‘Teenage Euthanasia’ Explores the One Thing You Won’t Find in the Multiverse
Teenage Euthanasia, an animated sitcom about an undead mom named Trophy (Maria Bamford) rekindling her relationship with her awkward teenage daughter Annie (Jo Firestone) is approaching its second season, which drops at midnight on July 26. Exploring themes of family and adolescence in a gross-out sci-fi environment, Teenage Euthanasia sees its characters getting up to all sorts of bizarre adventures, like frantically fulfilling CPS-mandated party quotas or hunting for lost foreskins.
We sat down with the show’s co-creators, Alyson Levy and Alissa Nutting, at San Diego Comic-Con 2023.
What gave you the idea for Teenage Euthanasia?
Levy: I’ve made a lot of shows at Adult Swim, and I wanted to make a half hour animated show, and I was just looking for the right person to make it with. And then I read Alissa’s short story collection [Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls], and I was just like, this is this hilarious, disgusting woman I’ve been waiting to meet my whole life.
We really wanted to make a show that centered around a kind of meek teen girl, who just had an absolutely awful mom, and who made terrible choices and really leaned into those. We developed the show for years before it was finally green lit and, you know, went through many iterations, which gave us time to really ruminate on the characters. All of them changed a lot over the course of development.
Nutting: Yeah. I think characters fighting for the love they’re never going to get was sort of a big theme for us to center, particularly with family, and how you cope with wanting one version of each family member, but having another. I think that’s a really interesting dynamic. And we’re very interested in alternative families and families without fathers. That was a huge theme we also wanted to explore.
Alissa, tell me more about the your short stories. It sounds like that there were some seeds of Teenage Euthanasia there.
Nutting: There’s a lot of death. There’s one where sort of a woman’s getting boiled alive to be eaten. She’s in a pot with a lot of people, to be eaten.
Levy: There was one story that struck me. It was about this groupie to a terrible psychedelic rock band. I’d worked with so many male creators and so many shows about men, and I just was excited to tell unique women’s stories, especially in animation, which I felt was completely ignored. I’ve told a lot of really weird stories, but this show has enabled me to put more personal things into it.
There’s this huge disconnect between Trophy and Annie—like you said, Annie’s fighting for the love she’s never going to get. Where did that particular relationship come from?
Levy: What’s fun about the sci-fi nature of the show is that we can just take it to so many places. A normal kind of Gilmore Girls show has to stop [at reality], but we don’t have to stop. Between the futuristic elements and Trophy’s [magical] powers, it just can go so deep. For instance, last season, Annie wanted to know who her father was, and Trophy wouldn’t tell her, and it sort of went through all these alternative realities of who Annie’s parents could be. I like how our sci-fi elements are these very personal stories instead of this global kind of time travel or multiverse story.
Nutting: What’s funny about Trophy and Annie is that there’s no place in the multiverse where Trophy’s a good, loving mom. I remember sobbing so hard, being so moved by Everything Everywhere All at Once, and in some ways, Teenage Euthanasia is the opposite of that. No matter where they went, it would not be Trophy pursuing Annie or asking her as a rock to come closer to her. She would be looking for a wealthy rock that she could marry, and ignoring her daughter.
Levy: Yes. The show is about trying to connect with a mother who won’t see you for who you are.
How did you develop Trophy’s character as a zombie?
Nutting: I think that the grossness [of zombies], and the funeral home [the characters live in], are very aligned with adolescence within the show. Both adolescence and death are times when you have to face the fact that these meat bags are are real yucky. As female characters especially, your body determines so much in terms of how you’re seen or not seen, or perceived or ignored.
Levy: And Trophy’s beautiful in her own way, or just glamorous in some way that Annie cannot seem to catch up with.
Anything you’re particularly excited about as season 2 comes out?
Levy: We really wanted to dive into Annie’s sexuality, so we have a bunch of episodes that deal with that. She goes through this anti-teen pregnancy thing that the U.S. government does, where they have to insert a baby that they have to give birth to and then raise, and the whole point is to not shake the baby.
Nutting: They try to get you to shake ’em. That’s how they’re designed. The deck is stacked against you.
Levy: Then there’s a lot of fun things like where Annie gets to go to second base. That’s her dream. I hadn’t seen a show that really leaned into second base. I was excited about that for her.
Nutting: And on the male agenda, Pete finds out about foreskins and realizes that he was circumcised at birth without his permission. Pete really wants to get his foreskin back.
Levy: It’s a hero’s journey.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
(featured image: Adult Swim)
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