‘Teenage Euthanasia’ Co-Creators Alyson Levy, Alissa Nutting On Their Journey to the Adult Swim Hit

Teenage Euthanasia co-creators Alyson Levy and Alissa Nutting sit down with Awards Daily to discuss their hit Adult Swim series. Here, they give details about their goals and inspiration for the show and the cathartic nature it has for them dealing with their own teenagers. Plus, they share details about how they are very pro-hag and about the interesting stories Florida teenage girls tell about what cockroaches do when they sleep.

Awards Daily: How did you guys come together to create this show?

Alissa Nutting: I was a fan of PFFR’s shows and Allison read one of my books, and we saw our weird girlness reflected in one another in a way that was worthy of really paying attention. Add to that we both had a goal of doing a half hour animated series that really focused and centered on female characters. So a partnership was born!

Alyson Levy: Also we are both very patient! It took us a long time to get the show going so when one of us is like, Oh, man, the other one can jump in and say, No, no, don’t give up now. Luckily we fluctuate.

Awards Daily: Alyson, you have worked in animation for a while. But Alissa, this was your first time in the medium. Was this a medium that interested you guys for a while, or was it just for this project?

Alissa Nutting: Oh, no, I mean, I’ve always been obsessed with Adult Swim animation in particular since the beginning. I remember when Aqua Teen Hunger Force first came out and I had never seen anything like it and I was hooked. Cable was the big thing, and it was the highlight of my week waiting for Adult Swim animation. (I am showing my hag age here But we are a pro-hag show. Baba is part of a hag squad, and Alyson and I identify as hags, so we do it with love!)

Awards Daily: I read that you both have teen or tween daughters. How does that dynamic in real life help with your work with Trophy and Annie’s relationship?

Alyson Levy: I mean, it’s so inspiring! Having a teen daughter can be pretty emotional and it’s nice to have a creative outlet for those feelings. So many of the episodes come from little moments with them. I have a 16 year old daughter and when she started high school I found myself really pressuring her to go to parties just like Trophy. Or I remember once I called Alyssa cuz I was with my daughter and we were shopping, which is a big theme this season. Because I found myself yelling, “Just try it on!” It’s like the most traumatizing thing, both being the daughter and being the mother. I like taking these experiences and finding absurd creative reflections of them. I’m not a diaristic kind of person so this is the perfect creative outlet for what we’re all going through.

Alissa Nutting: Yeah, I think that it lends us both this knowledge and realism to those struggles. My daughter’s 10 and Alyson’s daughters are 14 and 16. So we have a front row seat to how our world and society are shaping them. I think that we’re very much trying to be a show that’s a welcoming space for anxious teens, disgruntled teens, lonely teens, outsider teens, dysfunctional teens, and teens in therapy. You know, that is our core audience and who we think about as we’re doing the show.

Awards Daily: Speaking to that realism, you’ve set the show in an uncertain-ish close future and you’ve also given Trophy her Death Powers, as she calls them. So you have a lot of freedom with what you can do with these characters. But you are also really trying to keep it focused on these characters and their relationships. How do you guys try to keep that balance between the fantastical and the character-based?

Alyson Levy: I think there’s a lot of different ways. A really good example for us, I think, which also comes from being parents, was our obsession about seeing the decline in the public schools. So in the pilot, one of our earliest animatics had a hologram teacher. Which came from where we thought things were going. This was before the pandemic, and how that all did basically catch up with reality. Then it changed and our characters had to become the teachers because then during the pandemic everyone was, like, okay, now the parents are the teachers instead. So that is kind of how it filters through all of Teenage Euthanasia. It does usually stem from how it affects the characters or how it grounds something that’s going on in the world.

Alissa Nutting: We kind of have this rule as well that Trophy is the only one who has supernatural powers. But, you know, it’s kind of like rules are made to be broken, and sometimes we find character or plot motivations that do require other types of magic. Like an old world teratoma curse, for example.

