WesternAnimation Episode Three: ...Get right back up...
I'll spare you the rule of three cliche. Despite a rough start, Hazbin Hotel does manage to find its footing.
Episode Three has a lot going on: dismayed by Serpentious' proclivity for violence and the guests' general misanthropy, Charlie asks Vaggie to help the gang build trust. Vaggie decides to start things off with a trust fall segment played entirely for laughs; we get more casual sexual harassment from Angel, more standoffishness from Husk, and more off-putting behavior from Niffty.
More interestingly, however, we also get an injection of earnesty and vulnerability from Serpentious. Thus begins our dear, beloved snakeboy's transformation into the emotional centerpiece of the show. His villainous megalomania couples excellently with his sweet, awkward sincerity, producing one of the most endearing members of the cast. For the time being, however, he's still largely relegated to the role of Butt-Monkey.
Meanwhile, Alastor and Serpentious' delightful eggboy minions attend a meeting between Hell's overlords. We're introduced to the arachnoid archdemon Zestial en route, whose cordial, considerate nature contrasts strongly with the insolence and arrogance that typify the Vees.
The other overlords in attendance are similarly composed. Carmine is the standout character here, both in design and dialogue. Her enormous, monstrous arms are paired with the grace and footwear of a professional ballerina, and her cold, formal manner gives way to righteous indignation when a dismissve Velvette crashes the meeting by throwing an angel's decapitated head on the table and urging the overlords to war.
When the overlords express their reservations, Velvette launches into "Respectless," a song that has many of the same flaws as "Stayed Gone." The lyrics are oftentimes as awkward and unwieldy as the word respectless itself. As with "Stayed Gone," "Respectless" says a lot and shows little. Although her domain is as nebulous and superficial as "social media boss bitch," Velvette is nevertheless framed as "the backbone of the Vees." There's little more to her than that, however, and, just like Alastor v. Vox, that superficiality makes it hard to care about this transparently tertiary conflict.
Back with Charlie and the gang, Angel takes the group to a sex dungeon (trust is nothing if not essential to BDSM) in response to the first exercise's failure. The second verse is the same as the first, right down to the character beats. The bit of worldbuilding you get here is intriguing, though: Hell's kink culture (at least at this club) seems to be entirely above board, avoiding the obvious choice of presenting infernal BDSM as rife with abuse and exploitation.
Alack, this outing proves to be yet another failure. As Charlie's patience runs thin, Vaggie decides to force the group to learn to trust each other by throwing them into one of Hell's active warzones. Charlie is mortified by the prospect of sending her guests into combat, however, and her exasperated disapproval causes Vaggie to leave disheartened by what seems to be yet another failure.
We hop back and forth between Vaggie and Carmine now, deftly weaving our A and B plots together with one of the show's better songs: "Whatever It Takes." Both parts of the duet are jam-packed with insights into the characters and the world they inhabit, giving us a better understanding of infernal politics, tying up the loose end introduced at the end of episode one, and exploring more complex character dynamics than those depicted in previous episodes.
The song marks a real turning point for the show. Afterwards, we're shown that Vaggie's exercise paid off, and the hotel's guests exhibit newfound camaraderie. Couple that with some of the overlords' (who have heretofore been little more than imposing, borderline monstrous figures) displays of genuine compassion, and suddenly the "flight of fancy" that is the Hazbin Hotel seems downright vital.
WesternAnimation Fantastic
I was a huge fan of the pilot and I'm very pleased that Vivienne Medrano managed to both meet and exceed the standards set by it.
The animation is incredible. I especially love the character designs, from the protagonists to the background characters (all of whom look unique).The characters themselves are fantastic. There wasn't a character I disliked (except in a Love to Hate sort of way), from the main characters to the villains to the one-shots. Charlie is so much fun to watch: her idealism is really infectious. Alastor is as scene-stealing as everyone says, and I'm glad that Medrano managed to find the perfect balance, avoiding making him too villainous or too heroic, too sympathetic or too unlikeable, too powerful or too weak. He is such an amazing character to watch, a hilarious and terrifying enigma. All the other characters are fun and given surprising depths (with Sir Pentious, the Plot-Irrelevant Villain from the pilot, being especially surprising in this regard).
The songs are absolutely fantastic. They're catchy, varied, move the plot forward and are accompanied by gorgeous visuals. The singing is as fantastic as you might expect from a Musical-trained cast.
