The last time we spoke with show creators Alyson Levy and Alissa Nutting, they were just about to launch their hilarious show Teenage Euthanasia on Adult Swim. Two years later, the two talented women are back to promote the second season of their clever series which centers on the misadventures of the Fantasy family (undead mother Trophy Fantasy, her strange, old-world mother, brother and abandoned teen daughter Euthanasia, a.k.a. Annie) and their inland Florida funeral home.
In the show’s sophomore season, Uncle Pete (Tim Robinson) discovers the existence of foreskin and makes friends with a mobster’s limo. Trophy (Maria Bamford) is elected mayor of Fort Gator and finds her calling in sexual education. Annie (Jo Firestone) becomes a teen doctor, and Baba (Bebe Neuwirth) fills in for a deceased morning shock jock and goes bear hunting. We’re also introduced to a very charismatic goat! The Season 2 guest star roster includes Ann Dowd, Chris Redd, H. Jon Benjamin, J. Smith Cameron, Janelle James, Jinkx Monsoon, Joe Pera , Kieren Culkin, Lori Tan Chinn, Sophia Bush and Tim Heidecker.
Here’s what Alyson and Alissa had to say about the new season:
Animation Magazine: It feels like yesterday when your show premiered on Adult Swim in the fall 2021. How does it feel to come back with a new season of wild adventures for the Fantasy folk?
Alissa Nutting: It’s so much fun to make this show. We have ten episodes dropping weekly the old fashioned. We have so many great guest actors in every single episode it feels like a wonderful clown car packed with talent in addition to our phenomenal regular cast. The characters are in hilarious ways delve into their own emotional trauma which we get to watch and be entertained by and relate to. We get to see a lot more of the world and the wacky Florida Man parallel universe, 10 to 15 years in the future, where the show lives.
Alyson Levy : We spent the first part of the first season focusing on the Trophy-Annie relationship. I love that we got to see different pairings like Trophy and Pete, a lot more Baba this time. It was nice that we got to give the characters a lot more context with back stories and flashbacks and we learned that Baba has a fun group of friends called “The Hags,” (including veteran actress Judith Anna Roberts) and that was a lot of fun. We also get to explore Annie’s sexuality in this season.
What kind of memorable audience reaction did you get from the freshman year of the show?
Alissa: It was really fun to see people you dress up like the characters for Halloween. There were some wonderful Trophys and Petes out there. For us, it’s been really fun connecting with wayward teens: We have a special affinity for them in our hearts. The show is for a lot of different people, but wayward teens are the pilot light of the heart and spirit of the series. It has been nice to connect with them in the online dystopia of the internet.
Alyson: My favorite response — and it has happened twice — has been at a parent-teacher event. I have a daughters who are teenagers, and I’m at an event and talking to a random person there, a therapist there and they ask me what I do, and I tell them I make animated shows. I assume they have never heard of it, when they ask me what show? Our title is really weird, and I tell them Teenage Euthanasia, and twice they have told me that they’ve heard of it! They said, “A teenage patient of mine brought it up during a session!” To me, that was the highest compliment that I am hearing about it from therapists who see adolescents and that somehow we’re psychically connected.
What lessons did you learn from the first season that you applied in the second season of the show?
Allison: We learned that the show can be bigger. We really did learn just how much we can kind of pack in and push ourselves to take it to the next point and the next point within every episode. How much we can rely on our actors. When we wrote the first season, we hadn’t worked with them yet so now we really what to expect and how great they all are.
Alysa: All of that, and both Allison and I are constantly looking for any tweaks in places so that we can improve anything at all until the second it’s locked. Having gone through the animation cycle of season one, we are having a little more technical understanding of what is really possible
Allison: We also switched from Flash to Toon Boom Harmony. We wanted to focus more on the acting. For us the show really lives and dies on that so Harmony helped us push that more. We had more flexibility with the animation and it was easier to make changes. The folks at Atomic Cartoons in Canada did a fantastic job with the animation for us.
Now that audiences are getting to dive into the second season of the show this summer, what makes you the proudest?
Allison: I’m proudest of the stories we’re able to tell … I had done a lot of shows before, and there were always stories I wanted to tell about the female characters. I feel so lucky that we got to do these two seasons and hope that we get to do a bunch more. I just know how hard it is to get to this point, and I love the way this season came together and looks overall. I am also so grateful that I get to work with Alyssa. We get along so well, and there are no egos in this relationship.
Alyssa: Yes, all of those things as well. I feel like we try so hard not to compromise. I think so often plots can give way for jokes and humor. I feel like we really strive to have the characters be so unique and true to themselves and make sure the plot is also interesting. Humor or the quality of the storytelling can never can take a back seat. There’s a really difficult balancing act that requires a lot of work, but I feel pleased that we have been able to balance all those different elements.
We can’t let you go without getting your thoughts on this summer’s important writers’ and actors’ strikes. What is your take on the plight of animation creatives in the summer of 2023?
Alisson: I really hope both the writers and the actors are successful in getting what they want. Making sure all these protections are in place, especially when it comes to AI, is really important for all our amazing animation artists. One of our character designers is also an illustrator, and his field is completely overtaken by AI. It hasn’t come for animation, but it’s really important to get these protections in place. All those people deserve to get paid more, and that’s all very much overdo.
You can revisit our 2021 interview with Alyson and Alissa here.
The second season of Teenage Euthanasia premieres on Wednesday (July 26) at midnight on Adult Swim (watch it live on YouTube). The show reprises on Max the next day.
