Exploding Kittens is now available to stream on Netflix.
Thousands of years ago, it’s believed the Egyptians held their feline friends in not just high esteem but considered them connected to the divine. If they could see this idea now expressed in the animated Netflix series Exploding Kittens, perhaps they would have rethought the whole thing. Loosely based on the games of the same name (yes, the Cards Against Humanity competitor from cartoonist behind The Oatmeal guy has spawned VR and mobile versions) but lacking any of their fun or charm, Exploding Kittens is defined by painfully repetitive references and little else. The animation, while serviceable, ends up feeling secondary and oddly tame despite the show’s continual insistence that it’s doing something subversive. In reality, it’s all broadly vulgar with no real verve or bite.
Over the course of a nine-episode first season, premises are stretched well beyond their breaking point, jokes land with tiresome thuds, and every cliffhanger feels like a forced attempt to get Netflix subscribers to keep the app open. It’s as if another of the streamer’s animated comedies, Big Mouth, was stripped of all its sharp humor, squeezed into a can, and subsequently served up for us to choke down whole. Hailing from Shane Kosakowski and Matthew Inman (who co-created the original card game), its story is simple: God (Tom Ellis) is being sent down to Earth as both a punishment for being generally asleep at the wheel when it comes to overseeing his creation and to heal a modern human family that has drifted apart.
However, he isn’t going in his towering and muscular form. Oh no, he’s being sent in the body of a cat. This Shaggy Dog-ass premise is cloyingly familiar, but the “twist” is that there’s another feline on the field. Devilcat (Sasheer Zamata) has similarly been sent to Earth to set her on a better path, but with the directive to wreak havoc. The two do occasional battle, get up to various shenanigans (hope you like jokes about the various silly things cats get up to when left to their own devices, because there’s a lot of them), and discover they share an unexpected connection. Ellis and Zamata bring plenty of spark to their performances, but the writing – which is prone to cycling through a handful of lackluster punchlines – is much less explosive.
Both God and Devilcat make repeated claims to inventing some well-known product or much-hated nuisance. That’s the whole joke – just the closed loop of the reference to Diet Pepsi or the state of Florida being America’s flaccid phallus that’s full of trash (a hacky joke to end all hacky jokes that comedian Patton Oswalt already correctly deconstructed years ago). A random needle drop from the score of Stranger Things – itself a show increasingly defined by its allusions – only serves to highlight Exploding Kittens’ ouroboros effect, consuming not only its own tail but its hammy sitcom-esque setups along with it. When the writers lean into so-so bits about the perils of Twitch streaming or an awkward, in-universe stand-in for Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, they ensure the jokes feel way too terminally online and Internet-brained without any wit to back it up. It all proves strangely safe and toothless and unsure of its targets; even Steven Spielberg catches an odd stray in a rather dated, throwaway about War Horse. When Exploding Kittens then takes some potentially intriguing leaps through time and fantasy – even throwing in its own take on vampires – I found myself wishing I were watching something like the infinitely more fun Fionna and Cake instead.
Anyone waiting to see depictions of characters from the game or creative riffs on how it’s played will have to keep waiting. This Exploding Kittens is more of a dragged-out origin story than a playful romp. The problem isn’t that the show is building off an existing product; Barbie, while by no means perfect, already showed us how to both send-up and deconstruct the baggage of any shelf-to-screen adaptation. In its “remember this?” style of humor and utter banality, Exploding Kittens ends up far closer to something like the recent Jerry Seinfeld mediocrity Unfrosted.
You might chuckle at Exploding Kittens now and again, though when it starts trotting out various mascots as it makes even more references in a supposed climax that’s really a setup for another season to come, it’ll hardly feel worth it. It's one accomplishment: In the endless debate between which is better, cats or dogs, Exploding Kittens has unintentionally made the best case for the latter. If you too have cats, best shield their eyes from Exploding Kittens so they don’t see themselves and their brethren done so dirty.
Verdict
Exploding Kittens may get the occasional laugh due to the sheer volume of jokes that it throws out, but it mostly becomes a repetitive slog depending on empty pop-culture references. Tom Ellis and Sasheer Zamata attempt to give things a boost through their vocal performances, though the material they’re working with isn’t up to the task. The animation may be serviceable, but it’s actually in service of very little. By the time it comes to a generally disappointing close, Exploding Kittens ends less with a bang and more with a whimper.
