Have you ever played Exploding Kittens? If you have not had the pleasure, let me explain – there is no pleasure. It is the kind of game that has children convulsing in delight and adults weeping with despair at the very sight of the box.
Each player gets a handful of cards. They all mean different things. Some can be used only in conjunction with each other and you must try to avoid drawing an Exploding Kitten card. It takes longer than Monopoly, it’s more life-sapping than Risk and it’s less satisfying than any other experience.
Now, it is an animated series. The scraping of the bottom of the intellectual property barrel is audible throughout. The premise, which has no root in the game whatsoever, is that God has been making too many mistakes, including allowing humans to invent pumpkin-spice deodorant. (If I tell you this is one of the better jokes, I hope it will save you a lot of viewing time.) Anyway, God descends to Earth to learn how to help people. He arrives as a cat, so he can live closely with a family, and retains some but not all his powers, because otherwise there would be no jeopardy and no story.
The family he finds are the Higginses. The mother, Abbie, is a former US Navy Seal who is trying desperately to find as much purpose in family life as the military gave her. She is married, inexplicably, to hapless Marv, who runs the local bulk-buy store (which sells steaks the size of mattresses, because that is a humorous interpretation of bulk buying, you see) and loves to make up games for their weekly game night. Their son Travis is dedicated to becoming internet-famous for something other than a childhood video that went viral; their other son, Aiden, is an idiot; and their daughter, Greta, is a clever, competent type who takes after her mother.
While God-cat tries to get to grips with his new way of life – including a sudden fascination with pigeons and laser pointers – Beelzebub arrives, having been similarly cast out of hell for being bad at her job (visiting laggy internet and Baby Shark on people instead of war and pestilence), also for some reason in cat form. Now, they will duke it out on Earth.
It is carelessly made, infuriating and unfunny. It is full of jokes that don’t work because, clearly, no one knew or cared what they were doing. Of pigeons, God-cat says they are disgusting yet delicious, “like a Las Vegas buffet or Timothée Chalamet”. The buffet make sense, but Chalamet? Someone gave up halfway through. Then there is the traditional “omnipotence/impotence” misunderstanding that any bad comedy with a God character must make, but it confuses impotence with infertility.
This is not nitpicking. Animated series don’t get a pass on bad writing or storytelling because they are cartoons. We were long past that even before Pixar and DreamWorks showed up. It is not enough to take a brand, put some words and movement to it and offer it to us on a streaming platform contemptuous enough of its viewers to take it. Intelligence and wit must be added. Otherwise, it is almost as bad as a game night. Almost.
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Exploding Kittens is on Netflix now