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TV/Streaming
Love Resurrection We catch up with Alyson Levy and Alissa Nutting, the brilliant creators of Adult Swim’s hilarious and subversive show Teenage Euthanasia.
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he fall of 2021 might be the best time for Teenage Euthanasia, an adult animated show described as a “dystopic coming-of-all-ages comedy about death, family and accidental resurrection!” Co-created by Alissa Nutting, author of the acclaimed book Made for Love, and Alyson Levy, the Emmy-nominated producer of shows such as The Shivering Truth, Wonder Showzen and The Heart, She Holler, the series feels like a warm hug from a long-lost, loving and totally insane relative. Animated by the talented team at Brooklyn’s own Augenblick Studios, the series follows the misadventures of the Fantasy family and their inland Florida funeral home, Tender Endings. The clan includes Trophy (voiced by Maria Bamford), who’s magically brought back by from the dead by a lightning bolt; her teen daughter Euthanasia, called “Annie” (Jo Firestone); Annie’s Uncle Pete (Tim Robinson) and “old country” grandma Baba (Bebe Neuwirth). We watch in horror and wonder as Trophy gets a second chance at being a better mother as a resurrected zombie!
We were fortunate enough to get a sneak peek as the dynamic duo of Levy and Nutting get ready to introduce their show to the world. Here’s what they told us: Animag: We know it took a few years to deliver your animated baby. Can you tell us a little bit about how you came to make the series? Levy: I had been with Adult Swim for years and I had this two-pronged goal to, first, make a show with women, and to make a half-hour animated show, which was something that was never done. Then, I happened to read Alyssa’s short story collection and I was super
excited to find someone with a similar weird sense of humor. I knew we would really connect. So, we decided to work on an idea for a show together. Well, it took years, because we started in 2016! Nutting: The show went through many iterations. What was really important for us was to have female characters and a main teenage female front and center. We wanted it to be different and weird. I guess you can say a lot of exoskeletons were shed before we settled on this particular brand of weird! Levy: We were leaning into the mother-daughter theme, as we were both mothers of daughters. I watched Gilmore Girls with my two daughters who are 12 and 15. I was thinking about what my version of the show would be like. So, we wrote a spec script of the pilot and in the summer of 2017 we gave it to Mike Lazzo [former exec VP of Adult Swim] and he loved it. So they wanted us to make an animation, and that’s when Augenblick Studios came in.
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Can you describe the show’s visual inspirations? september|october 21
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