The acting is superb. Everyone is the The Other Darrin from the pilot and the performances vary from great but a slight downgrade, on a similar level or, in many cases, far exceeding the standard set by the pilot actors. Regardless, all give fantastic performances. The best would probably have to be Erika Henningsen as Charlie (who really imbues her with a wonderful naivety without going over-the-top), Keith David as Husk (who sings beautifully and performs the character's complexities well), Amir Talai as Alastor (Bosco and Brown were fantastic but I think I might well prefer Talai, though it is very close) and Blake Roman as Angel (especially during 'Poison').
The plot is fun and has surprising depth: I like, for example, how Heaven isn't shown to be pure evil and that some angels are Well-Intentioned Extremist (Sera) or even genuinely good (Emily). Angel's plotline was especially well-done, helping to contextualise his character and tying nicely into the main narrative in episode 6. The dialogue is fun and at times genuinely funny (Nifty and Pentious are probably the funniest characters). I understand why some people are put off by the swearing but I barely noticed it and, for most characters, felt it was appropriate. The one criticism I would agree with is the pacing. I didn't find it too much of a problem: most of the characters had a decent amount of time on screen and enough development was shown that it certainly didn't ruin the show. Still, 10 episodes would have been nice. Hopefully season 2 will be longer.
Overall, this show is absolutely fantastic, and one of my favourites. If you're a fan of Medrano's previous works, I would definitely recommend. Even if you're not, I'd still recommend giving it a shot, there's a lot of good here enjoy.
WesternAnimation An Underwhelming Underworld
This is simultaneously one of the most hated and popular adult animated shows of the year. Some sing its praises and shower it in acclaim, some call it little more than putrid dreck. I personally don’t think either reputation is warranted. It’s not a terrible show or a great one. It’s entertaining and sometimes reached some good emotional heights, but mostly it’s middling.
The best and worst part of the show are its characters. Hazbin relies on an ensemble cast and lives and dies off the comedy. And it has a genuinely great cast! So how is that comedy? Eeeeh… it’s not for me. A lot of the jokes are based around the characters being extremely loud and awkward (this website refers to this as characters being "Adorkable", or swearing and sex jokes. There are occasions that the show can be funny, but that humor style doesn’t gel with me and it never made me laugh. As for the characters:
The two designated comic relief characters, Niffty and Sir Pentious, hit their marks well. Pentious of course is overcome with Adorkability later on in the show, but his bumbling Cobra Commander-esque characterization and genuine kindness make him quite likable. Nifty meanwhile is a complete lunatic and her scatterbrained, eccentric antics is quite endearing, although I wish she had been given more depth, especially since Kimiko Glenn is just as good at being dramatic as she is at comedy.
Angel Dust is at times annoying and often uncomfortably sexually harasses people, but this isn’t a knock at the show since it’s meant to be a deliberate flaw. Whenever the show focuses on him, he shows quite a bit of depth and tragedy. It certainly feels like the show should have centered around him more, as the episodes about him are infinitely more interesting than Charlie and Alastor’s antics. Husk, the hotel’s bartender, is quite likable as well with his growing bond with Angel. Keith David is great as always, and his general apathy, disgust, and confusion to the elements I don’t like made him my favorite.
Alastor is the fan-favorite, and he’s a fun character. However, I feel like the show gave him too much screentime for a character who works better on the sidelines. So much of him is shrouded in mystery that there’s not too much depths with him to be plumbed. He’s well-written, but the episodes centering around him could have been much better utilized focusing on the other characters.
And now to Charlie and Vaggie… I don’t like them. Charlie is so loud and upbeat that I found her obnoxious and grating. I understand why people like her and she’s not unsympathetic, but she was really annoying to me. Vaggie’s VA Stephanie Beatriz gives a bored and lifeless performance, which I attribute to bad direction as Beatriz is a pretty good and expressive actress. I wouldn’t put it past the show to have essentially just tried to make the character into Rosa Diaz 2.0, which absolutely does not work. Since these are the main characters, I had a lot of trouble connecting to the world and their struggles.
The villains are great. Vox, Velvette, and Valentino are all really entertaining and amusing while still striding the line of being menacing. Many have criticized Adam and Lute for lacking nuance, which is a pretty good critique. But Adam is a sincerely fun loathsome bad guy you want to see defeated, so he serves his purpose in that regard.