Alyson Levy: Yeah, I mean, the more we get into it, the more that feels like their family in particular has some kind of supernatural background that is unclear what good it is for. It does mostly come from superstition like a mysterious secret small village somewhere that this all emanates from. I don’t know, maybe we’ll get more into it, but the less said is probably for the best.

Award Daily: Plus the hags can sense things too.

Alyson Levy: [Laughs] Yeah, we are into hag wisdom, a big catchphrase around our office.

Awards Daily: Continuing with the characterization, a big part of the show is the idea of connection. Annie wants this connection with Trophy and she’s reluctant to do that for several reasons. Then you’ve also got, kind of on the opposite end, Pete and Baba have probably the most unhealthy connection you can have. What was it about this concept that appealed to you?

Alissa Nutting: I mean, they’re a very dysfunctional family, and I think that was something that was very important for us to portray. They’re not a family that is necessarily good or healthy for one another. But because of human need and psychology and psychosis, we are really drawn to our family members and getting approval from them, even when that isn’t healthy. I think generational trauma, particularly through generations of women, is something that both Alyson and I are very interested in. The kind of trauma or pain we pass down to our own daughters, sometimes knowingly, but most of the time unknowingly. Just having good intentions, that’s something that we really wanted to see portrayed in a comedic way within the show. I think the dressing room episode that Alyson was referencing is a really good example of that. Every woman I know has a horror story involving a dressing room and her mother. So that was something that was really really important to both of us. You know the whole mix between anxious attachment and avoidant attachment within the family is really nice to be able to explore. Both Trophy and Baba are pretty avoidant, and Pete and Annie couldn’t be more anxious, so there’s something for everybody that way. Whatever your attachment wound is, we’ve got jokes for you!

Awards Daily: I especially loved Trophy’s flashbacks to her dressing room days with Baba. That added a nice extra depth to her.

Alissa Nutting: She suffered too, and you can forget that sometimes when she’s being a mean girl. But she carries a lot of pain, and you know in the opening sequence to every single episode, you see her kill herself before she’s brought back to life. So as much as she tries to be superficial there is actually a lot of unplumbed repressed depth to Trophy.

Awards Daily: On a more ridiculous note– where did the idea for the death roaches that come out of Trophy come from?

Alissa Nutting: Okay, first of all you have to know that growing up in Florida at slumber parties, there was this urban legend that was this terror story we all perpetuated of someone having a cockroach crawl into their vagina. As teenage girls, cockroaches are scary and our vaginas are scary. It all involves the unknown and it has never left my mind. I still cannot fall asleep naked, you know, cuz I’m, like, a cockroach in the vagina! I just can’t. I would stay up all night because of that story if I was denied pajamas . So I was just thinking well, you know, if she was a dead body and cockroaches or beetles did in fact invade her vagina and then she was magically reanimated, wouldn’t the beetles filling her vagina also get magical powers and perhaps you know live to serve her and do her bidding? That seems like a really straightforward logical progression.

Awards Daily: You did something to Florida in the final episode, which of course hasn’t aired yet, so, if you are given a third season, is that something you’re going to continue to address, or are there any other ideas you guys have thought about already?

Alyson Levy: I mean, I think things have a way of resetting in our world like The Simpsons. I think that there could be some repercussions about the separation. Orlando Jones plays the governor of Florida on our show, and we do like the big picture Florida stuff. But I don’t know. We’re not sure yet about how that will all pan out. We do have a lot of ideas. I feel like we always have twice as many things as we need. To me our show feels like Bob’s Burgers in that way, that it just goes on and on. There is not this big change happening, it’s really a constant coming of age story for Annie and an endless family dynamics sitcom. I don’t know what kind of memory exists within our show. It’s just not something we were terribly interested in.

(SPOILER for the finale)

Alissa Nutting: If Florida is America’s penis and if you know it got castrated and then got reattached it would probably get reattached badly. You can see it being attached, you know, backwards or sideways or, you know, the United States rejecting its reattachment. Who knows who knows what happened?