Purrfect comedy abound in Exploding Kittens, the hilarious new animated series from creators Shane Kosakowski (You’re the Worst, Teenage Bounty Hunters) and Matthew Inman, the cartoonist/card game inventor/genius who spawned the Exploding Kittens and Throw Throw Burrito games, among other things. The laugh-out-loud new series has a groovy premise: God sucks at his job. He’s fired and his “body” is shoved into a chubby cat on Earth as punishment. Simultaneously, the antichrist is also bad at her job — she’s too kind and sweet, handing out Gatorades to people who are dehydrated. In Hell. She, too, winds up in cat form on Earth.

Godcat and Devilcat become neighbors, in fact, with new human pet owners. Tom Ellis is Godcat — coming off Lucifer, wink, wink — and Sasheer Zamata (Agatha All Along) is Devilcat. Suzy Nakamura, Mark Proksch, Ally Maki, and Kenny Yates are among the voice talents on board. Shane Kosakowski and Matthew Inman, the co-creator of the game, are jazzed to have their show premiering on Netflix July 12 and spoke with MovieWeb about the series, the big finale twist, and much more in this exclusive interview. Read on.

It’d be like if, you know, Cards Against Humanity made a show. You’d be like, ‘What the hell is this?’ So, I think that’s going to be something that’s unexpected. — Matthew Inman

WTH: Lucifer’s Tom Ellis is God?
Exploding Kittens Earth sucks, so God (Tom Ellis) gets fired and sent to Earth to reconnect with humanity. The catch? He’s trapped in the body of a chubby house cat. As part of his rehabilitation, he moves in with a dysfunctional family and tries to solve their problems, but ends up spending a lot of time chasing laser pointers. And to top it off, Godcat’s next-door neighbor, who is also a cat, turns out to be none other than his nemesis, the Antichrist. The result is the ultimate fight between good versus evil…except, Godcat (Ellis) is distracted by a pigeon he saw in the yard and Devilcat (Sasheer Zamata) is busy napping on someone’s laptop.Release Date July 10, 2024 Seasons 1 Showrunner Shane Kosakowski , Matthew Inman Expand

It’s hard to overlook the irony here — the fact that Lucifer headliner Tom Ellis went from playing a dashing devil to a grumpy God in Exploding Kittens. “When Matt and I first started talking about Godcat, it was such a big role, and it requires this kind of grandiosity,” Shane Kosakowski shared. “We talked a lot about what we were looking for in a vocal motif. And when we heard Tom the first time, it was pretty automatic. We really gravitated towards his voice, but also he just commands a room.” He added:

“Then we started recording with him and we didn’t realize… we had seen some of his BBC stuff, and we knew he had a background in comedy, but when you get into a room with him,
he is hysterical, and he has a ton of really funny ad-libs throughout the season
. He would just change lines just a little bit and he would add the comedy, you know, 50 to 60 percent. It was a total joy to work with him.
And to know that he also plays the devil is hysterical to me. It’s a trip.
”

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Straight-Up Comedy with a Big Climax

Shane Kosakowski is known for his work as a producer on the hit shows, You’re the Worst and Teenage Bounty Hunters. When the possibility of Exploding Kittens became more than a minor creative blip on his radar, something clicked. He was a fan of the franchise (and another project of Inman’s The Oatmeal comics), and took what he learned from his previous shows to fuel this new outing.

Related: Lucifer: The 20 Best Episodes of the Series

“I was a fan of the game, so I was really excited about the project and Matt’s idea,” he said. “Those shows [You’re the Worst, Teenage Bounty Hunters] specifically were serialized. They had serious moments, and they had jokes, and they kind of ran the gamut between joke kind of drama and comedy.” Kosakowski went on to note:

“This is a straight-up comedy, but we took some of the elements from shows that I’ve worked on, about trying to build character dynamics, trying to see an arc go from A to B over the course of a season and have it feel satisfying at the end… when you get to kind of that big crescendo of the climax of the season. And those are elements that live through on our show.”

“I hope that people quickly watch the show as fast as they can and get to the big ending,” added Kosakowski, “because each episode is its own little story, but also we’re telling a bigger story over the course of the season.”

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Exploding Kittens’ Accidental Cliffhanger

As Godcat and Devilcat move through their individual feline journeys, intersecting here and there, look for the hilarity — and the high stakes — to increase by the end of the season. Surely, this isn’t a one-off. There must be more to come, yes?

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“From the beginning of the season, a lot of people don’t expect our premise,” Inman said. “They don’t know what to think. It’d be like if, you know, Cards Against Humanity made a show. You’d be like, ‘What the hell is this?’ So, I think that’s going to be something that’s unexpected.” He went on to say:

“I don’t want to spoil the season because we do have some events that happen. But I think they’re [audiences] going to be satisfied. It’s really funny. The other thing, this will make sense when you watch the whole season, but the way we wrote it, it ends, in my mind, in script pages… it was like, ‘Ah, we’ve written a show, it’s done.’”

“Then when we got boarded and scored and everything, it ends, and it became a cliffhanger. But it wasn’t supposed to be,” added Inman. “It ends like, well, I don’t know. It’s not going to make sense until you watch it, but it was an accidental… an accidental cliffhanger.”

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Can Fallout and The Last of Us Influence Other Game Adaptations?

Peruse theoatmeal.com, Matthew Inman’s professional website, or explodingkittens.com, and you’ll discover plenty of creative content there. “I think we have 40 games at this point,” Inman told us. It’s fitting to ask if he’d love to develop other games he’s created, or that he and his creative partner, Elan Lee, have designed. “I would really like to keep pushing on this show for a couple of years, because we’ve already got our characters made, and we’ve already got, you know, casting.” He continued:

“That being said, we do have a big library of games, and there’s this sort of model now where stories come from unusual places, especially gaming. You’ve got the
Fallout
series or
The Last of Us. Video games to
TV has become a lot more prominent.
Board games and card games to TV is a lot less prominent. Like, our two main competitors are
Clue
, the movie from 30 years ago, and then we’ve got the
Battleship
movie.
So it’s pretty sparse.”

At the same time, he went on to say that streaming is a good place to test IP. “You make a card game, and it explodes and everybody loves it, maybe that could be a show,” he added. “And card games are cheap, and card games are easy. That’s an easy medium. It’s like the Marvel model. Make a comic, see if people respond to it. Turn that print comic into a $200 million movie. I’m not saying we’re going to do that…”

Well, God, they say, does work in mysterious ways. Perhaps Season 2 and other potential series are already part of the divine plan. Watch Exploding Kittens on Netflix on July 12. through the link below:

Watch Exploding Kittens