Parents are the worst—especially when your mom is a control-freak Wiccan and your dad is the undisputed ruler of the underworld. Life is thus hard for Chrissy (Lucy DeVito), a disaffected 13-year-old who on the first day of school, in the latest of many new hometowns, goes through puberty and discovers that she’s the half-human child of Satan caught in a tug of war between her ferociously protective mother and charmingly devious father.
Executive produced by Dan Harmon, creators Darcy Fowler, Seth Kirschner and Kieran Valla’s half-hour FX comedy Little Demon (August 25) is the latest in a string of recent animated efforts (such as Netflix’s Inside Job and Hulu’s Marvel’s M.O.D.O.K) to indulge in out-there R-rated insanity. And like those predecessors, it’s at once rat-a-tat-tat inappropriate and surprisingly sweet, charting its protagonist’s attempt to understand herself and define her identity while negotiating a familial situation that’s dysfunctional beyond belief. Whether that balancing act is sustainable in the long run remains to be seen, but at least in the early going, this raucous and raunchy affair exhibits a flair for the absurd and profane, even if its boundary-pushing elements get in the way of casting its characters as three-dimensional figures worth rooting for—or caring about—in a serious manner.
Chrissy is the only child of single mom Laura (Aubrey Plaza), who at the start of Little Demon relocates them to Delaware. On her first day at Middletown Middle School, Chrissy befriends nerdy Bennigan (Eugene Cordero) and then has her life thrown into disarray when, while in the bathroom, she gets her period—which manifests itself quite strangely, via menstrual blood dripping through her pants and into a toilet where it takes the shape of a glowing demonic face. When bullies appear outside her stall, intent on tormenting her as well as Bennigan, Chrissy’s eyes suddenly go black, the bathroom’s mirrors and windows shatter, and her two would-be tormentors go splat—literally. Their legs blowing up with huge pustules, followed by their bodies exploding in a sea of flesh, organs and goo, they become the first victims of Chrissy’s newfound powers, which—much to everyone’s dismay—cause her to blast energy beams from her eyes and mouth, creating a giant black hole in the sky that sucks up everything in its vicinity.
This isn’t exactly how Chrissy wanted to introduce herself to her new classmates. Yet more shocking is her mom’s subsequent revelation that she’s the spawn of Beelzebub (Danny DeVito), who—as she learns during their subsequent meeting—is a cheery fellow desperate to develop the father-daughter relationship they were denied when Laura absconded with Chrissy. Laura had good reason for this, it turns out: Satan is stuck living in the Metaphysical Realm, a lame purgatorial way station (“Think Port Authority but with much, much, much more urine and fewer bomb threats”), and wants to use Chrissy to bring about “Maximus Dawnus,” a cataclysm in which all the realms will fold into one to create a single, lawless universe. It’ll also allow Satan to regain the full scope of his diminished abilities—although, at least initially, he keeps that selfish reason secret from his rightfully shocked and annoyed progeny.
The jokes fly fast and furiously in Little Demon, some of them landing harder than others—as when Satan quips, upon hearing his daughter’s Christian-inspired name, “Of course she named you that.” In traditional modern animated-comedy style, Fowler, Kirschner and Valla keep the pedal to the proverbial metal, dispensing visual gags and one-liners in almost attack-model fashion, rarely letting a moment breathe minus a witty remark or grotesque sight. That proves as exhausting as it is exhilarating, and the plotting is equally helter-skelter throughout, aided by supporting characters who further amplify the material’s craziness. On the positive side is Darlene (Lennon Parham), Laura and Chrissy’s neighbor, who at first comes off as a friendly suburban square and yet reveals herself to be game for unholy carnage. Far more troublesome, meanwhile, is Unshaven Man (Michael Shannon), the leader of a group of mercenaries who’s committed to purging the world of demonic forces for the supreme pontiff of the universal church.
Unshaven Man suffers an ignominious (albeit not fatal) fate in the premiere of Little Demon, and Shannon—like DeVito the elder—relishes reveling in this demonic lunacy. While Shannon’s baddie is a grizzled true-believer with a homicidal streak a mile wide, DeVito’s Satan is a jovial destroyer of worlds whose desire to reconnect with Chrissy seems sincere, regardless of the fact that he’s trying to manipulate her for his own malevolent purposes. DeVito is the show’s undeniable highlight, chuckling his way through all sorts of wackadoo scenarios, the most amusing being a The Running Man-inspired TV game show challenge that boasts a vocal cameo from none other than Arnold Schwarzenegger. Plaza is similarly enthusiastic as the jaded Laura, whose torso is covered in tattoos and who, in one explicit scene, strips nude in order to perform a realm-traversing ritual that’s designed to make TV censors blush.
There’s plenty of energy to Little Demon, which boasts an impressive roster of voice actors including Mel Brooks, Dave Bautista, Patrick Wilson, Sam Richardson, and Rhea Perlman. Its full-throttle momentum, however, often interferes with its character development. Chrissy is the proceedings’ nominal protagonist and yet, at least in the show’s maiden three chapters, it’s difficult to feel like we know her aside from the stock traits she displays when squabbling with her bizarre parents. Lucy DeVito does the best she can with Chrissy, who’s petulant and morose in all the standard-issue teenage ways. Still, there’s a sense that, at least for now, she’s mostly a narrative pawn around whom Fowler, Kirschner and Valla want to spew fire-and-brimstone madness. The same, to a lesser extent, holds true for Laura, whose anger is so off the charts that it turns her somewhat humorless—a state of affairs that will hopefully be alleviated as she establishes a friendship with Darlene.
None of this makes Little Demon hellish, but it does render it more frenzied than uproarious. As with so many like-minded comedies, though, a bumpy beginning doesn’t mean there isn’t promise for its righteously ridiculous premise.
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