Teenage Euthanasia is the newest addition to the Adult Swim line-up, fitting in perfectly alongside its programming block of wacky animated series. In Teenage Euthanasia, Baba (Bebe Neuwirth), Trophy (Maria Bamford), Annie (Jo Firestone), and Pete (Tim Robinson) are the operators of the Tender Homes Funeral Home in a world where the undead can rise to party and cause even more chaos. Despite the show's heavy topics with death and casual cruelty on display, the show fuses it all with a keen and silly eye for comedy.
During an exclusive interview with CBR, Teenage Euthanasia creators Alyson Levy and Alissa Nutting discussed the animated series' tricky and uniquely goofy tone of comedy.
CBR: One of the more notable balancing acts of the series is how it juggles the typical Adult Swim cynical edge along with genuine earnestness. What was it like finding the balance between the goofy elements of the show with the more traditional darker elements of Adult Swim's projects?
Alyson Levy: I think it really helps how long it took us to get the show made, and then having to write during the lockdown of the pandemic.
We wrote in April and May of 2020, and I was like, "The tone needs to shift for the show. This show needs to be silly... We don't know if there will even be a society in the year it takes us to make this show. But if there is one, we both can be extremely silly." Plenty of the people who wrote on the show are very silly, that's their default setting. We decided, let's just lean into that because it's going to be way more fun. But we kept ultimately the relationships between everybody that we had established, and that is the other part of this tone. It was a very conscious decision to, "Let's not go down some dark path." It just didn't feel sustainable to our own psyche.
Alyssa Nutting: I saw this clip once where Whoopi Goldberg was talking about working with her vocal coach in Sister Act and the way there was no voice, the coach just pulled it out of her. I think that Alyson really did that for me in terms of these earnest, emotional moments inside me that I would've claimed absolutely didn't exist... But as the process kept going, it just [drew out more] into the light and I think it's some of my favorite moments of the show.
There's this line that I'm sure to anyone watching will be this, like, "Go away," but when Baba tells Trophy that she's so pretty to her, I truly choked up at that moment writing it. I literally started crying just getting to that... When you do get to that grounded moment of truly relatable emotion that transcends, I think it's so concentrated and powerful in a way that it's not in non-absurdist comedy shows.
Levy: A bunch of animated shows have dealt recently with depression or mental health which I think is really interesting. But I think for me, I was like, "We got to lean into some kind of joy and silliness." I felt like that was the hardest thing to do as opposed to taking a more cynical stand or something. I think it was this desire to explore the notion of joy through things truly being really terrible. I found it a challenge that I was very interested in trying to figure out.
Nutting: Alyson is so dark.
Despite all this too, she's the perfect person to trust because so many people, when they tell me something's too dark, I'm like, "Ah, anything's too dark to you." It's like I don't believe them really, it doesn't mean anything to me. But when Alyson says it's too dark, I'm like, "Absolutely. You must be totally right." She's totally right... It goes deep with her. I trust her implicitly. She was the only person in the world I trust to say, "Yes, too dark."
CBR: What made Adult Swim the best home for Teenage Euthanasia?
Levy: It was always our intention to bring it to Adult Swim.
I've made a bunch of shows at Adult Swim but we had never tried to do a full-on, half-hour animated show. It's a really long development process and a true dream to try to figure it out and pull it off. Alyssa was absolutely the only person I ever wanted to try to do that with. As soon as I got to know her better, I thought, "She's the perfect person to do this." I felt like I really knew Adult Swim, but I had never had an entire female partnership. I knew there was a show that we could make that hadn't been done before, but fit in the wheelhouse of Adult Swim.
CBR: Teenage Euthanasia focuses largely on three generations of women in their consistently dark but goofy world. It's also maybe one of the only Adult Swim shows that seem to really focus on an intergenerational group of mothers and daughters. Why was that important to explore?
Levy: That the main takeaway is that Alyssa and I actually are good mothers...
Why we made the show is we never felt our own experiences reflected back to us in animation at all -- either our sense of humor or what we were into and this show has just been so fun and so easy in a way to write because we had all these things that we had thought of that I didn't feel like you've seen a hundred times.
Nutting: I don't think there are a ton of valves in our society. [We] just play with these darker, trickier, freer areas of motherhood. Really complicated motherhood, and the generational trauma of just the very specific matriarchal... The things your mother says to you that keep you up at night, that sort of trauma. It has been Pandora's box, just getting to open it. I think there are times when I didn't realize how much I had in there, in a lot of ways, until we started writing the show.
It's hard to be a weird mom. I think that's also a thing that I've had where a lot of art, especially transgressive art, there's this tough area when you overlap it with parenthood. Every day I'm still figuring out how to navigate that. But I also think that there's this immense pleasure -- having that adult workspace and I think that's the pleasure that we've afforded men and fathers for a long time -- that creative work can be entirely separate and say nothing about your suitability in terms of raising a child. So yeah, it's fun.
CBR: It was only a few years ago that Adult Swim was facing controversy for the few women helming their animated series. But now, there's Teenage Euthanasia, along with other shows like Birdgirl, The Shivering Truth, the recently acquired Tucca & Bertie -- Alyson, as someone who has been working with Adult Swim for a while, what's it like to be a part of the brand's evolution?
Levy: It felt like a long time coming, to be perfectly honest.
It felt like Adult Swim did all these amazing things and let all these spectacular weirdos have their dream show and a really diverse group of weirdos -- but mostly male. And as one of the only female show creators on there practically from the beginning, I always felt like there are all these super weird women that I always had my antenna going towards. Like, who are these people, and who would fit on the network? It's just so awesome to be part of that now with Alyssa and to have made it this far because it's really hard to get a TV show made.
I've not been a part of any other shows on Adult Swim that have women show creators, but it's great to see them all and everyone doing their own different thing. I'm sure there are lots of really cool ones that can come along now from this -- especially animated because so many animators are women.
I've seen beyond Adult Swim, animators used to be 80% men or more when you get into an animation studio. Now it's at least 50/50, if not more heavily women as animators. Our animation director was a woman, our animatics director was a woman, the person who designed the show is a woman. There's just so much more coming to support women in animation as well. It's great.
New episodes of Teenage Euthanasia air on Adult Swim Sundays at 12:00 AM ET/9:00 pm PT.