Hazbin Hotel

The Gospel of Second Chances

The first ten minutes of *Hazbin Hotel* produce a kind of tonal whiplash that feels almost aggressive. One scene is built around a demon tossing out a joke filthy enough to make you blink; the next bursts into a full-throated Broadway anthem about redemption. It is a weird mix to process on the fly. But Vivienne Medrano clearly has no interest in smoothing those edges out. The whole series runs on the friction between profanity, carnage, and an almost disarming sincerity.



The setup sounds like somebody joking around until the pitch somehow got approved. Hell is overcrowded, so Heaven sends angels down once a year to slaughter the surplus damned. Charlie Morningstar, Lucifer’s daughter, responds by opening a hotel where sinners might be rehabilitated and sent upstairs instead. As A24’s first animated series, the show carries some of that studio-brand strangeness, but beneath the chaos it is built like a musical with very classical bones. Medrano, who first introduced the project in a 2019 YouTube pilot, has said she sees Hell as a space historically used to threaten queer and marginalized people. Here she reworks it into something gaudy, inviting, and defiantly hers.



The voice work is what keeps the whole thing from floating off into noise. Erika Henningsen, coming off Broadway’s *Mean Girls*, gives Charlie exactly the kind of earnest center the show needs. Without that, the character could have curdled into a stock cartoon innocent surrounded by more interesting grotesques. Henningsen never lets that happen. She approaches even the biggest lines like Charlie means every word of them. When Charlie pleads her case to Heaven’s ruling class, you can hear the nerves, the hope, the stubborn refusal to become cynical. As Amelia Emberwing wrote for IGN, the series "meets its salaciousness with an amount of earnestness that we don't quite expect from the genre." That tension is the show.



It does not always land on its feet. Sometimes a genuinely moving beat about addiction or shame gets run over by a spray of blood or a joke that arrives half a second too loudly. Whether that feels exhilarating or exhausting probably depends on how much taste you have for maximalism. Still, even when the balance slips, the music keeps pulling the show back into shape. These songs are not decorative; they carry plot, character, longing. By the end, I was not just amused by the ridiculous sight of a singing snake-demon trying to build a death ray. I was rooting for him. *Hazbin Hotel* may live in Hell, but it is powered by a surprisingly stubborn faith that people can change.