Why?!” shrieks a papal demon hunter, seconds after having his penis shot off by a chicken that just so happens to be Satan. “Comedy!” the chicken responds. And that neatly sums up the approach of Little Demon, an endlessly irreverent animated sitcom that doesn’t let viewers sit around too long for the next gag.
Created by Darcy Fowler, Seth Kirschner, and Kieran Valla, the FXX series revolves around a teenager, Chrissy (Lucy DeVito), whose simple existence is rudely interrupted by the discovery that she’s the Antichrist. Her new powers awaken in grisly fashion, quickly reducing a gaggle of school bullies into piles of red goo in what turns out to be the first of many spectacularly gory sequences. Chrissy doesn’t seem overly concerned by the whole triple-murder thing, shrugging it off with an easy-breezy attitude that sets the tone for the rest of Little Demon.
The emergence of Chrissy’s diabolical powers also serves as a beacon to her estranged father, Satan (Danny DeVito), who’s determined to reconnect with his half-human spawn. But the girl’s mother, a tattooed, demon-slaying survivalist named Laura (Aubrey Plaza), is willing to do whatever it takes to stop that from happening. Inevitably, then, Chrissy finds herself at the center of what amounts to the universe’s most intense custody battle.
It’s easy to imagine the elevator pitch for Little Demon: “Rick and Morty but make it metal.” After all, Laura summons portals and cobbles together ray guns with the same disgruntled hyper-competence as that Adult Swim show’s Dr. Sanchez, except that she uses blood rituals and chicken bones instead of an assortment of scientific gizmos. While the idea of Satan as a deadbeat dad is intriguing, Laura is the most entertaining part of Little Demon, with Plaza’s patented deadpan delivery evincing a level of “done with this” that you can feel in your soul.
Most of the show’s best moments come when it leans into its hellish premise and plumbs the depths of its own depravity. It’s likely you’ve never seen a man punch a hole in his own face before or heard the words “Let’s go boil some babies while their heads are still soft” in quite that order and, after two decades of South Park, Family Guy, and other cartoon shock merchants, an animated series finding new ways to disgust is a genuine achievement.
On the other hand, the onslaught of gags can get a little wearying at times, with some lines landing better than others and the occasional use of truly played-out punchlines, such as an unironic “That went well.” Similarly, the bloodletting, while frequent and enthusiastically excessive, doesn’t have the bombastic invention of, say, a Rick and Morty action sequence.
The key to that show’s enduring appeal is that it treats everything as a joke while continually underlining how existentially horrifying that vision of the world actually is, creating those famous gut-punch moments of nihilistic despair. From its first bloody explosion, Little Demon has such a gleeful disregard for the bodies being flung around and torn asunder that the moments of occasional earnestness don’t really cohere with the rest of the series.
Little Demon is a more effectively provocative show when it’s being truly demonic rather than just trading in curse words and nudity. In one standout scene, Laura picks up a serial killer at a nightclub and engages in a sexually charged game of cat and mouse with him. Drawn together by their mutual bloodlust, they move from the bar to the dance floor to a back alley, trading sinister innuendos and sultry threats along the way. It’s a deeply weird, genuinely dark scene that could easily have ended up in 100 different problematic places, and it’s a shame when the episode abruptly cuts it off in order to go on another portal-hopping adventure.
Still, the hit rate of Little Demon’s jokes is high enough to make each individual episode enjoyable whether they add up to anything greater or not. It might not have the emotional depth or intelligent design to get itself out of Rick and Morty’s shadow, but it still manages to have the sort of fun in the dark that holds promise for future seasons.
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