Helluva Boss
Vivienne Medrano has created two animated hits, Hazbin Hotel on Amazon Prime Video and Helluva Boss on YouTube, both based on the same version of Hell. Helluva Boss is the better show of the two.
To put it bluntly, both are great. Hazbin Hotel is a touching story of an oppressed class’s struggle to escape religious domination. The art is fantastic, the characters are memorable, and most of the music is absolutely wicked (“Hell Is Forever,” “Loser” and “Poison” are instant classics). Despite its list of porn studios and nominal hotels, Hazbin is massive in size.
Meanwhile, Helluva Boss ranges much smaller. Exterminating the residents of Hell is not a plot point. Instead, the story focuses on Blitzo, the petty boss of the Immediate Murder Professionals, and the fires Duststar puts in his life. The themes Medrano loves to explore are here, such as overcoming childhood trauma and how irrational notions of sin lead to unnecessary marginalization. Helluva Boss makes these topics personal, not systemic.
Hasbein’s main character, Charlie Morningstar, is basically a Disney princess who lives in Hell due to circumstance, not curse. She’s naturally kind and eager to use her position to improve the lives of those around her. In essence, she’s a trust fund kid who starts a nonprofit organization.
From a fiction perspective, this isn’t a bad thing. Of course, the world would be a better place if Charlie were a role model for our leaders, but it does make her a complex character. Like most modern Disney princesses, her story ends with her ultimately believing in herself, in this case an act that reveals her true power as the Lord of Hell to kill a threat to her friends. done
Charlie has one of the most subtle flaws as a protagonist, a shyness to assert himself. Watching him overcome it is satisfying, but simplistic. For a show even dirtier than South Park, it’s surprisingly silly. Complex characters like Angel, Husk, and Alastor are side parts of his destiny, and that makes the show relatively shallow.
However, Blitzo is an incredibly complex character. Imagine him as the blade of the disc part of a table and imagine the teeth as his myriad flaws, bright and biting. A short list: raised by a heartless father in a circus; forced to betray a childhood friend; responsible for another’s serious injury; a bull in a china shop involved in romantic relationships; and being on the bottom rung of Hell’s racial hierarchy placed a great responsibility on his shoulders.
Through it all, he’s remarkably likable. Medrano recounts his toughest moments in Blitzo’s story. He adopts a teenage hell-dog, Luna, because he can’t stand to see her be killed and forgotten by the foster system. When he spends his free time watching his married employees, Moxie and Milly, it’s clear that he sincerely wants to learn how to love in their ways. When her upper-class boyfriend, Stolas, seems eager to end the relationship, Blitzo promises to be her best friend.
The show at no point backs away from the loss that Blitzo is suffering. Unlike Charlie, who rarely ends an episode without having learned a lesson or overcome an obstacle, Blitzo fails just as often as he succeeds. This recent season has had him crying in frustration several times as there are moments when he just can’t get things done no matter how hard he tries. Sometimes, a good heart isn’t enough to make up for the damage you do when you’re broke and hopeless.
This is what makes Helluva Boss more punk rock than Hazbin Hotel. Imagine Hazbin is Green Day’s American Idiot, an obvious idea that hits the ground running but is still appealing to Broadway fans in Des Moines. Helluva Boss is Dukie, a tougher, more real case of being confused by the world as a young adult. Both are wonderful things, but one of them is realer, like someone pulling the stitches out of their teeth because they can’t afford to go to the doctor.
Speaking of the music, Helluva Boss’s soundtrack is consistently better. The song “2 Minutes Notice” will be hummed breathlessly by an entire generation of tired workers in the near future. “Cotton Candy” was co-written by Kesha, so no need to argue. “Crashin’ a Muthafuckin’ Wedding” is a great example of how Helluva Boss roams around with genre more freely than its companion show, which sticks primarily to pop ballads and Broadway bookend numbers.
Again, none of this is to say that Hazbin Hotel is bad. It’s great. The show tackles very adult themes with ease and is an incredible subversion of classical animated tropes. Many of the aspects I mentioned in Blitzo’s story are present in Hazbin’s side characters.
Helluva Boss simply puts these characteristics front and center. This not only gives the show extra sincerity and credibility, but helps make Helluva Boss even more silly. Many episodes have a sort of Doctor Who/X-Files monster-of-the-week quality that gives it room for experimentation. Sometimes, Blitzo just needs to fulfill his duty of killing an incredibly horny fan writer and the bigger plot can wait.
Hazbin rarely has this distinction, everything works to set up the epic showdown at the end of the season. It’s good storytelling, but it’s something we’ve grown tired of after 16 years of Marvel movies. Hazbin Hotel is a well-constructed machine. Helluva Boss is a pile of gears and screws that Medrano can take apart and reassemble at will. What the show makes up for in intensity, pace, and cohesion of the series, it makes up for in its emphasis on surprise, humor, the ability for fans to react immediately, and always blitzing on big events.
Now that Hazbin Hotels has hit Amazon, maybe Medrano will have a chance to change things up a bit. Until then, Helluva Boss is the one I’m waiting on for new episodes.
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