Teenage Euthanasia is one of the few programs on Adult Swim’s current slate that still feels like the network’s vintage brand of radical satire and subversion. Set in a not-too-distant Fort Gator, Florida, Annie yearns for normalcy in a world where her mom is a resurrected corpse who is held together by a hive mind of beetles while they all try to run a funeral home. Now two seasons in, Teenage Euthanasia is weirder and wittier than ever and this could be the year where the edgy animated series finally finds a dedicated audience. Alissa Nutting and Alyson Levy open up on the production of Teenage Euthanasia’s second season regarding how to find emotional depth in such an outrageous world, the importance of maternal storytelling, and why it remains the most quintessentially Florida animated series that’s out there.
Daniel Kurland: What were you excited to explore and expand upon in the show’s second season now that the audience knows these characters and their world a little better?
Alyson Levy: A big one for us was expanding their world by establishing a bunch of new secondary characters. We see that Baba has a group of friends–the Hag Squad–that are her people. We also spend more time with Annie’s friends. Pete even has some friends this year, believe it or not. It’s all about expanding their world and getting into maybe explaining some of the weirder aspects of how this world works. Then it’s just a matter of pushing ourselves to come up with more scenarios that we were excited to move forward with now that the show’s foundation had been built.
Alissa Nutting: Yeah, we were really excited to deep-dive into each character’s particular emotional trauma in hilarious ways, that are also hopefully touching, too.
Daniel Kurland: Well, I think that this season does a good job with how it explores a lot of new character pairing and combinations to better see what works.
Alyson Levy: We really pushed hard to establish the Annie and Trophy dynamic in the first season, but now it can go beyond that. We always envisioned Teenage Euthanasia as a larger family show. We also have so many new characters that appear throughout the entire season. It was still really fun to do a Trophy and Pete story. That’s one dynamic that we really wanted to explore. Trophy and Baba is also really a fun dynamic.
Daniel Kurland: It’s just fun to see Pete butt heads with a goat and feel threatened there. That’s the perfect adversary for him.
Alyson Levy: Oh right, the goat! The goat dynamic got seriously expanded this season. My husband, John Lee, who’s also a part of PFFR, voices the goat. He had a great time this season and really made us proud. For some reason that goat really made us laugh and we had a lot of fun with that this year.
Alissa Nutting: That guy’s backstory will have to come later.
Daniel Kurland: Female relationships are a big part of the series, but there’s a particular focus on maternal storylines, as you mentioned. Is that an intentional effort in the writing and is it satisfying to say so much on the topic of mothers and daughters, which can be lacking in television.
Alyson Levy: Yeah, I think they often do grand-dads and think they’re funnier, or something. I think it’s a huge interest for us. Alissa and I both have daughters, but then there’s also the flip side to it with our own mothers. You just really see it, you know, when you’re out and meet somebody’s mother? That will kind of help everything click together. I think that’s really been fun to explore and I can’t really think of anyone else in animation that’s tackling it like this. What was that Ari Aster movie? Beau is Afraid? That’s a really terrible movie, but I feel like mothers and sons are a whole other can of worms…
Alissa Nutting: Yeah, we love that quote: “Daddy issues are for amateurs.” This is definitely a show that highlights mommy issues in funny ways.
Daniel Kurland: It’s nice to see a lot more Crotch Beetle representation this season. They were such a fun element from season one that did you know early on that you’d be returning to them and doing more with them as characters and as a concept?
Alyson Levy: I wish that we had done more! There’s an episode from the first season where we really get into their world, which doesn’t happen this year. Everything it a lot more mixed together. It was so much fun and more so a case of us just running out of episodes. There’s a lot more room for the Crotch Beetles to grow.
Alissa Nutting: They’re a beloved part of the show for us.
Daniel Kurland: Similarly, it’s such a fun idea this season when Trophy embodies that A.I. baby. Is there any chance that this could become a recurring thing that you’d like to find a way to return to in the future?
Alissa Nutting: She does like to go inside of stuff, doesn’t she? Whether it’s someone else’s corpse or a squirrel in season one or an A.I. baby this year. We definitely take advantage of Trophy’s death powers. In the future I can definitely see her wanting to put her consciousness into more things in order to accomplish her superficial agenda.
Daniel Kurland This season seems to push the boundaries even further when it comes to ideas that are rooted in sci-fi and fantasy. Is it fun to see how far you can go in those departments and just how wild the show can get? You have time travel on display this season, but is there anything that would be going too far or out there for the show?
Alyson Levy: I can’t think of anything. In the end, it really comes down to the stories. It will start with an idea that seems like it could be a normal idea on any show, but then us and our writers will push it to some place that you’ve never seen before. I’m so excited that our show has sci-fi and supernatural elements to it. At first it was like, “Wait, you’re sci-fi and supernatural?” But okay, whatever, we are. It’s really just a way for us to fully follow wherever our imagination may go. It needs to feel rooted in some emotional element to the characters or something dystopic about their environment.
