It’s been a couple years since we heard anything about the Paramount+ Among Us animated series, and you would have been forgiven for thinking it had gotten lost somewhere in the vents. But surprise, all 10 episodes are out today, featuring a stacked celebrity voice cast but little in the way of substance or hearty guffaws.
Among Us the series is exactly what you think it is: it follows a colorful crew of little Among Us dudes stuck on a spaceship together with an alien shapeshifter posing as one of them and murdering them, one by one. There’s roughly one murder an episode, with the crew frantically trying to find the imposter in between deaths while the audience is similarly left in the cold dark of space until (presumably) the end.
I’ve seen the first five episodes so far. While strong personalities aren’t integral to the game, the show does a good job of distinguishing each color dude and giving them a cursory amount of motivation and personality. Patton Oswalt is one of the standouts as White, a stuck-up rich guy who won a contest for a space ride, Yvette Nicole Brown is solid as Orange, the deeply corporate-loyal head of HR, who in tandem with White and the young, naive, unpaid intern Green (Elijah Wood) gets in a few good but shallow zingers at the expensive of billion-dollar corporations and capitalism. My favorite in the cast is Randall Park as Red, the deeply incompetent captain whose bumbling attempts at unifying the group and looking cool led to most of the chortles the show managed to get out of me. I don’t mean to spoil things so early, but one of these four dies fairly early on, and I find it ridiculous to hire them for this and then not keep them around for very long.
Which wasn’t a lot, to be clear. I don’t think Among Us the show is bad. It’s fine! There are some good gags, especially if you pay attention to the art and animation detail. It is also deeply predictable: I know from the jump which characters are going to last until the final few episodes, and the first half of the series contained no surprises to debunk that prediction. If you’re watching this to see a long string of references to the game, you’ll be perfectly happy. The comically gruesome deaths showing a single bone in the weird crew bodies, the big Emergency Meeting button, the pizza, all the different rooms, security cameras, vents, it’s all there. It’s mostly referential fluff. It is essentially just like watching some celebrities play Among Us without you. I feel like I’d rather just get my friends together and play the game.
Friends or no friends, the other announcement in this segment was for Among Us Story: On Guard, a new story-driven Among Us game that’s about to be available to be wishlisted on Steam. No release date here, though we’ll likely get more details once the Steam page is up.
Anyway, if after watching several hours of Summer Game Fest, you want to wind down by watching a few episodes of Among Us (which are all very short, in the ballpark of 12-15 minutes apiece), all 10 of ’em are on Paramount+ right now.