From Patreon to Prime Video: Vivienne Medrano’s Road to the Hazbin Hotel

Vivienne Medrano’s adult animated comedy series Hazbin Hotel has been renewed for a second season—with the deal struck even before the series premieres on Prime Video today. Not too shabby for the first-time TV showrunner. But Medrano earned her stripes (and studio attention) the new-fashioned way: She amassed a huge online following as YouTube animator and creator Vivziepop. The crazy, fantastical world of Hazbin Hotel originated as a Patreon-funded pilot, which Medrano released on her own channel in 2019, garnering more than 94 million views since. 

The show focuses on the adventures of Lucifer’s estranged daughter, Charlie (Erika Henningsen), the princess of hell. Charlie has the audacity to try and find a peaceful alternative to the angels’ yearly extermination of hell’s overcrowded conditions. With devoted girlfriend Vaggie (Stephanie Beatriz) at her side, Charlie opens the Hazbin Hotel as a sort of rehab/halfway house for demons, teaching clients foreign concepts such as forgiveness, second chances, and redemption. Charlie ignores the sniggers of hell’s denizens, determined to help demons get to heaven. 

Fans of the original pilot will notice that Prime Video’s first episode isn’t simply a rehash. While differences abound, the updated version is still clearly not for the kiddos. Hazbin Hotel includes wickedly pointed adult humor, eccentric characters, lots of sinners, and Disney-esque musical numbers—if those tunes included cuss words and sexual innuendo. (Listen to Henningsen and cast sing the Broadway-worthy “Happy Day in Hell ” to dive into the show’s dichotomy. Written by Sam Haft and Andrew Underberg, the up-tempo song includes lyrics that reference both saving souls and sticking barbed-wire where the sun doesn’t shine.) 

“The biggest challenge was not recreating the original pilot,” Medrano says during a recent Zoom interview. “I was asked pretty early on, ‘Do you want to use the pilot as it was first set? Do we want to recreate it?’ And for me, we were given eight episodes. I had the story set, and so I really didn’t want to lose any episode to telling the same story that already exists.” 

Directing all eight episodes, Medrano figured out a way to reintroduce familiar characters, introduce new ones and reset the narrative for the first season. She added the intro backstory of Adam and Lillith (Adam’s first wife who was cast out of the Garden of Eden for disobeying her husband) as well as Adam and Eve. “I’m very proud of that episode because I worked really hard to make all those pieces work,” she says. “And I feel like I pulled it off in some way.”  

With an underworld of demons, hellions, and a few angels to create, Hazbin Hotel showcases Medrano’s long-lined style and exaggerated features for her characters. She cites influences of animator Bruce Timm’s Batman: The Animated Series, Jhonen Vasquez’s sci-fi Invader Zim, the Disney Renaissance movies, “and Looney Tunes and Warner Brothers animation that’s very elastic and cartoony and expressive. It’s kind of like all those things in a blender.”  

Visually eye-catching, everything in Hazbin Hotel is wrapped in red and black hues, from the characters to the background imagery. Everything. “When you think of hell, you think of fire and you think of red. And to me it was like a no-brainer,” she says. “[There’s] a lot of very red setting. That was the goal.”

Medrano launched her YouTube channel in 2012, while still a student at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Some of the characters in Hazbin Hotel were developed while she was in college, but others came from her drawings and imagination in grade school. Alastor, a powerful overlord also known as The Radio Demon (Amir Talai) was one of her first characters. “I’ve had him for a very long time. He started as a very, very edgy deer OC [original character] that I had,” she says. 

We had to ask if Medrano’s parents were just a touch worried that their kid was drawing about demons at such a young age. “He was a very different character like I said,” she laughs. “He was a deer, an animal, and then eventually became a shapeshifter between the two [human and animal].” Alastor has evolved even further to become a demon who sings and works as the host of the Hazbin. 

With the impending release of Hazbin Hotel, Medrano is ready for critiques from the peanut gallery. “I’m definitely anticipating it. I feel like anything that is queer and reclaiming hell imagery will warrant some comments from people,” she shares. 

As a queer, POC artist herself, Medrano says that the show presents some of the stories that she wanted as a kid growing up, including loving, same-sex relationships, found family and imperfect characters. 

“There’s definitely elements that come from me, but hopefully, it’s still a fictionalized, fun show that’s meant to be about redemption, letting people have flaws and seeing that they can grow from them,” Medrano tells me. “So I’m hoping people can see beyond that, and not get too mired in the weeds of the subject matter at hand.”

The first three episodes of Hazbin Hotel begin streaming on Amazon Prime on January 19, with two episodes released each week through February 2.