Peacock’s Twisted Metal manages to make its 10 half-hour episodes feel much longer than they actually are. Only by the finale does the series arrive at the premise for the classic PlayStation games that it adapts: a bloodsport fought in vehicles, with all manner of cars and trucks mounted with missile launchers and automatic weapons. Up to that point, the show reimagines the world of the games as a post-apocalyptic road trip centered on a delivery driver, John Doe (Anthony Mackie), with a “Got milk?” bumper sticker on his truck.
Mackie’s motormouthed amnesiac agrees to make a dangerous cross-country run in exchange for a place within the walled city of New San Francisco. Along the way, John encounters the requisite variety of deranged characters and factions. The first is a woman whom he calls Quiet (Stephanie Beatriz), a begrudging passenger on her own quest for revenge against Agent Stone (Thomas Haden Church), who leads an assortment of fascist lawmen.
With other post-apocalyptic mainstays like cannibals and religious zealots, Twisted Metal isn’t done any favors by coming so soon after another game-based road trip through the end times, The Last of Us, though the series operates at a wackier register. The most successful example of the show’s comedy is represented by franchise mascot Sweet Tooth, a murderous clown with literally flaming hair who drives around in an ice cream truck.
Played by wrestler Joel “Samoa Joe” Seanoa and voiced by a pitch-shifted Will Arnett, Sweet Tooth is conceived as a kind of murderous theater kid, an amusingly affable psycho in search of his audience. The rest of the show’s comedy, though, lands with a thud, with a skilled ensemble of actors mugging for the camera in a desperate attempt to liven up jokes that feel like first-draft placeholders. (When Joe scurries off to move his car, Quiet observes that he “runs weird.”)
By the time we get a dose of free-for-all car combat in the season finale, one catches a glimpse of what Twisted Metal is going for, as the grudge-filled collision of characters from various factions adds an additional thrill to the chaotic action. But for all the brio of this sequence, it can’t quite disguise the fundamental shoddiness of the show’s production values. The sets and costumes lack any of the well-worn qualities that one associates with a world gone to ruin. Throughout, we get plenty of cutaways of anonymous parking lots and even more nondescript countrysides, with CGI cars weightlessly drifting through wider shots when the action isn’t edited to shreds.
Perhaps the only thing worse than the action and comedy in this series billed as an action-comedy is its paint-by-numbers pathos. Twisted Metal misjudges our dramatic investment in watching its protagonist be tortured by having to fill out DMV forms while speakers blast Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” on repeat. John and Quiet squabble in painfully contrived fashion, resulting in reheated monologues about trust and vengeance that would play poorly in any context but are particularly galling here, padding the runtime of an otherwise interminably wacky series.
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