On Oct. 28, 2019, the animator and YouTube personality Vivienne Medrano celebrated a milestone: the release of “Hazbin Hotel,” a 30-minute pilot for an animated musical-comedy about a rehabilitation program that aspires to help Hell’s repentant demons get to Heaven.
Produced and directed by Medrano and brought to life by a team of several dozen freelance animators, the pilot was self-financed with contributions from Medrano’s Patreon subscribers, who helped support her and the project with monthly donations during the episode’s more than two-year development process. When she finally uploaded it to YouTube, Medrano was both relieved and excited — it felt like the culmination of something a long time in the making, and she was eager to show her work to her small but dedicated group of fans.
She was not prepared for what happened next. Almost immediately, the video went viral, attracting fans of adult animation, Broadway musicals and ribald comedy who, based on the comments and other online reactions, were charmed by the project’s original voice and punky, carefree style. Within months, it drew tens of millions of views and sent Medrano’s Patreon subscriptions skyrocketing; admirers coalesced into an ardent fandom that generated fan fiction, tribute art and elaborate costumes. (As of late January, it had nearly 95 million views.)
“I’ve been an artist online basically my whole life, and I had an audience,” Medrano said in a phone interview earlier this month. “But when the pilot came out, it just exploded — there were so many people so fast and so suddenly. It became this massive hit in a way that I never expected.”
Medrano just celebrated another milestone: the release last week of “Hazbin Hotel” on Amazon Prime Video. Produced by A24 and the animation studio Bento Box Entertainment, the show’s eight-episode first season takes the familiar tone and spirit of the original YouTube pilot and expands it to the scale of a prime-time animated series.
“There’s been so much hype and so much waiting,” Medrano said. “At this point I’m like, ‘Oh gosh, I hope it delivers.’”
The new “Hazbin Hotel,” like the pilot, is about Charlie Morningstar (voiced by Erika Henningsen), the princess of Hell and the proprietress of the eponymous establishment, where she intends to rehabilitate demons so that they can one day see the pearly gates. A kind of fire-and-brimstone sitcom with a tone somewhere between the gloomy wit of “Bojack Horseman” and the wry, whimsical misanthropy of “Don’t Trust the B____ in Apartment 23,” the series is both dark and cheerful, thrumming with upbeat verve while also tackling turbulent issues.
In one episode, Angel Dust (Blake Roman), an adult film star prone to salacious innuendo, tearfully admits to having been abused by his sadistic boss; in another, he brings an X-rated movie to show-and-tell, to the groaning consternation of his friends. Other characters break out in song without warning: The series is a full-blown musical loaded with comic show-tunes, reminiscent of “Once More With Feeling,” a musical episode of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” or the movie “South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut.”
Medrano first began fantasizing about “Hazbin Hotel” in middle school, when she started drawing illustrations that would serve as the basis of these characters and their world. Medrano said her earliest creation was Alastor, the “fun pseudo-villain and mysterious Cheshire cat character” who is voiced in the series by Amir Talai. Medrano’s younger fans, in particular, seem drawn toward Alastor, she said. “I’m glad he can be loved by the same sort of audience he was created by.”
Medrano started thinking more seriously about how to bring the world of “Hazbin Hotel” to life during college at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. “That’s when I realized that this would make a really good TV show, and that all these characters would work really well together,” she said.
Her original concept, she said, “was more of a one-note raunchy comedy” that might fit within an adult animation world then dominated by series like “Family Guy.” But toward the end of her college years, the genre opened up, with new shows appearing that were “much more adult not only in their raunchiness but also their emotion.”
“I kind of had this awakening,” she said. “Like, wait, adult animation can tell these kinds of stories? That really opened the door for me.” The success of shows like “Bojack” and “Rick and Morty” showed her there was an audience for complex animated stories with characters that evolve and aren’t always funny. That kicked off the creative journey that led to the “Hazbin” pilot.
In the wake of the pilot’s release and viral success, Medrano considered using Kickstarter to raise money to produce another episode or even an entire season, among other options. She worked on comics and music videos to flesh out the universe, developing an outline for how a longer story might unfold.
Then A24 caught wind of it. “We watched the pilot, and we were extremely impressed with how she’d bootstrapped this and essentially made it herself,” Ravi Nandan, the head of television at A24, said in an interview. “We fell in love with it. It’s kind of outside the box for A24, but what really impressed us was this voice.” The company offered to finance and develop the pilot into a series, and Medrano agreed.
Melissa Wolfe, the head of animation at Amazon MGM Studios, was already familiar with “Hazbin” and Medrano when she heard that A24 had produced a season of the show and was shopping it around. She asked to see it and within minutes had “kind of a goose bumps feeling when you just know it’s an amazing show,” she said. Amazon bought the series and has already commissioned another season.
Medrano is not the first artist to parlay a viral hit into a professional TV venture: Shows such as “Adventure Time,” “Insecure” and “Broad City” also emerged from YouTube, and other creators with a proven online audience have been given a shot to prove themselves on the big stage. (Remember “$#*! My Dad Says,” the series?)
But what’s notable about “Hazbin Hotel” is the extent to which Medrano’s vision has been retained in the transition from YouTube to Amazon. The “Hazbin” pilot was weird and quirky, with outlandish humor and mature themes, and so is the series, even as it feels bigger, glossier and more expensive.
One big difference: None of the voice actors from the pilot reprise their roles. Medrano opted to hold new auditions for each character, and none of the original cast made the cut.
The recasting did not go over particularly well, at least initially. In a 2021 Twitter post, the voice actor Gabriel C. Brown, who voiced Alastor in the pilot, wrote that he “would rather be involved in a smaller project that values me, than a bigger project that doesn’t.” Michael Kovach, who voiced Angel Dust in the pilot, wrote on Twitter: “The ex-voice cast wasn’t given any information, and anybody who DOES know likely can’t discuss it due to NDAs.”
Medrano chose to recast because “the challenge of this show is that it’s a musical,” she said, adding: “It requires performers who have a strong singing background and who could do the character voice as well.” Medrano heard from outspoken fans who were alarmed to hear that the voice actors had been replaced, thinking it might mean that the series was a departure from the pilot. But aside from the voices, the Amazon “Hazbin” is otherwise the same.
“I do know there are many other creators who have had to compromise their vision, and that just hasn’t happened here,” Medrano said. Scripts she thought might be too dark or bizarre even for the boundary-pushing standards of A24 were approved, she said.
Whatever its faults or merits, “Hazbin Hotel” is Medrano’s vision alone. The show’s release on Amazon is just the latest step in journey that began in her childhood imagination.
“It got to prove itself on YouTube, and then prove itself to A24, and then prove itself to Amazon,” she said. “Now hopefully it’s going to prove itself to the world.”
Calum Marsh
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