“Carol & the End of the World”: an affirming apocalypse
In Netf lix’s new animated miniseries “Carol & the End of the World,” the question is not whether the apocalypse can be averted. The rogue planet that is definitely going to collide with Earth in about seven months is steadily growing larger in the sky. Humanity has accepted its fate; heroics are of no use. With the time they have left, people are out partying, traveling and hang-gliding, all of which are now clothing optional.
Amid the bacchanal, the question — at least for Carol Kohl, an introverted 42-year- old woman in an unnamed American city — is what to do if you don’t care to join the fun. Carol is a happy creature of habit, and she does not see why the imminent end of the world means that anything has to change. Her wealthy parents may be spending their days naked and in a passionate throuple with her father’s hunky caregiver, but Carol just wishes she could still go to Applebee’s after work. What she would really like to do is to go to work, period.
“Carol & the End of the World” was created by Dan Guterman, an Emmy-winning comedy writer and alumnus of The Onion who has worked on a small but interesting roster of shows that includes “At Home With Amy Sedaris,” “The Colbert Report,” “Community” and “Rick and Morty.”
His new series has elements of science fiction and dystopian workplace mystery, but it’s essentially a gentle, clear- eyed, coming- of- middle- age story. Carol is remarkable in her unremarkableness, and the show’s tension lies in whether she will come into her own in the little time she has left. Guterman doesn’t exactly find hope in the apocalypse, but he holds out for common humanity and a flicker of redemption.
Actress- comedian Martha Kelly voices Carol with an abashed drone that has a core of dogged resolve. (She played another lowkey character, Martha the claims adjuster, on the Zach Galifianakis comedy “Baskets.”) Carol is an odd, lonely, awkward duck, but she is that by choice. Her sister, who is spending her last days trotting the globe with younger men and compulsively skydiving, says: “She always did her own thing. Do you know how hard that is? I always do what everyone else does.”
The world of the show has a surface realism and a fairy-tale logic: No one is going to work, but somehow the trains still run and cable news networks still report; benignly silent soldiers fold laundry and ring up groceries. Traveling the mostly empty, gently trashed streets of the city (the whimsical, colorful animation is by Bardel Entertainment, the Canadian studio that also does “Rick and Morty”), Carol discovers the mysterious venue around which the story revolves: a bustling, brightly lighted accounting department in which towers of paper are shuffled for no obvious purpose or any apparent employer. For Carol it’s nirvana, but even here she has trouble getting with the program. She is determined both to learn the office’s secret and to instill some camaraderie in its silent, shellshocked workforce.
Carol’s new sense of purpose sends her and two coworkers, the formidable Donna ( Kimberly Hébert Gregory) and the effervescent Luis (Mel Rodriguez), on missions that have a dry, deadpan comic edge. The 10 half-hour episodes are also fleshed out with separate storylines involving Carol’s family ( Bridget Everett is the voice of her frenetic sister, Elena), and a sad father ( Michael Chernus) and son (Sean Giambrone) with whom Carol is briefly embroiled. Some of the later episodes take on stylized forms, like a riff on an “Endless Summer”-style surfing documentary or a human resources investigation recounted in true crime voice- over.
Guterman and his fellow writers, Kevin Arrieta and Noah Prestwich, let the story wander here and there, and their epiphanies can be small-bore; if you’re not on the show’s wavelength, you may find it aimless or mundanely sentimental. But it has a shaggy, slightly ethereal charm and sympathetic characters whose varied reactions to the end of the world ring largely true. “Carol & the End of the World” resonates with all the medical, meteorological and political terrors that animate the current wave of apocalyptic entertainments, but it’s not out to scare you or to lecture you. It’s for people like Carol who live inside their heads and need a little more time to emerge, even when the world is on fire.