4 out of 5

Created by: Christopher Yost, Alan Wan (showrunners)

This is an incredibly muddled mess of compromises, most of which it has in common with the Mutant Mayhem film with which it shares a Turtlesverse – and is acting as a between-quel for a followup flick – but this 12-episode series has a bit more wiggle room to establish itself on its own terms thanks to the film, and the episodic nature (even if it’s for the sake of two 6-episode mini arcs) makes those compromises feel more experimental than a sign of the unfocused times. That is: one of my main criticisms of the movie is that it felt rather inconsequential as a result of the storytelling, and that the storytelling seemed informed by the 2020s take on YA narratives.

My current theory (as of late 2024) is that the increased screentime / social media that led to rapid fire input during the 2010s has evolved into second screentime pacing: media should have the rhythm of memes, but should also be kind of general enough that you can be watching the show in the background and still have an opinion. I have no evidence for this except trends, but both Mutant Mayhem and Tales have a way of sitting on punchlines for a minute too long, or making sure to kind of explain the joke after the fact.

A quick read is that this is dumbing the humor down, but that’s what’s interesting: that rapid-fire memeness produces some pretty complex and clever gags, and I’d argue the writing on Tales is pretty strong in that regard (excepting another holdover from MM of referencing stuff from the 80s / 90s that feels like try-hard attempts to woo older audiences, but also reward super cool kids for having watched Akira); I eventually adjusted to this pace, kind of expecting most jokes to hover in the air, and then was pleasantly surprised when some episodes were able to ditch it – particularly the bookends of the series (so we got off to a strong start), perhaps suggesting that my analysis is bunk and it’s just padding. But I think it could be a bit of both.

The other plus / minus is in the animation, which settles on a lower budget way of effecting the hand-drawn / dropped-frames style of the movie without the input, but it ends up with a flip-flop of Mayhem’s (from my POV) issue: the movie’s herky-jerk worked well for action but seemed off for dialogue; in Tales, the timing seemed to sync with the writing for conversation, but the stuttering was too drastic for most of the action. Except some of the big money scenes in key episodes, where stuff was smoothed out. The final episode, in particular, has an incredible showdown that seems to reduce the stutter purposefully, and it really made me feel like the dropped frames shtick probably wasn’t necessary at all. The character designs and loose-lined backgrounds are unique enough.

Voice actors: the teens who play the turtles (Micah Abbey, Shamon Brown Jr., Nicolas Cantu, and Brady Noon) nail it. They were finding their rhythms in the movie, but man, they all land it here, giving each Turtle a solid personality, and managing some of the shmaltzier dialogue really well, giving it just enough nuance to make it seem organic. To be fair – the schmaltz isn’t really too bad, but we repeat some variations of “I should be myself” / “I should listen to my brothers” several times, and fall back on some pretty generic lines to do so. And Ayo Edebiri is a very solid April. On the other hand, I’m guessing Jackie Chan wasn’t available, or was too big of a pricetag, to do a TV show, so Splinter is “voiced” by having him speak the gibberish of Scumbug – his girlfriend who is a mutant bug. I’ll get into this more in the next plus / minus, but it’s firstly a clunky gag, and secondly distracting; it’s an adjacent negative to some of the new celebrity cast who play the main villains in the second arc – Timothy Olyphant as baddie Goldfin, Danny Trejo as Mustang Sally, and Jillian Bell as Lee the Eel. I appreciate the efforts, but none of these actors really get past the “I’m voicing an animated character!” superficial vibe, particularly – I’m sorry to say – Olyphant. The returning Mutanimals’ actors are a mixed bag, but perhaps a combo of returning to the characters and the characters having a bit more dimension helps out.

My next “how is this a four star review?” comment regards the overall structure of the episodes, which is bizarre. Both arcs are told in kind of winding flashbacks that go through unnecessary layers of This Happened The Same Time As…, and I truly just cannot figure out the necessity for this. It’s part of what ends up requiring this ridiculous Splinter voice workaround – if you really didn’t want to recast, there were ways to write him more on the sidelines, versus the aforementioned gibberish or having Raphael do a Splinter impression as the whole story takes place via Raph narrating events to us…

Now, old-heads may retort: that’s… that’s how Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – as per the comic book – is supposed to be! A Turtle tells us a story! Yes. Sure. But the wraparound timelines are not a requirement for that. This goes into the same pile as the animation style, and the “second screen” viewing concept: it feels like glossy quirk tacked on to add surface interest, but I question the need for it.

…That said…

For all of this, Tales took some of Rise’s and Mutant Mayhem’s bolder swings and grew more confident with them. As I sneaked in somewhere above, while some of these things were unavoidable – like the celebrity casting – on the whole, all of the “minuses” come across as the team trying something, as opposed to just giving in. For everything that fell kind of flat, I couldn’t get past also feeling somewhat tickled by it. It’s goofy. The show just goes for it. And yeah, when they “went for” a more complex narrative structure, that affected all the episodes, but they also stuck to it. Again the roots of this stuff were already there, with Rise’s second season getting strong, and a good base built up in MM, and then the weird position of Paramount in the streaming circus seemed to give the writers and directors enough room to feel like they could eff things up a little bit. Maybe they did! But they had a lot of fun doing so, and as a result, I did too.