Matt Inman and Shane Kosakowski’s new animated series hilariously depicts God and the Devil as dueling house cats, navigating earthly chaos and dysfunctional family dynamics while atoning for their otherworldly failures; the show, adapted from a card game, premieres July 12 on Netflix.
‘Exploding Kittens’ Season 1 now streaming on Netflix. All images © 2024 Netflix, Inc.
When deciding on a plot for the animated series adaptation of his company’s award-winning card game, Matt Inman, The Oatmeal creator and illustrator behind Exploding Kittens pulled inspiration from his ex-girlfriend’s cat, who may or may not have been possessed.
“He had a weird name like Oswald or something and very much acted like a deity,” remembers Inman. “Some days he’d act like a god, other days he acted like Satan. My ex-girlfriend’s parents were very religious, and, at one point, they had a priest come over to perform an exorcism. That has lived in my notebook for a long time, and I’ve always wondered what I could do with it.”
Enter Netflix’s all-new series, Exploding Kittens, from showrunners/creators Inman and Shane Kosakowski, known for The Muppets and Teenage Bounty Hunters.
The 2D animated show, which releases on the streamer Friday, July 12, is executive produced by Dustin Davis of Bandera Entertainment with Peter Chernin and Jenno Topping for the Chernin Entertainment Group. It features an Earth that – spoiler-alert – sucks hairballs. In the series, when God gets fired for some rather self-absorbed, ungodly behavior, he’s sent there to reconnect with humanity. The catch? He's trapped in the body of a chubby house cat. As part of his rehabilitation, he moves in with a dysfunctional family and tries to solve their problems but ends up spending a lot of time chasing laser pointers. And to top it off, Godcat’s next-door neighbor, who is also a cat, turns out to be none other than his nemesis, the Devilcat. The result is the ultimate fight, good versus evil… except, Godcat is distracted by a pigeon he saw in the yard, and Devilcat is busy napping on someone’s laptop.
Things will work out eventually. Or maybe we’ll all end up in Hell, or Heck depending on one’s age.
Check out the trailer:
“I thought, let’s create a series that people want to watch with no knowledge of the card game,” says Inman. “Each card is a non-sequitur. Each comic on each card is like a “Far Side” comic, in that there’s just one little word to tell one little joke. Trying to write a story around that is really hard. But there’s a lot to work with when you turn God and Satan into domestic house cats.”
Kosakowski was already a fan of The Oatmeal but, after hearing Inman’s pitch for a premise, was sold on the series and hopped on board.
“It was so simple and so brilliant and rather timely to talk about God being punished for doing such a terrible job at keeping the world together,” shares Kosakowski. “Though, honestly, you could have told that story 3,000 years ago and it would have still been interesting and compelling to audiences. It’s timeless.”
Sasheer Zamata, who voices for Devilcat in the series, had actually heard of Oswald-or-something’s antics from Inman and she says the story gave her an additional boost of excitement to take on the role of the feline Antichrist.
“The concept of a devil being put in a cat's body is fodder for so much comedy, especially when you’re talking about a devil that's not really good at being a devil and is working hard to get better at being a devil while being a cat,” says Zamata. “I've voiced for a lot of shows consistently, but this is one of the first main characters I've played. And a lot of the other characters I've done in animation have been more subdued. Devilcat is wild, and it's so fun to play such a dynamic character with high highs and low lows and really stretch the limits of my voice.”
For Zamata’s fellow Exploding Kittens star Tom Ellis, known for his leading role in the live-action series Lucifer, playing Godcat has also been his biggest voice acting role to date and felt like, as Ellis put it, “a natural promotion” after playing Satan for five years.
“It was purely coincidental, I have to add, that I played the devil and then played God,” notes Ellis. “But it was a nice opportunity to do, again, a fresh spin on a very well-known character. And when I'm looking at projects or things that I really love watching myself, if it's comedy, then it's got to have two things. It's got to be really funny, and it's got to have heart, because the two work really well together. It's such a powerful thing to be able to make people laugh and then suddenly make them feel something and they didn't even know they had that connection with the characters they're watching. This show had that in the scripts. And watching it now all come together, I think it has landed as well. It’s not a kids’ animation, but there’s something for everyone in this show.”
Making sure the emotional narrative to this otherwise zany comedy series had real impact was a big reason why Inman and Kosakowski chose for Godcat to stick with the same family, rather than have him trying to help a new family every episode. Though they went back and forth on the idea for a while, Inman felt there was more to glean from getting to know one family really well.
“We abandoned the idea of Godcat exploring a new place with a new family every episode pretty quickly because we wanted to really unpack these characters and understand their emotional needs and wants.”
Kosakowski adds, “We have a rough and tumble Navy Seal mom with a shrinking violet dad and a brilliant but nihilistic daughter whose brother is trying to find fame on the internet after going viral once with his Horkey Porkey dance. We wanted to talk about characters we hadn’t seen before and subvert expectations of the adult animated family.”
Part of that effort meant making the characters both comedic and believable, Inman once again drawing on his own life to give credibility to the show’s cat and human characters.
“In the show, Travis Higgins, the son, goes viral after mixing up the words to ‘Hokey Pokey’ and I had a slightly similar experience in kindergarten,” shares Inman. “Except I didn’t mix up the words. I peed my pants in the middle of our classroom ‘Hokey Pokey’ dance. I tried to crabwalk sideways out of the room and play it off, but it was pretty obvious. I’ve channeled a handful of childhood traumas into this show.”
Sticking with the family theme, the Exploding Kittens team wanted to create opportunities for families to watch the series together, even if the show doesn’t shy away from demonic torture ranging from nipple-clinging rodents and Saturdays forcibly spent at TJ Maxx to, heaven forbid, an Imagine Dragons concert.
“We never cuss in the show,” notes Inman. “We go to adult places, but we wanted parents to be able to watch this with their teenagers. What’s also been helpful about not swearing in the scripts is that it makes you write smart jokes. It’s easy to throw in a cuss in lieu of a real joke because it’s shocking. So, we worked a little harder, but I think our comedy is a bit more clever because of it.”
It’s a similar concept to Godcat’s limited powers. One of the contingencies to God being sent to Earth as a cat is that he is no longer all-powerful and can’t snap his fingers to make all things well again. He has to get creative and so, in turn, do the show writers.
“We did a time travel episode and without guardrails, that story would go bonkers,” notes Inman.
There are limits, but the crew still had lots of fun with the series and the show certainly thrives in the realm of the bizarre. Devilcat ascends from hell through a buttocks that then launches her out of a woman’s toilet covered in filth. There are teddy bear murders, acid trips, and lots of Easter eggs hidden around the show, some of which the audience will pick up on and others that are just the team exerting their own god-like power.
“I put my son’s birthday above the doorframe of the daughter’s room in the show,” shares Inman. “I couldn’t tell you why. I guess because I can. I don’t think Netflix even knows that. There’s also a scene with a library of board games and a lot of them are games The Oatmeal has made.”
Zamata adds, “There are also some puns in the show viewers might not catch onto because they aren’t reading it in the script. But there’s a scene where I’m fighting Godcat in the grocery store and I assemble all these meat products to create some sort of Power Rangers-style outfit and my catchphrase is, ‘Prepare to meat your maker.’”
No word yet on an Exploding Kittens Season 2, but Kosakowski promises a thrilling end to the first season.
“There is a big crescendo at the end of the season where things happen that you don’t see coming and it leads to a big finish. We hope people take their time and take in all the detail of the series – especially in the wide shot of Hell – but also, we’re anxious to see what people think of the ending. We hope they enjoy it.”
Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime. She's reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment. Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.
