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Read a summary of the Amazon animated show Hazbin Hotel and you’d be forgiven if you thought a gathering of its fans and creatives might be a pretty R-rated affair. Sure, it does have musical numbers, but this is a show where f-bombs get dropped constantly; where the characters include pimps, pushers, sex slaves, a one-eyed S&M-loving janitor, and a host of other very adult-oriented characters; and which includes some very disturbing acts of violence. Euphoria has nothing on this show (or, for people of another generation, Oz).  

And yet when I showed up for Hazbin Hotel’s panel Thursday morning at New York Comic Con 2024, I found a room buzzing with a happy energy that felt more like it belonged to fans of the Disney Channel's beloved Owl House. People were bouncing around, taking pictures of all the cosplayers, who absolutely came to play. (Hazbin actually shares with Owl House a fantastically visual set of characters, as well as some great queer Latina protagonists.)

I heard one fan telling stories about a Catholic friend that loves the show. “Umm, okay, I guess?” she told her friends, giggling, before going on to talk about her own experience attending religious services every week.

In truth, for all of its foul-mouthery and adult situations, Hazbin Hotel is a show about someone who believes in the possibility of redemption with an undeniably-infectious kind of joy. Charlie Morningstar, daughter of Lucifer, has made it her mission in life—er, Afterlife—to see that the demons of Hell have the chance to be saved.

Fans of the show have clearly embraced Charlie’s happy optimistic spirit. The panel actually started 20 minutes late—the first day of comic con always has its kinks, but losing 20 minutes of an hour-long panel is kind of a lot (especially for the hundred or so I found already eagerly waiting 45 minutes early). At one point someone came to the podium. The crowd began cheering, only to discover it was just a member of the con staff, coming to grab a mic. But rather than grumbling, they all just laughed.

Once the panel started, showrunner Vivienne Medrano and cast members Alex Brightman (Adam, Sir Pentious) and Kimiko Glenn (Nifty) shared that same happy attitude. With his grey beard and hooded sweatshirt, Alex Brightman looks more like a dad that just dropped the kids off at school than an evil angel who’d love to skull**** a demon. And after a couple questions from Collider’s Peri Nemiroff, he interrupted to say, “You are the nicest person. These are the nicest questions we’ve ever gotten.” As co-panelists Kimiko Glenn (Nifty) and creator Vivienne Medrano nodded in agreement, Nemiroff tried to play the compliment off, saying how easy it was talk about Hazbin Hotel team. Shaking his head, Brightman said, “I’m making this my Bar Mitzvah.”

Among Nemiroff’s great questions: “One of the most exciting things when you start a new show is feeling like you’re on unstable ground, you’re not sure who your character is. And then you have the a-ha moment where you find them. What was moment for each of you?” It led to Brightman revealed that he finds each character through the posture he uses while voice acting them. Meanwhile Glenn shared, “I want to say it was a hard road, but I looked at her and I was like ‘Yeah, gremlin energy.’”

Also there was this gem from Nemiroff, which gave the cast a way to tease season 2 on their own terms while also sharing their own experiences as actors: “I’ve heard a whole lot about how you’re upping things, you’re leveling up in season two. So as singers and voice actors, can you tell me something you did in season two that’s upping your game, that’s putting a new tool in your voice acting toolkit that you didn’t have before?”

Being fun is obviously a big part of being on a convention panel. After Medrano shared how she’d tried without success to find the teacher who had first inspired her to become an animator, Brightman quipped, “That is such a weird way to say that he died.” When Glenn talked about getting offered the show, she talked about watching the pilot that Medrano and thinking, “This is not Baby Shark.”

But as the panelists talked, they attributed a lot of the show’s success to the feeling they have for each other. “We are a group of people that love to be around each other,” Brightman explained. Glenn agreed: “We have mutual admiration for each other. We’re all kind of Broadway theater nerd people.”

And the thing that has most surprised them is not simply the great fan reaction, but the kinds of reactions thev’ve gotten. Medrano has had multiple couples tell her they met watching the show. One even got engaged at a con in Hazbin cosplay. Awed that people would find “these characters are so special that they made this enormous milestone in they life sort of involve them,” Medrano said to them, “That insane!”

Brightman revealed that he had recently been in a coffee shop in Iowa, and had a similarly wild thing happen. “The barista hands me my coffee, I say thank you, and she says ‘You’re welcome, Dick Master.’” (Dick Master is a title Brightman’s evil angel character Adam gives himself in the show.) “I was like, Holy shit.”

Fan questions at con panels are a mixed bag. (This is a polite way of saying that fan questions are often kind of a shit show.) But every question here was a banger, either getting the panelists to dig deep or revealing some pretty swell news. Could there be a theatrical release at some point down the line? Yes! Will the hotel get upgrades in season two? Indeed! Will we ever see the proverbial (and now truly hole-y) Dick Master again? STAY TUNED.

Maybe this doesn’t seem like much of a story. Maybe I’m trying to make a chocolate fondue out of a single s’more. But the last time I attended a panel as violent and vulgar as Hazbin sometimes gets, the crowd (of mostly middle-aged men) went so crazy watching a clip that I thought they were going randomly choose one of their own and tear them apart. (The Walking Dead fans, I love you, please don’t hurt me.)

Meanwhile, sitting in this room full of people who have fallen in love with a show about angels and demons who break into song (and also are very, very broken) was like escaping from a brutally cold night into a cabin where a great fire is blazing and a room full of friends await with board games, showtunes and stories. Hazbin Hotel is a show about bringing out the best in people, and it seems like it does that in real life, too.

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