The Peacock original series Twisted Metal is pretty much exactly what you should expect from a new streaming TV show based on a 1990s video game about heavily-armed cars that blow the hell out of one another. It’s big, dumb, obnoxious, and sometimes mildly amusing. Depending on your perspective, and your mood at the time of watching, that can make for a perfectly acceptable time-waster to relax your brain in between other content you care more about.

I wouldn’t fault anyone for taking one look at the show’s trailer and immediately writing it off as dumb trash. On the other hand, even dumb trash can be enjoyable so long as you don’t hold unrealistic expectations for it.

Title:	Twisted Metal
Season:	1
Number of Episodes:	10
Release Date:	July 27, 2023
Watched On:	Peacock

Twenty years ago, back in 2002, all the computers in the world suddenly stopped working. You remember that, right?… Wait, what do you mean you’re reading this on a computer right now? Stop being a buzzkill. It’s just a TV show, man. Go with it.

Naturally, as soon as the computers died, the entire planet went immediately to shit and turned into a Mad Max post-apocalyptic hellhole, as you’d expect. Governments fell. Cities built enormous walls to isolate from one another, leaving the terrain in between to scavengers and violent warlords. Also living in that wasteland are the desperate underclasses, assorted psychopaths of every flavor, and delivery drivers called “milkmen,” who face enormous risk to transport goods and packages from one city to another.

That’s the backstory for the TV version, anyway. I’ll be honest, I think I may have played the first Twisted Metal game on the original Sony PlayStation once or twice ages ago, but I’ll be damned if I can remember whether it actually had a story or not. All I recollect is driving around in an armored and armed car, shooting at anything I saw in my path.

Of course, a TV show needs a plot and characters, so now we have Anthony Mackie playing a milkman with amnesia issues who goes by John Doe. He drives around in a red Subaru he calls Evelyn. When the leader of New San Francisco (Neve Campbell) offers him citizenship in her too-perfect utopia if he’ll complete one particularly dangerous job for her, he heads out toward New Chicago. Doing so, he’ll have to contend with cannibals, bandits, religious cults, a sadistic cop (Thomas Haden Church) determined to impose law and order onto a lawless frontier, and a psycho in a clown mask (voiced by Will Arnett) acting as an agent of chaos to fuck up everybody else’s plans. Along the way, John will also reluctantly pick up a companion, a scavenger named Quiet (Stephanie Beatriz from Brooklyn Nine-Nine), who might just break through his cynical shell and make him care about something other than his car again.

The series comes from producers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, the team behind Zombieland and Deadpool. Their playful, smart-assed sense of humor is stamped all over it. That said, it should be noted that many of Reese and Wernick’s other projects haven’t been nearly as successful as those two, and this one will probably not be remembered as one of their best.

Twisted Metal is an entirely disposable TV show. If you try to scrutinize it too much, the whole thing is very dumb and lazy. Cars in the show are seen taking reams of heavy machine gun fire yet rarely suffer more than two or three bullet holes for it. For that matter, the vehicular combat – the entire point of the video game this is allegedly based on – really only factors into the first episode and about half of the last one. The other eight episodes in between find other, much less exciting or creative things for John and Quiet to do.

Even at its best, I wouldn’t say the show is hilarious. It can be agreeably amusing if you’re in the mood for it, but I doubt anyone will give a moment’s thought to it between this first season and the next, should one materialize. This isn’t the type of cult property that will develop rabid fans. It’s just a thing to watch if you’re not already busy with too many other, better shows right now.

As far as that goes, the ten half-hour episodes will pass the time quickly. I’ve wasted more of my life bingeing worse. If the second season set up by the last episode’s cliffhanger comes to fruition, I’ll probably watch.

Video Streaming

Twisted Metal is a Peacock original series. I’m on Peacock’s ad-supported Premium tier and didn’t find the ad load too intrusive. During my binge, most of the half-hour episodes had two to three commercial breaks of one minute each. The series streams in 4K HDR at an aspect ratio of 2.00:1. The image quality is quite sharp, though Peacock’s compression quality leaves something to be desired and most episodes have at least momentary issues with color banding or pixelation.

The show has a hyper-vibrant and exaggerated visual style, and the HDR grading is very hot. Episodes can be almost scorchingly bright, with oversaturated, cartoony colors. The red of blood looks quite fake. I’d be inclined to assume that’s all intentional, except that highlights often clip at my projector’s normal calibrated settings. Turning the projector’s tone-mapping down tempers that a bit, but then leaves other scenes looking too dim. (Content during the ad breaks also looks dark and dull – not that I care what the ads look like.) I had trouble finding a compromise setting that I was fully happy with.

The Dolby 5.1 soundtrack is loud, bassy, and obnoxious. That’s entirely appropriate for the content, of course. When it’s used, music has acceptable fidelity and nice range. On the other hand, Will Arnett’s dialogue for the Sweet Tooth character screams of ADR and never sounds like it’s actually coming from the physical actor on screen.