In ‘Carol & the End of the World,’ Freedom Is Just a Happy Hour at Applebee’s Away
“I had a realization that if I knew the world was coming to an end, I wouldn’t want to go traveling or skydiving or running naked through the streets,” Dan Guterman told IndieWire. “I’d want to keep working. I’d want to continue being distracted from the end.”
The result of that epiphany is “Carol & the End of the World,” an animated 10-episode limited series on Netflix starring Martha Kelly as Carol, a woman surrounded by the hedonism of a planet that knows it will end in six months. But Carol (like Guterman) doesn’t want to surf — although she lies to her parents about it to offer them something — or do much of anything beyond quietly sifting through an existential crisis alone in an abandoned Applebee’s.
“So much of what I do is instinctive and unconscious, and it just seemed to me both very funny and haunting to have a woman inside an abandoned Applebee’s sitting in a booth or dragging her hand along the walls. It seemed to feel like a snapshot of who the character was emotionally in the moment.”
Over the course of the series, Carol finds both community and purpose in an office, where fellow comrades can move papers from one desk to another in a semblance of a normal routine even as a big blue planet inches ever closer to Earth and total destruction. The people in Carol’s world (including a single dad one-night stand, her parents and their lover, and her co-workers) get separate storylines and, in some, cases, episodes, but it is always Kelly’s performance that we return to. Leveraging her affectless vocal delivery to maximum comedic effect, Kelly also brings real pain to the character, who can’t understand what she’s supposed to do now that she’s free to do anything.
Integral to the success of “Carol & the End of the World” is the animation style that manages to feel both heightened and prosaic. “The show is so quiet and so nuanced that the characters had to feel grounded, to have a humanity to them, almost a kind of soul,” Guterman said. (He was also “obsessed” with matching the character designs to the actors. “Carol is especially interesting because so much of what she expresses and communicates falls between the lines,” Guterman said. “It is based on nonverbal cues. So we gave her these giant eyes to communicate with. There’s so much in a Carol look, in a Carol glance, in a Carol glare. We could go through long stretches of silence just using a character design to deliver dialogue.”
But to give voice to Carol, there could only be one actress. Fourteen pages into a 30-page script, Guterman realized he was writing for Kelly. Luckily, she read it and loved it. Equally lucky was Applebee’s acquiescence to license the use of the name and logo for the series. (Its ultimate role in the series is too good in a humdrum, oh-so-human way to spoil.) “Applebee’s is getting a free commercial out of our show because it’s mentioned a lot and it’s mentioned in depth,” Guterman said. “We didn’t clear it until a little bit down the line, and I remember getting up in the middle of the night, like, in a cold sweat, ‘What if this doesn’t clear?’ Because we had built so much on top of it. Luckily, it cleared.”
It’s in keeping with the spirit of the series that Applebee’s plays such a large role; as Guterman put it, “Carol & the End of the World” is a show about the end, sure, but it’s also a show about beginnings. Whether that’s a new relationship or an excuse to connect on a deeper level or, for Carol, an opportunity to create a new, fulfilling life, the show finds sweet hope in looming doom.
“We didn’t want to have a show that was just a comedy or just a sci-fi show, or even just a plot-driven show,” Guterman said. “We wanted to make something different, that balanced different textures, the funny and sad, the sweet and surreal, the melancholy.”
Structurally, the show takes big risks that pay off, including an entire episode about Carol’s wholly imagined adventures as a surf bum that Kelly narrates with precision. “That’s one of the episodes where it’s like, we’re out on a little bit of a limb with it. Because there’s nothing explained,” Guterman said. “All of a sudden there’s a fantasy episode in the middle of the season. I’m hoping people will understand and enjoy it and appreciate it for what it is, this sort of curveball, left-field episode near the end of the season.”
“Carol & the End of the World” is now streaming on Netflix.
