This column contains spoilers for Prime Video’s Hazbin Hotel.
Adult animation has been taking over the TV world for some time now, speaking to our childish yet crude hearts in ways that our younger, Saturday-morning-cartoon-watching selves could only dream of. Hazbin Hotel has marked itself as the most recent addition to the raunchy pantheon, but it meets its salaciousness with an amount of earnestness that we don’t quite expect from the genre. Even more surprising is the fact that its purity doesn’t work against the story, but elevates it.
The show centers on Charlie Morningstar (Erika Henningsen), daughter of Lucifer Morningstar and Lillith. Lucifer and Lillith built hell and created a haven for demons, reaping souls and growing in power until heaven was having no more of it. To keep hell’s population at bay, the angels descend on the pit and raze as many demons as they can find in one night. It’s a gruesome affair, but Charlie has a plan! She’ll simply save as many souls as she can so they can go to heaven and be spared from the culling. Or at least she would, if heaven wasn’t made up of a bunch of dicks.
Imagine Parks and Recreation’s Leslie Knope thrust into the world of Supernatural, where most angels are monsters (God being the biggest dick of them all) and some demons have a point. Then imagine her deciding she was going to save all of those demons and bring them to the promised land. That’s… basically the premise of Prime Video’s new series, and it’s pretty damn great.
The success here comes from the balance of Hazbin Hotel’s narrative. The first two episodes are rooted almost solely in helping you understand Charlie’s cause and, even though the series might have benefitted from showcasing more character work early on, this ultimately serves the story more than it hurts it. We need to understand Charlie and her purity before diving headfirst into the seedy underbelly of hell because we, the audience, need to care in the way she cares about the success of the other players she surrounds herself with. Also, the contrasting ideologies require that Charlie’s wholesomeness get more of a highlight early on if only because, at this point, the nihilism and snark of the demons is easier to relate with on a broad scale.
Charlie is surrounded by a delightfully demonic cast of characters in her rehabilitation hotel, including girlfriend Vaggie (Stephanie Beatriz), Angel (Blake Roman), Husk (Keith David), Niffty (Kimiko Glenn) and radio demon Alastor (Amir Talai). Each one of them brings their own hilarity to the table — Angel, an androgynous porn star, keeps trying to hook up with Husk, for example. As you may have gleaned, Husk is nonplussed by his advances — but it’s radio demon Alastor that comes with the most intrigue in early episodes.
Alastor does not believe in Charlie’s mission or that demons could be saved to begin with, but he finds himself charmed by the Princess of Hell. He doesn’t think she can succeed, but remains the patron of the Hazbin Hotel nonetheless. Why? We don’t know! But it most certainly adds to the appeal here. Alastor is clearly powerful and, while Charlie benefits from a certain amount of status being Lucifer and Lillith’s daughter, Mommy and Daddy are largely out of the picture. Hell, at this stage, seems to mostly be run by a council of demons — those who have collected the most souls — of which Alastor is a member, meaning there’s no real power grab to be had either. So what does he gain by helping Charlie and her cause? Who can say! But his evil in conjunction with Charlie’s purity and Vaggie’s loyalty definitely keeps the first episode interesting.
The radio demon seems to be in a blood feud with Vox (Christian Borle), who is not a “TV demon” in the same way that Alastor is a radio demon, but his face is a big ol’ TV so why split hairs?
There are tinges of American Gods’ feud between the New Gods and the Old Gods in their rivalry, which had me obsessed basically immediately. That obsession is only heightened by the fact that Alastor seems to live by a code. Not a moral one; that is very much reserved just for Charlie. He just believes folks should carry themselves in a certain way, while Vox represents all of the hilarious terribleness of the worst tech bros you have the displeasure of knowing.
