.
• Work Com: Technically it is, but it's a really weird one.
• Worthless Foreign Degree:
  • Grimes's Hispanic maid went to medical school.
  • As did the Croatian man, though he actually is terrible at surgery.
    • On the plus side, he'll perform any surgery for 16 dollars.
• You Shall Not Pass!: The Wizard's Guild main building. Until you sign in.
• Zombie Apocalypse: More of a quagmire, really. In this universe, it stands in for the Vietnam War.

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