Another problem is that the show seems muddled in what it wants to say. There are some commentary on Christian conservatism, the nature of punishment, the prison industrial complex, and how good and evil is dictated mainly by privilege and societal circumstances. But it’s all muddled and stays in the background for zany shenanigans. The show really wants to be a dark, emotional dramedy and a zany, surreal comedy at the same time, and the tones don’t always gel. If they had picked one or the other, it could have worked, but the tones are a mess. I personally preferred the darker episodes, since the writing team seems much better at those than at the straightforward comedy. I think it’s a show that can certainly improve over time, but as is it’s quite flawed. In the end, it does have the potential to be great… it just needs to decide what kind of show it wants to be first.
WesternAnimation As Fun As Red Tide at the Beach
Hazbin Hotel was first announced by Vivziepop some eight years ago. After all that time, alongside a whole cult of personality built up around its creator, the show has finally made it to Amazon Prime via the arthouse studio A24. As much as I want to celebrate any such marathon effort by an indie animator, I can't bring myself to do that with Hazbin Hotel. I can barely bring myself to finish the fourth episode of the miniseries.
The premise of this adult cartoon comedy is that Hell is overflowing with demons, and it has gotten so bad that the only way to keep the population in check is through annual massacres. The princess of Hell, Charlie, resolves to find another way; rehabilitating demons into being better creatures in her brand new, dysfunctional hotel. So follows wacky hijinks with colourful characters. By colourful, I mean the one colour, mauve.
This is the first problem of the show; everything in Hell is saturated in shades of wine, right down to every last over-designed character. It leads to monotonous visuals, despite the clear efforts to make unique demons. We have one character called Alastor, who has a monocle and suit, a fuzzy radio voice, shark teeth, clock eyes, furry fox ears and occasional antlers too. It is a jumble of character parts that don't really have anything to do with each other. Most of the characters are like that, to the point where it makes them all kind of visually uncommunicative and confused.
The far bigger problem though is the writing. This is billed as a comedy show, and Hazbin Hotel's approach to comedy is to have every character say "fuck" a lot, and that's it, that's the joke, they said fuck a lot. Not only do the characters look like something off of a 14 year old's Tumblr page, the jokes do too. It was so desperately unfunny I found it unbearable to keep watching by the third episode. On top of that, the show at one point violently whiplashes the audience between tones, moving from comedy killing and dismemberment one minute to a serious sexual exploitation subplot the next, both undermining each other. The only quality bit of writing consists of some of the musical numbers, clearly produced by someone with far more talent.
In a previous review of the pilot, I talked about how much the show desperately needed better oversight to workshop the characters and the material, and it looks like A24 have instead been completely hands off with them. After all, with their pilot racking up tens of millions of views, who could argue with those results? They clearly just let Vivziepop get on with it, and that's probably going to please a lot of people. So perhaps that's it, perhaps I'm not getting it because I'm not 14. But then again, if you're reading this, you're probably not either though. And you're in for an insufferable show that's irritating on the eyes and ears.
WesternAnimation Episode One: How to Shoot Yourself in the Foot...
Hazbin Hotel does not leave a good first impression. The series practically requires you to have watched the pilot prior, and the first two episodes of its first season are easily its least compelling.
Episode 1 starts us off with an unnecessary exposition dump that doesn't even explain who the main characters are before segueing into an A Plot that centers on Adam, a character far too insufferable for his own good (to the point that you begin to question why he's even in charge of the exterminators given his gross personal incompetence).
I can almost see what they were going for: the first man ever, filled with the knowledge of evil and raised to a position of uncontested authority over the lives of the damned, embodies every stereotype of toxic masculinity you could ever imagine. He's the primary antagonist for season 1, so surely they'll do something with this, right? Of course not; Adam remains a caricature of an obnoxious frat bro douchebag for the next 7 episodes, never rising above the simplest possible depiction of such a character.
The stakes Adam leaves us with—the extermination is coming slightly earlier!—aren't very exciting, either. Telling us our protagonists are fighting against slightly more of the status quo does not an effective hook make.
The B Plot, meanwhile, does its own poor job of explaining why we should care about the extermination to begin with, showing us our cast of future extermination victims at its most flanderized. Hell is full of unrepentant assholes that the world would be better off without and, as of episode 1, our lovable assholes remain wholly unrepentant.
The framing device used to show us these characters, Vaggie's struggle to shoot a commercial for the hotel, is then instantaneously solved by Alastor, rendering the previous several minutes pointless beyond their depiction of the cast at its most flanderized. Angel Dust's main contribution to this segment is sexual harassment. Niffty, the most child-coded 22-yr-old I've yet encountered in a work of fiction, is used entirely for comedic effect (and, to be fair, her scenes are funny). Alastor is little more than aloof, enigmatic, and ridiculously overpowered in the same way that a Slenderman OC is, while Husk is literally just aloof.
