Netflix’s Best New Animated Series Doesn’t Need a Season 2—But I Wouldn’t Complain
Carol and the End of the World sort of quietly premiered on Netflix in December 2023, while most of us were likely distracted by all the ways in which our own world is slowly ending. And maybe the holidays.
Created by Dan Guterman, a former writer for The Onion whose TV credits include The Colbert Report and Rick and Morty, the Netflix Original animated series is an existential comedy for grown-ups. The great Martha Kelly (Baskets) voices the eponymous Carol, a middle-aged woman navigating an unexceptional life in the end-times: a planet is heading straight for Earth, and humans have less than a year before the extinction event. While most of the population drops their inhibitions to live it up while they still can (Carol’s elderly parents have become nudists and are in a meaningful throuple with their live-in caregiver), Carol is just trying to get through each day—not entirely unlike her life pre-end-times, when she was a middle-school secretary.
It’s not that Carol doesn’t want to expand her world; her ambitions are just a little different. She often stands outside an Applebee’s, wondering what it’s like inside. In an effort to give what’s left of her life some structure, Carol takes a job in an office colloquially known as “The Distraction,” where employees just keep their heads down, do their busy work, and none of the coworkers interact. Carol finds a purpose here, determined to learn the names of her coworkers and win them over with banana bread. And she does, befriending Donna (Kimberly Hébert Gregory) and Luis (Mel Rodriguez), and even begrudgingly opening up to her more outgoing and adventurous sister Elena (Bridget Everett).
Carol and the End of the World is a hilariously droll take on the existential crisis comedy that becomes increasingly poignant over the course of its 10 episodes. Rather than reinforce her habits, surrounding herself with like-minded introverts inspires Carol to overcome her typical anxieties and impulses. She makes friends. She makes plans. She makes a lot of banana bread. And yes, eventually she goes into Applebee’s, where Happy Hour becomes an integral part of the work week.
The series is filled with recognizable voices, with the characters—drawn in a style that evokes Cathy—often resembling the actors voicing them: Michael Chernus (Orange Is the New Black) is Eric, a lonely man who proposes to Carol at the end of their first date; Bridget Everett is unmistakable as Carol’s gregarious sister, and makes me long for Martha Kelly to show up on Somebody Somewhere; Laurie Metcalf is a mean HR lady; and Gillian Jacobs and Megan Mullally voice Carol’s old friends.
There is no major life change for Carol at the end of Carol and the End of the World—at least not in the traditional sense. The series rejects the plot contrivances of sitcom storytelling in favor of something more meaningful, examining deep-seated anxieties (what happens if you die and there’s no one left who might care?) and ordinary neuroses (why is it so hard to make friends as an adult? do people like me?) with the same level of care and humor. It turns out that, even when the world is actually ending, for many people, our concerns remain the same.
Carol and the End of the World ends on a lovely note, with Carol and all of her new work friends enjoying Happy Hour at Applebee’s. Some people, like Elena, need to chase their wildest dreams. Others, like Carol (and most of us, probably), just need meaningful connections to get them through each day. I’m not sure that Carol and the End of the World needs another season, and I’d be perfectly happy revisiting these 10 episodes any time I’m in A Mood about my own world.
Although it was conceived as a miniseries, if Netflix and Dan Guterman want to make Carol and the End of the World season 2, I wouldn’t complain. As I get older, I find fewer characters on TV and in movies relatable, or maybe I relate to them differently than I did in my twenties, when everything I loved had to become my personality. Carol is the most relatable character I’ve seen on TV, possibly since Martha Kelly played Martha in Baskets. And the reason I identify with Carol so strongly is because she’s so … regular. She wasn’t written as an exceptional pain in the ass or a pathological collection of our worst impulses. Her flaws don’t define her. Carol is just a normal woman trying to get through the days she has left on this planet, hopefully not alone, and hopefully feeling a little better than okay.
Yeah, I’d watch 10 more episodes of that.
(featured image: Netflix)
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