2 out of 5

Created by: John Whittington and Toby Ascher

Not that mass media audiences are necessarily arbiters of quality, or that my tastes are necessarily any more trustworthy, but I always grow curious when some piece of TV or filmic artifact ends up having a longer tail – more seasons, more sequels – than my judgment of the first go-around suggested was merited. Like, surely it means something, right? And sometimes that’s fairly easy to suss out, such that even if I recognize something isn’t for me, I can get why it might otherwise appeal. But then there are those projects where I’m flabbergasted an initial followup forms, much less two followups – and much less going from movie to TV screens, which ask for more of a time commitment. When this pattern happens, it convinces me to start fresh – watch from the beginning.

So with the announcement of Sonic film franchise spinoff Knuckles as a ding-dang TV show, it made me curious: how did we get here?

And then I understood, via a curiously inoffensive first movie, and an approaching-better-than-good second movie, and yeah, with Idris Elba back on board to voice the red echidna, and with a pretty well-balanced delivery of drolly fish-out-of-water dialogue in Sonic 2, having a mini-series might be a good way to stoke some hijinks-focused coals. Even though Wade (Adam Pally) was one of the more unfunny parts of the movies, I understood pairing him and Knucks as a kind of Two Stooges slapstick duo, and the trailers suggested the whole thing had a silly enough tone to maybe pull it off.

This isn’t not untrue, but it becomes less, and less, and less so as the episodes tick by; the series is stretched even at a couple episodes to maintain momentum, but I was still kind of feeling it – episode three essentially lampshades the utter pointlessness of this side story by having an anthropomorphic character attend a shabbat dinner with Stockard Channing, and I even admittedly marveled a bit at the action scene shot at the end of this, which features some solid stuntwork and scene choreography on what was clearly a pretty stretched budget. Like, this is on top of the general setup of Wade and Knuckles doing a cross-country trip to win a bowling tournament against Cary Elwes wearing a cowboy uniform, while being hunted by a ponytailed bounty hunter who’s played by Mighty Boosh-er Julian Barratt. This is enough “what the hell is this” to be entertaining even if poorly executed, but main writers John Whittington and Brian Schacter and a juggle of directors shove it in a box that’s certainly colorful and goofy enough for kids, and then pokes its head into weird enough gags or line reads to make an older crowd chuckle along.

At the same time, we are paired with some powerfully painful bits where the over / under-acting and pacing leads to a slew of off-timed beats and genuinely just puzzling moments where it’s unclear what the intended beat was. When we get to an almost entirely Knuckle-less episode – episode 4 – while I truly appreciate the physical spectacle of what the ep pulls off, it’s also evidence of how painful this stuff becomes when it’s centered mostly on Pally, who’s unfortunately responsible for a good share of those pacing flubs. And as many have subsequently pointed out, his arc is what the show ends up being about, and as that essentially takes over for the series’ last half…

The appearance of a Robotnik substitute villain in the conclusion is laughable: it is almost literally pasted in; Knuckles has almost no presence in the last three episodes except to be around for this villain, and their motivation exists completely at the peripherals of the series.

As this series was all dropped in a single day, doing it as a series seems odd – why not just shave off some spend and tighten the thing up to a 90 minute film? My only thought here is that a show somehow suggests less stakes than a movie (even if it was a straight-to-streaming one), allowing the creators to pitch the bowling gambit, but then I wish they’d had (or the producers / studio had had) the confidence to keep the focus on that and not shove in the tacked-on fight sequences. …If Sonic 3 is successful, maybe we’ll have some opportunity to see another attempt at a spin-off show, and if it can manage the step-up that occurred between the first two movies, well, I’ll be wholly onboard with this Sonic film-universe stuff.