There is, nevertheless, an off-kilter charm to the whole thing. Episode 1 is Hazbin at its most indulgent, bearing its plaque-choked heart for all the world to see. The show is strangely cohesive despite every character looking like they were plucked straight from a queer emo kid's sketchbook circa 2007. There's even a kind of comfort to the characters' initial simplicity: they're the over-the-top archetypes of edgy "babby's-first-RP" forums the world over.
Episode 1 of Hazbin Hotel is essentially "Spencer's Gifts meets Hot Topic: the TV Show," and, before you know it, you can't help but want to wander into the back of the store and gawk at all the freaky stuff that so intrigued you as a brooding, bicurious teenager.
WesternAnimation If you liked Helluva Boss and don't mind fast pacing, you'll like this
Feels like this is a fairly obvious statement considering they have the same creator, but odds are you will have the same opinion of this as you would for Helluva. It has a lot of the same strengths, the humor is great, the characters are all fun, and it can transition to more dramatic moments pretty well. The songs are also great overall, with Loser Baby being a stand out for me. I haven't disliked an episode so far, though I do think some are better than others.
My biggest issue with the show is the pacing, as I feel things move along way too fast. The first 6 episodes take place over the course of about five months, and a lot of stuff gets crammed into that time. It makes it feel like some fun potential stories got rushed because Viz only got greenlit 8 episodes in a season, so things like Angel's slow redemption and Lucifer's choice to help out felt rush. Some characters got a bit rushed to, with Emily being a good example. She's likable, but I feel like we could have used another episode to get to know her so we can really see her form a friendship with Charlie and decide to support the hotel. I think the show could have benefitted from another 4 episodes to slow down the pace and allow us to get explore the characters and the arcs.
All in all though, very solid show. I enjoyed it for the most part and can't wait for more.
WesternAnimation Episode Two: ...And Slip in a Puddle of Your Own Piss...
Hazbin Hotel does not leave a good second impression, either.
Episode 2 focuses primarily on Vox, the seeming leader of a trio of overlords known as the Vees. Vox is a hypnotic, screen-headed media mogul devoted to improving his reputation and consolidating his power through brain-washing TV broadcasts. He is depicted as a force for the future, a self-serving tech genius with a wi-fi motif.
Vox's recently reignited feud with Alastor serves as the A-Plot of Episode 2, and the discrepancy between how seriously the show treats either character could not be more conspicuous. Alastor is an inscrutable being of immense eldritch power, and Vox is a self-aggrandizing tech bro who looks like he graduated from knockoff Rushmore. The second Alastor deigns to pay Vox any mind, he immediately drives him off the air and decisively ends their spat in his favor.
The show attempts to make this a battle between hip youngsters and jaded oldheads, but it gets completely lost in the sauce in the process. The characters' technological motifs are simply set-dressing for a musical number that tries far too hard to be clever. Neither character expresses a vision of their ideal Hell save that they're in charge, leaving us to wonder why it even matters that one of them likes TV and new file formats (which is such a bizarre characteristic to turn into a supposedly stinging insult to begin with) while the other prefers radio and analog media. The song fails to show us what makes either character cutting edge or old fashioned beyond these superficial signifiers.
Indeed, rather than tell us anything new about the characters, "Stayed Gone" does little more than vomit exposition at the audience. Even that it does poorly: we don't actually learn what changed during Alastor's absence (aside from everyone pivoting to video, I guess), and we aren't told why the Vees are even relevant outside of their respective industries.
After his humiliating defeat, Vox attempts to infiltrate Hazbin Hotel using wannabe Vee Sir Pentious (his name doesn't even start with V!). Why they need an in-person infiltrator at all when Vox can see through any device's screen (half the residents have smart phones!) is never adequately explained, and Pentious' espionage involves little more than placing a very obvious camera in an office regardless.
Pentious' treachery is revealed his very first night at the hotel, however, and he is immediately given a chance to redeem himself and become a full-time resident. Part of me is glad that they got this out of the way ASAP, but another part wonders why they even bothered with this subplot if they weren't going to use it for anything beyond getting Pentious checked in.
Episode 2 is far too focused on setting up future arcs than it is functioning as an entertaining episode on its own, and it does so well before the show has provided a compelling plot-hook to justify such setup. If it weren't for the three episode rule, I would've dropped the show outright here. Nevertheless, I persevered.