Twisted Metal - (10 episodes of ~30 minutes, Peacock, 2023)
This is a show about post-apocalyptic delivery men using heavily-armed vehicles to fight murderous clowns. If you are looking for more than that? You won't find it. But if you want enough gratuitous violence and profanity to delight your inner 12-year-old? It delivers.
The only thing it's lacking is nudity, but this isn't the 1980s and that sort of thing is reserved for serious adult dramas instead of B-movie material. In exchange we get the talents of Anthony Mackie (Falcon from the MCU) who brings his charm as John Doe, Thomas Haden Church (Sandman from Spider-Man 3, that guy from Wings and Sideways) as a manically subdued police officer, and an interesting team-up of Samoa Joe (multiple belts in pro-wrestling) as the body and Will Arnett (Come On!, Arrested Development) as the voice of murderous clown Sweet Tooth.
That last one deserves some extra praise. Samoa Joe does a damn good job bringing the character to life and with any luck we will be seeing more of him. Will Arnett does a great job with the voice acting, but it's a very physical role and Joe plays it beautifully.
Rounding out the cast are Stephanie Beatriz (Rosa Diaz in Brooklyn 99) who is meant to be tragic, but just comes across as sulky, Neve Campbell (Sidney Prescott in the Scream films) as the intimidating leader of New San Francisco, and Jason Mantzoukas (perfume magnate Dennis Feinstein from Parks and Recreation) who plays, as always, a psycho. There's a bunch of crazy factions besides the clown and his followers including a convoy of trucks that never stops moving, the aforementioned police officer and his mall-cop followers and your obligatory, tire-wearing raiders.
That's why as much as I'd like to, I can't call it the Car Wars show. That 1980s era wargame by Steve Jackson also featured a post-apocalyptic society with fortress cities and heavily-armed cars fighting across surprisingly well-maintained highways, but it tried to stay grounded. The most absurd organization was EDSEL, an organization that hated heavily-armed cars so much they would attack them on sight with their own, equally heavily-armed cars. I'd mention that they also hated irony, but I believe irony didn't exist in the United States in the 1980s.
Twisted Metal is actually based off the eponymous Sony videogame, and the idea of putting guns on cars was probably dreamt about shortly after the first Model-T left the lot. Most people credit the Mad Max movies (though Max's car wasn't armed) with the idea, but nerd historians trace it back to Alan Dean Foster's “Why Johnny Can't Speed” in 1971. Which is just a long roundabout way of saying anything that looks like a rip-off is probably lawsuit proof.
Plus if you are looking for autodueling? There isn't much. Mackie gives a speech at one point where he talks about balancing offense, defense, handling and speed which would ring true for any Car Wars fan. Do you install a two-space turret for $1,500 and an extra 200 pounds to get 360° firepower for your weapons, trade that in for an extra 20 points of armor, install an extra rocket launcher or ride light and not have to worry about a bad driving roll sending your car into a flip?
Instead we get a bunch of cars speeding around and it's... OK? There are some admittedly cool scenes where people throw tomahawks into the skulls of other drivers, but nothing like the multiple calculations and trade-offs that my overly sugared teenage brain would have to consider before announcing my next Car Wars move using cut-out cardboard makers in the basement rec-room.
I'd tell you about the cars, except I don't really remember any of them, except for the purple hearses driven by a particularly loathsome faction's enforcers. Instead I was kind of amazed at how great product placement works in a post-apocalyptic show. Normally I never comment on the things around me, but if I saw a Double-Frosted, Cherry Fresh Pop-Tart with Self-Toasting Package™ for the first time in decades? Yeah, I could see myself launching into a speech about them. Of course if your product is being featured in a show where people get casually murdered and have PG-rated sex in abandoned fast-food playgrounds? You may not want that as a brand manager. Unless you are Rice-A-Roni. That cameo was impeccable.
So if you like to see Anthony Mackie act like a more charming version of Will Smith, then kill a bunch of guys with CGI blood explosions, and curse while doing so with some funny bits? There are worse things to check out. Oh and one major plus, there are ten episodes but each one is only a half-hour so it fits perfectly when you need to veg out between the endless grinding responsibilities of adulthood.
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