There’s a certain set of characteristics we’ve come to expect from an adult-animated series that looks and sounds like Netflix’s Carol & The End Of The World (out December 15): 27 minutes packed with sight gags, rapid-fire jokes, and throwaway plotlines that are designed to be forgotten by next week.
And though the animation recalls the broad, cartoony style of shows like Family Guy and Big Mouth, this new miniseries moves to a rhythm all its own—a slow, melancholy waltz that’s less American Dad! and more Somebody Somewhere. In keeping with its pre-apocalyptic premise, nothing is wasted on this 10-episode show about what humanity gets up to in its final months of existence. Carol & The End Of The World is funny, yes, and there’s plenty of absurd slapstick; but at its core, this is a patient, meditative series about what it means to be a person living among other people: where we put our attention, what we owe each other, and, most of all, what we owe ourselves.
Created by Dan Guterman—who cut his teeth writing for Rick And Morty—Carol & The End Of The World picks up seven-odd months before Earth is due for total annihilation via a mysterious planet hurtling a little closer every day. It literally hangs over the series, a quietly menacing turquoise orb whose presence in the sky has become as commonplace a sight as the sun and moon.
Rather than going full The Purge, knowing the end is nigh has brought out the best in the human race. Nearly everyone across the globe has thrown out the playbook in favor of living their best lives—whether that means trips to Tibet, all-night dance parties, spending quality time with family, or finally learning how to play the trombone. The show has a blast with these background gags: Freed of their inhibitions, people dress in getups ranging from bird costumes to nothing at all; there’s always a skydiver somewhere overhead, or a small orgy at the edge of the screen. And, it goes without saying, society has done away with the capitalist playbook; chain stores and office buildings have fallen to ruin, and anything you could ever want is free of charge.
The show centers on the one person on Earth who has no idea what to do with all this freedom, Carol Kohl (voiced by comedy stalwart Martha Kelly), a middle-aged woman who wears the same drab outfit every day and speaks in a halting tone of constant apology. While everyone around her self-actualizes, Carol trawls deserted Office Depots or sits alone at a booth in an abandoned chain restaurant. When someone asks her what she misses about the old world, she thinks about it before replying, “Recycling, mostly. And the feeling you get from saving money? And Applebee’s.”
It’s a potent metaphor for depression. When everyone around her comes out of their houses to cuddle close and watch the sun set while a choir sings a wordless hymn to the beauty of existence, Carol only sighs and heads off to shop for groceries. She’s always been a lonely person resigned to living on the outside of everyone else’s happiness—but this was easier to do when the day-to-day grind was commonplace. But it turns out she’s not alone in her dissatisfaction. When she clocks an older woman in a business suit, she follows her into a seemingly empty high rise and discovers her own kind of nirvana: an accounting department teeming with office drones, the only sound the percussive clacking of a thousand computer keys. What are they all doing, exactly, in a world where there’s no longer money and therefore no more numbers to crunch? If you have to ask, you’re probably skydiving right now.
As the months tick down to doomsday, Carol comes to realize that what she’s really looking for is a chance to foster connections with her fellow outsiders—the ones who feel more at home drinking stale coffee in a windowless break room than sipping Mai Tais on a sun-kissed beach in Tahiti. And as her scope of awareness expands, so does the show’s. Some of the miniseries’ most profound moments come when we pull away from her point of view to focus on the lives around her.
There are her coworkers, Donna (Kimberly Hébert Gregory) and Luis (Mel Rodriguez), two fellow travelers whose lives are as ordinary and extraordinary as Carol’s own. In one particularly touching subplot, Donna goes to her son’s house to celebrate Christmas in April (because the world won’t be around come December—nor, for that matter, December as a concept) with her extended family. Amid the celebration, she reflects on the fact that a lifetime spent at work to make ends meet meant she never spent enough time with her kids. The story ends on a lingering closeup of a photo album resting on the passenger seat as Donna drives away from her family for what could very well be the last time.
Even characters whose lives we laugh at when we first meet them get their moments of reflection. Carol’s elderly parents, Pauline (legendary character actor Beth Grant) and Bernard (Lawrence Pressman), are living as nudists in a loving ménage à trois with Bernard’s much younger beefcake of a live-in nurse (Delbert Hunt). Later, the nurse delivers a monologue about his profound love for the pair that made us shed a tear or two. The standout fourth episode is shown entirely from the perspective of Carol’s adventurous sister, Elena (Bridget Everett, speaking of Somebody Somewhere), as she records a hike the pair take on an old VHS camera. We feel for Elena as she tries to get her shy, melancholy sister to open up about her hopes and dreams before it’s too late.
At the same time, the series doesn’t shy away from darkness. In one episode, Carol finds a gun in her desk drawer that hangs over the episode like, well, a Chekhov’s gun. The tension mounts as we wonder whom she’ll train that pistol on—her friends? Herself? Because, after all, just how deep does Carol’s despair go?
By the titular end, Carol & The End Of The World put us in mind of Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day,” whose famous closing line (“Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”) is often misinterpreted. In context, the poem isn’t asking us to live every moment to the fullest as if we’ll die tomorrow; it’s inviting us to consider where we put our attention. For Oliver, it’s the seemingly smallest thing: a grasshopper she spots leaping through a field. For Carol (and for Guterman’s gorgeous, surprising show as a whole), it’s all the lost people and displaced objects around her—none more, it turns out, than herself.
Carol & The End Of The World premieres December 15 on Netflix