It’s easy to root for Hazbin Hotel. Creator, head writer, character designer, and director Vivienne “VivziePop” Medrano began her career, like most children of the Internet, on webcomics and YouTube, crafting animated fanvids for pop songs and uniquely gothic-inspired original shorts to a growing cult fanbase whilst she tried to realise her dream project: a 2D adult animation musical set in Hell.
After a few years of false starts and harsh industry lessons, Medrano created her own independent animation studio, SpindleHorse Toons, and painstakingly put together a half-hour pilot for said dream project over the course of several years with funding from her Patreon, before releasing the episode onto YouTube in 2019 where it became a viral sensation. 100 million views as of this writing, universal praise for its striking high-quality animation, and an ongoing spinoff series, Helluva Boss, which is in production on a third still-independently-produced season. And then, as the fairy tale bow, Hollywood came a-knocking a few months later, with A24 and Bento Box picking up Hazbin for a full series and a second season renewal confirmed months before premiere.
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Hazbin’s premise is one with potential. Charlie Morningstar (Erika Henningsen) is the Princess of Hell who, partly in an effort to stop the yearly genocide of her citizens by Heaven’s angels due to overpopulation and partly because she believes in the innate goodness of everyone, aspires to help reform sinners via the Hazbin Hotel and grant them passage to Heaven. Staffed by security head and girlfriend Vaggie (Stephanie Beatriz), surly bartender Husk (Keith David), psychopathic janitor Niffty (Kimiko Glenn), and the not entirely altruistic radio demon Alastor (Amir Talai), Charlie aims to prove her hotel works on her reluctant guests, gay porn star Angel Dust (Blake Roman) and inept villain Sir Pentious (Alex Brightman), through bonding, exercises, and the power of lavishly-animated musical numbers.
In theory, I should love this. The Good Place meets an emo sketchbook by way of a Disney soundtrack and a cast/attitude full of queerness? Where do I sign! In practice, across its eight-episode first season… god, it’s a mess. The kind of television I’m trying so desperately to enjoy. Some of that failure can be put down to the suffocating restrictions inherent to modern streaming series production. But mostly the blame can be laid at the feet of Medrano and her team seemingly having no idea what show they actually want to make.
Perhaps that fact can be best encapsulated by the titular Hazbin Hotel arguably being the least important part of the show. The entire first-half of the season goes by before we spend any time longer than a half-assed B-plot inside the hotel, having its core cast interact with each other and grow closer as people.
Before then, Hazbin puts its cart well before its horse by dedicating the first three episodes to introducing a half-dozen nebulously connected side characters – excessively sweary bro-angels who won’t even pretend to hope that the hotel succeeds, a trio of excessively sweary demon overlords who have history with Alastor, a slightly less excessively sweary board of other demon overlords with their own vague conspiratorial plots – many of whom we don’t see again for the run. I’d say that their presence functions like highly-inelegant lore dumps, but they’re in addition to the many actual highly-inelegant lore dumps squeezed between the breakneck pacing and artlessly sweary dialogue.
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Relatedly, Hazbin lays the vulgarity on thick. Like the vast majority of adult animation, the show is desperate to prove that it’s not for the kiddies and super-edgy which translates to extreme bloody violence and every character (bar Alastor) punctuating every sentence with a minimum of two “fuck”s or “cunt”s. This approach only serves to make it feel even more immature and deeply insecure where any potential shock value vanishes in a puff of smoke due to being so very try-hard. Medrano and her writers begin to ease up on the relentlessness of said vulgarity in the latter part of the season, which only makes it clearer that the numbing machine gun approach of the early-going was entirely unnecessary.
To put it mildly, the show starts off on its absolute worst foot. The comedy clangs hard due to relying on the vulgarity crutch and awkward timing. Most of the alleged main cast barely get any screentime, let alone interactions or development. Few of the attempted heartfelt turns left any impression on or stirred any feelings within me. Medrano’s direction is overly hyper to a distracting degree; refusing to let any one shot sit for more than two or three seconds, constantly breaking the 180-degree rule, unnecessarily swooping or tracking in a way that betrays a lack of faith in the material. And even when it does get somewhat better in the season’s second-half, the storytelling is overambitious to a degree where it loses any emotional or thematic resonance in the quagmire of its plotting.
I wouldn’t entirely place the blame on Medrano. When you’ve been handed the reigns to finally realise your dream project after decades, it’s understandable that you’d want to cram in literally every single idea you’ve had for it in one go case it gets snatched away from you without warning. And the broad strokes of the first season’s plot – which situates the Hotel as not just representative of a battle to save the moral souls of its residents, but arguably the entire afterlife on all sides of the divide, with multiple personalities trying to control Charlie and her dream to their own ends – would likely work a lot better if given adequate time to breathe.
It’s the kind of narrative which begs for a sixteen-to-twenty-episode broadcast season, where the character introductions and lore dumps could be spread out, the main cast get more than fleeting interactions with each other which sell their eventual misfit camaraderie, and this sitcom about a rehabilitation hotel allowed to be a sitcom about a rehabilitation hotel. Compressing into the eight-episode binge seasons that streamers almost exclusively order nowadays does Hazbin absolutely no favours.
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On the other hand, that also leaves the creative team, who know in advance what their episode order is going to be, with a responsibility of writing to fit the medium. Either scale back the density of the plotting so you can fit the gist into a truncated season, or scale back your ambitions and just tell the simplest version of your premise for the first season then start introducing the additional worldbuilding conspiracy ‘fate of the afterlife’ stuff if you get renewed. Trying to cram an entire show’s worth of myth arc into 176 minutes means that nothing satisfies.
Much as I’ve complained, Hazbin does find a sort of rhythm in the season’s back-half. Episode 4, which focuses on Angel’s relationship with his abusive porn boss Valentino, is the first to provide character depth to a member of the main cast and treats its triggering subjects with surprising sensitivity. Episode 5, where Charlie’s dad Lucifer comes to town, is a significantly better pilot than the actual pilot at introducing the world, the characters, and black-comic tone. Whilst Episode 6 is the first to find a balance between pushing forward the myth arc and also letting the hotel’s denizens hang out together on-screen in entertaining ways – Sir Pentious is easily the comic highlight and it’s telling that this episode is the one with his best moments.
And there are virtues on the way to Hazbin starting to come good. Every episode has two musical numbers and they’re almost uniformly great. Varied in genre and style – encompassing Disney Renaissance “I Want” ballads, campy gothic swing-jazz cabaret, Latin pop, Lady Gaga electro and much more – full of individual character, woven into the narrative, and often legitimately catchy (though occasionally prone to cramming twenty syllables into an eight-syllable bar).
The voice work is often excellent, stacking the cast with Broadway regulars works wonders for both the songs and the warped-Disney Princess tone of the characterisations and comic high points. (I also adore Talai’s old-timey radio newscaster voice as Alastor, which the show runs through a crackled mono filter for added impact.) And Medrano’s character designs remain a striking delight to look at, moving with gorgeous fluidity and bursting with colour, which are also matched by high-quality backgrounds of unique visual flair.
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When Hazbin Hotel’s first season is good, it can be really good. Songs and one-off jokes/moments which, when compiled together on YouTube or shared individually on TikTok, could fool me into misremembering the whole being a lot better than it actually is. But the times when Hazbin does manage to fulfil its potential throughout these eight episodes are rare and fleeting, suffocated under an exhausting grossness and poorly-managed storytelling. I’ll still root for Medrano and Hazbin, because theirs is the kind of story you want to succeed, but I don’t see myself checking back in for another stay in Hell.
Hazbin Hotel is streaming on Prime Video.