The big rule–and we do occasionally break it–is that Trophy is the only one who can do magic. We do try to make that the main rule, but then Baba has those prehensile breasts that can punch, strangle, and do stuff. So we do break that rule, but we try to make it so that Trophy is really the only one who can do magical things.
Daniel Kurland: I love that this show feels very quintessentially Florida and that it’s a big part of the show’s DNA. Why is it the perfect setting and how do you kind of unpack new layers of Florida this season?
Alissa Nutting: Actual Florida has just gotten so Fascist and out of control. It also takes us 18 months to produce this animated show, so it’s a little harder for us to be exceptionally current. Our show’s Florida is kind of this parallel universe of Florida Man’s Florida that’s about 15 years in the future. That’s maybe the best way to describe this locale. I’m from Florida and I really love so much about my home state. My Florida is this wild, lawless land of possibility that’s entirely a universe to itself. Anything can happen. Nothing is surprising. You’re just sort of left to your own devices and it’s like the rest of the country doesn’t care about you, but that also allows you a certain freedom. These are the elements of Florida that I think we’re taking into our show in the fictional town of Fort Gator. And in terms of how far the show can go, I can’t think of a state where things could go further than potentially Florida.
Daniel Kurland: One of this season’s episodes tackles teen pregnancy and the nature of baby raising exercises in high school. I love that this idea is a bit of a tradition in television, whether it’s protecting an egg, a fake baby, or in this case a sophisticated A.I. Was it fun to build upon that trope in a wild way, but also to do an episode about teen pregnancy?
Alyson Levy: We wanted to deal a lot with Annie’s sexuality because I think that’s just rich material. They do it a little on Bob’s Burgers with Tina. I like how that character’s sexuality is handled, too. Teen girl sexuality in animated series just feels like a wide-open space that hasn’t been tackled very much. We have a lot of episodes that kind of tackle Annie’s “needs.” This particular episode felt like the opposite version where we’re talking about something that’s being put onto girls and what they can and cannot do.
Dan Licata came up with the idea that this whole thing was coming from the U.S. military, which is when it all started to come together for me. It’s this terrible idea that’s gone too far where these girls are actually getting impregnated and actually needing to give birth. It was just so awful that we had to see what would happen with all of it. And it’s all going on during Mother’s Day, no less. That’s the ultimate Teenage Euthanasia episode, to me.
Alissa Nutting: We wrote all of that before Roe v. Wade got overturned, too. It is really interesting how certain dystopian ideas will resonate with actual dystopian events. It adds this interesting, timely layer to it all that we couldn’t have possibly predicted.
Alyson Levy: We do lean into the idea of teen moms a lot, too. Trophy was a teen mom. That’s also a very Florida thing, in my opinion. It’s just something that was really on our minds and territory that we wanted to explore.
Daniel Kurland: Speaking of timeliness, another episode this season features a teachers’ strike, which is certainly timelier subject matter now than when you wrote it. I love how Teenage Euthanasia is able to highlight important issues like this through all of its silliness, which is kind of the show in a nutshell. Is that an important part of the series when you’re trying to break stories?
Alyson Levy: We’ve had a few other situations like that, too. Our writers are kind of a political group anyway, but that was certainly serendipitous timing. That was of course never on our radar though. We’re both parents and dealing with the state of public education is its own dystopic pastime. The whole thing that we came up with pre-pandemic was the hologram teachers and then that actually happened with teachers being on screens. It’s all really confusing and we can’t really stay abreast of what’s coming.
Daniel Kurland: Lastly, what are you most proud of when it comes to this second season, whether it’s a character moment, storyline, particular joke, or anything?
Alissa Nutting: I’m really proud of any moments that can nail sincerity or be really emotionally moving, even though the show is inherently funny. There’s a moment with Trophy and Annie where Trophy needs to consider the positive impact that Annie has made in her life. It gets into how her life would be–or what would be undone–had she never gotten pregnant. Trophy is so non-maternal and insincere that I think that can be a hard landing to stick. Trophy, in a comical way, is pretty horrible. That’s great and fun to watch, but to have a truly moving, emotional moment between her and Annie makes me really proud. When we can make that happen without it being at the sacrifice of story.
Daniel Kurland: Yeah! That moment where Pete and Baba rejoin each other, after they’re finally able to get away from one another, is genuinely sweet! As silly as the show is, you really do hit those authentic emotional moments.
Alyson Levy: It comes very organically, too. Sometimes it happens in the animatic process. The end with the goat and the sunset was all there, but once we got the music and everything together it really felt special and like we had pulled this thing off. The intention was there, but you never know with those types of moments if you’ll stick the landing. That’s one of my favorite moments too, actually.
Season two of ‘Teenage Euthanasia’ begins July 26th at midnight on Adult Swim, with next-day-airing on Max