Season Review: Haunted Hotel Season One

Look at the charts for the other streamers not named Netflix, adult animated comedy is usually number 1 on every one of them. From Hulu to HBO MAX to Paramount+, adult animated comedies is what the fans want on their streamers and it has been quite sometime since the biggest streamer in the world has really focused on this area.

To try and get some of that market, Netflix has rolled out a new adult animated horror-comedy series, Haunted Hotel, created by Matt Roller, a writer and producer known for his work on Rick and Morty, Community, and Archer, the show offers a blend of supernatural chaos and witty humor but unfortunately falls flat as anything truly distinctive. 

The series is produced by the Emmy Award-winning animation studio Titmouse and the show looks like it’s worth every god damned penny with characters that kind of look like Big Mouth meets Hotel Transylvania not just in look but in comedic stature as well. Other animation studios have in recent years attempted to launch the Rick and Morty take on supernatural animated comedy, with Haunted Hotel producer Dan Harmon lending himself to Little Demon and Freeform launching Praise Petey, both of which actually do a better job of doing just that, but all falling short of the undoubted king of Rick and Morty/animated horror rip-offs, Gary and His Demons. 

The show features a star-studded and probably expensive voice cast including Will Forte (MacGruber, The Last Man on Earth), Eliza Coupe (Happy Endings, Future Man), Skyler Gisondo (The Righteous Gemstones), Natalie Palamides (The Powerpuff Girls), Jimmi Simpson (Westworld, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia) guaranteeing that the show, should it somehow get a renewal, the furthest it may go is four season with the eventual tap out definitely not being more than seven, but before it does that the show needs to try new things if it wants to really get an audience. In fact, in an almost mirror approach to how the show actually came to be, Netflix originally named this series after the hotel in which the show is based, The Undervale which I thought for nothing else was far more original of an moniker than what eventually became the much more generic-named Haunted Hotel. The show follows a single mother who, along with her two children, inherits a mysterious old inn called The Undervale. She soon discovers that the hotel is not only teeming with ghosts and supernatural guests but also being co-managed by the ghost of her estranged brother.

Aside from a few laughs here and there, the majority of the episodic series is largely unoriginal in its execution. Many, many series have trampled this turf and I didn’t notice anything, not even the twist of episode nine that we spend all of five minutes on, does enough to make me think this one even needs a renewal. All of the jokes,characters, and plots are largely derivative and in a lot of ways can be found on FOX Sundays with Grimsburg which, even with that show’s mediocrity, lands the parodies far more accurately. Anybody wondering if anybody on the Dan Harmon side of the co-created Rick and Morty was actually the reasons why that show has seen any success, the fact that Dan has released another mess with his name on it should be all that you need to know as to who was REALLY the creative mastermind.

Futurama dropped a new season this last Monday, watch that instead of whatever this mess is.