A Cat Exorcism Partially Inspired Netflix Series ‘Exploding Kittens’

When it came to adapting his popular tabletop card game into the “Exploding Kittens” 2D animated series (currently streaming on Netflix ), Matthew Inman found inspiration in an old girlfriend’s schizophrenic cat, who got so disturbing that a priest was called to exorcise its demons. The premise became the ultimate fight between good and evil when God (Tom Ellis) and the Devil (Sasheer Zamata) are both fired and sent to Earth to reconnect with humanity, trapped inside the bodies of two chubby house cats.

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While Godcat is tasked with turning around a dysfunctional family through empathy, Devilcat, his next-door neighbor, stirs up trouble as the destructive anti-Christ. “When I got paired up with [executive producers] Mike Judge and Greg Daniels [of ‘King of the Hill’], it kind of all just came together and it clicked,” Inman told IndieWire.

“Some of the [family] dynamics we wanted to avoid were things that we’re all a little tired of,” he added. “Like every single teenager on earth gets bullied and then gets bitten by a radioactive spider, and then suddenly his nose bleeds and he can punch people in half.”

But Inman’s talent as a unique cartoonist (he describes his characters as “bloated, sallow, obese”) required a complementary writer, so he teamed up with Shane Kosakowski (“Teenage Bounty Hunters”) on the scripts as co-showrunners.

“We kind of took some tropes that we thought were funny and tried to bend them on their ear a little bit,” Kosakowski told IndieWire. “That’s why the mom, Abby [Suzy Nakamura], is this Navy SEAL veteran and the dad, Marv [Mark Proksch], is this dorky tabletop gamer who’s pushing 50 and is still wearing sock sandals and still playing ‘Dungeons and Dragons.’ We thought it was interesting that the son, Travis [Kenny Yates], was a gamer of a different variety, and they couldn’t communicate that to one another.”

The hardest part for Inman was adapting to the world of animation, where collaboration became more complicated. The front end was done at Netflix, and the animation was completed at Canada-based Jam Filled (“Clone High” Season 2). “You suddenly add actors, and motion, and sound design, and score, and there’s all these other elements that aren’t in your control where the comedy can change, or just kind of lose its air,” said Inman.

“So the challenge was making sure that we cast people who were funny and not really celebrities,” he continued. “And that we had heavy involvement in the recording and also heavy involvement in the animatics to make sure that the visual gags were landing, to make sure that the one-liners were landing.”

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Inman’s favorite one-liner: In the pilot, Godcat haltingly tells Marv, “You speak as like a dagger made of Benadryl.”

In the pilot, God is depicted as a jerk who slowly warms up to his feline body and helps the family overcome their lack of communication by teaming up to kill monsters in a game. It just gets wilder from there with the introduction of Devilcat, who keeps undermining Godcat, even after he keeps acting as a friendly paternal figure.

“There’s the universe of Godcat, where he’s a terrible god and he’s bad at being nice, and then we had this idea of Satan being nice,” Inman said. “That’d be evil, where I would picture the river Styx. You’ve got Satan walking up and down this buffet of people being tortured, and his daughter is just handing out Gatorades to everybody to make sure everyone’s cool and comfortable. And we thought: that’s a funny idea of her. Hopefully, the dynamics comes off as complex because out of any beings in the entire universe, they’re the only two that kind of understand what the other one is going through.”

One of the standouts of the nine-episode series is Episode 5 (“No Regrets”), in which the family gets to go back in time and undue their most regrettable moment. “That was an episode that really allowed us to get into Abby’s backstory in a very elegant way, I thought,” said Kosakowski. “What makes her tick and what she wanted in life and where she is now. And that whole sequence with her and Greta [her amateur entomologist daughter, Ally Maki] in North Canada to me was the most important in terms of character storytelling, allowing her daughter to see this window into her mom’s life.

“And, at the same time, getting this really nice father-son story, where [Travis] feels hurt by this embarrassing moment where he was bullied, and his father reveals this thing that he’s been hiding all these years. And there’s this really important lesson that there’s always going to be bullies in life, and it’s about how you react to them and not letting them get the upper hand. I mean, there are a lot of funny pieces in there (a high-speed chase on a moose), but I thought it was an important episode to reveal what are characters are feeling.”

“Exploding Kittens” is now streaming on Netflix.