Exploding Kittens Review 2024 Tv Show Series Cast Crew Online
The adult animation boom seen over the last few decades has produced some of modern television’s most exciting series. “BoJack Horseman,” “Archer,” “Primal,” “Rick and Morty,“ “Tuca & Bertie,” “Blue Eye Samurai,” and even “X-Men ’97” (just to name a few) all used their limitless medium to push serialized storytelling in new directions. But peak TV also created a slew of exhausting, unimaginative copycats — cheap knockoffs of popular and/or innovative shows that operated under the principle that all they had to do to get laughs was make cartoon characters curse about pop culture. Blame “South Park” for amplifying the shock value of “Kids Say the Darnedest Things” or “Family Guy” for tricking a generation of teens into thinking random movie references were the pinnacle of comedy writing. Either way, you end up here, with a bunch of aimless animated programs served up to subscribers whenever they finish bingeing “American Dad.”
So it was inevitable that one staple of the streaming era would combine with another, fusing an adult animated series with some seemingly unrelated intellectual property. Technically, one could argue that there are cartoon drawings on every card in a deck of “Exploding Kittens,” making it a “logical” development opportunity for anyone eager to pitch the fine folks at Netflix. But despite its origins as a webcomic, the game is what people know, and the game has no illustrious backstory. There’s no obvious starting point, no beloved character to build from, no unique facet of gameplay that lends itself to an ongoing script. The kittens don’t even have names.
I’m sure some die-hard fan will point out a piece of “Exploding Kittens” lore I’ve overlooked, but having played a handful of times before and watched a few YouTube videos just now, I feel my experience with the game is at least comparable to many who may watch the show — that is to say, there’s nothing to know going in. Created by Shane Kosakowski and the game’s co-creator Matthew Inman, Netflix’s “Exploding Kittens” series takes the premise of a typical family sitcom and tosses in the X-factor of a new pet. Sure, this pet just happens to be God Himself — sent down from heaven as a fuzzy white feline to build empathy with the humans from whom he’s lost touch — but that rather apt bit of window dressing is about as clever as the nine episodes get. (Cats, after all, don’t just carry themselves like gods. They are gods.)
The heart of “Exploding Kittens” revolves around plots like attending an uncomfortable wedding, dealing with an annoying neighbor, and hiding an embarrassing flub from party guests. That the flub happens to be a dead unicorn with rainbow-colored innards is a distinguishing touch, but similar supernatural flourishes are too chaotic to feel appreciably creative, like the writers just picked a weird idea out of a hat whenever they wanted to acknowledge the show’s celestial side, rather than build out an intriguing, detailed afterlife.
Hovering over these ordinary (or, in suit-speak, “relatable”) B-plots are God-Cat (voiced by Tom Ellis) and Devil-Cat (Sasheer Zamata) fighting for control of the Higgins family — so He can get back into heaven, and she can earn the respect of her demon peers — but the stakes never feel substantial, and the jokes stem almost entirely from randomly mocking things people supposedly find annoying, overrated, or generally evil. An Arby’s sign hangs in a corner of Hell. “That Papa John’s guy” gets dragged for looking like “Dracula got botox and then drowned.” A man being tortured screams, “No more nipple-biting hamsters! I’m sorry I made my family watch movies with the subtitles on!” …which isn’t even a bad thing? Sometimes you need subtitles! Who cares?!
Ellis does a decent job bringing an outsized swagger to his miniature kitty, and no matter what he’s saying, I’ll never complain about listening to Mark Proksch, but the animation is uninspired, the episode arcs all-too obvious, and the character development embarrassingly thin. (One late-season twist involves a flashback to an earlier episode that just… skipped that part of the story? A part that would’ve changed what we did see, or at least changed how two characters interacted.) Chaos can only get you so far, and “Exploding Kittens” coasts along as far as it can, but the series isn’t invested in its own story, its own design, or its own jokes — so why should anyone else be?