While the intrigue of the likes of Alastor and Vox is instantly appealing, Angel and Husk are more of a curious kind of slow burn. (Can four episodes be considered a slow burn?) There’s never a moment where the characters themselves aren’t fun, of course, but while the former denizens of hell’s character depth is immediately apparent, the pornstar — Angel — and the bartender — Husk — start out at surface level and grow into something deeply engaging by Episode 4.
At first, their dynamic is rooted in Angel going out of his way to make Husk uncomfortable by making passes at him. (If you haven’t watched yet, please imagine Keith David’s voice as he plays being scandalized by a delightfully promiscuous demon.) But we quickly learn (one of) Angel’s secrets: he wants to believe Charlie is right and that he can be saved. He wants it almost as much as he craves a community, which he would realize he has if he could get out of his own way for five seconds.
Getting in his own way becomes a theme for Angel, but only in the sense that he won’t ask for help because he perceives his situation to be his own fault. By the time the credits roll on Episode 4, we’ve learned that Vox and his cronies — in this case Valentino (Joel Perez) — are more despicable than we initially imagined.
When Angel can’t get out of work to do her soul-saving exercises, Vaggie tells Charlie to exercise her powers as princess of hell and lay down the law with Valentino. When Charlie does, we learn that it isn’t as simple as the pimp demon being Angel’s boss. Valentino owns Angel’s soul and forces him to make porn for Vox and his empire. We see what was previously presented as an annoyed demon who lost one of his chief moneymakers in earlier episodes morph into a dangerous, physically abusive monster who couldn’t be less intimidated by Lucifer’s offspring. Valentino quickly becomes the most deplorable character yet, and Angel immediately shifts to being one of the most nuanced characters in Hazbin Hotel.
Delightfully, Angel drags Husk along with him into nuanced-land.
In response to the complicated fallout between Angel and Charlie after her interference in his affairs (and because the bartender keeps calling Angel fake), it’s Husk who has to chase after Hazbin’s most sex-positive inhabitant. When the two of them find themselves in a pinch, we learn that Husk has demons — heh — of his own. Once a denizen of hell and now a “lowly” bartender after a gambling addiction that did him dirty, Husk relates to Angel more than he had previously let on. The two share a song, Angel keeps hitting on Husk, Husk stops calling him fake, it’s all quite… charming.
The contrast between Charlie and Hazbin Hotel’s inhabitants is engaging because it’s funny, but it also offers a level of weight to the story that you wouldn’t quite expect to be the entire theme of an adult animation series. The point is never to achieve Charlie’s perfection, but to understand the beauty of the rest of the demons’ (and our) imperfections. A reductive take might end in something like “the real saved demons were the friends we made along the way.” But it’s hard to level snark at something so charming and musically fun, especially when there are so many nods to other great stories in its DNA, intentionally or otherwise.
Better still is the fact that you can not care about a single ounce of its story depth and still have a grand old time getting lost in Hazbin Hotel’s instantly engaging character pairings and its wickedly complicated contrasting moralities.
Charlie Morningstar stands out as the only Leslie Knope-esque character prancing around hell and trying to save lives, but there’s a deep humanity in all of our newly beloved little demons. Vaggie hates everyone, but she loves Charlie; I’ve just prattled on about Husk and Angel’s dynamic and layered appeal; Alastor’s one of the most powerful demons in hell but it seems like he may be endeared by Charlie for more reasons than him simply needing her; and even Sir Pentious (Alex Brightman) starts to grow on you once the snake demon realizes that he really will receive the support he needs from Hazbin Hotel and its inhabitants.
Creator Vivienne Medrano’s series is so cute because it’s salacious, and its obscenity is made all the more fun by its purity. Hazbin Hotel takes an episode or two to get cooking, but what a joy it is once it starts rolling. I can’t wait to learn more about these little weirdos!
Amelia is the entertainment Streaming Editor here at IGN. She's also a film and television critic who spends too much time talking about dinosaurs, superheroes, and folk horror. You can usually find her with her dog, Rogers. There may be cheeseburgers involved. Follow her across social @ThatWitchMia
