Welcome aboard! As a MIRA employee you will be responsible for transporting ore safely, and not dying. Good luck!

You’d be forgiven for thinking a series based on an enormously popular but now slightly waned social deduction video game would be an exercise in box ticking. Among Us is anything but box ticking.

Created by Owen Dennis. responsible for the astonishing Infinity Train, Among Us is very funny, very clever and a genuinely great example of ‘Something terrible happens to a small and cheerfully ill-equipped spaceship crew.’

Much of this success is down to the cast who are uniformly brilliant. Elijah Wood’s permanently terrified new guy Green is a charming entry point character and every one of his crewmates are just as much as fun. The friendship, and maybe something more, between Kimiko Glenn’s cheerful Cyan and Liv Hewson’s gloriously goth Black is genuinely lovely, as is Patton Oswalt as louche socialite White and Deba Wilson and Phil LaMarr as Brown and Yellow. Dan Stevens too has enormous fun as Blue, the dashing, handsome, handsome and dashing ship’s medical officer.

The standouts in a group of standouts are Ashley Johnson as Purple and Randall Park as Red. The former is a hard-bitten, down on her luck security officer and the latter is the flighty, flamboyant and not even remotely competent Captain. Their shared past is key to the show and crucially to the sense of tension. You genuinely do not know whether one of them is the bad guy at several points and the emotional dimension the two bring to their roles is hugely impressive.

But the show’s gleefully gooey sense of humour is its other ace in the hole. The credits shift constantly to reflect how and who has been killed, and the focus of the show itself cheekily moves through the video game, the VR version, a hilarious live action sequence and animation. Sight and line gags hit constantly (there’s a joke involving a CAUTION SLIPPERY FLOOR sign which is a classic) and the interplay between the cast is all the more impressive given they recorded everything separately.

Verdict: This is a great video game adaptation, not just in terms of format and tone but style. It’s also an enormously funny comedy and an unrelentingly dark piece of science fiction horror. The final couple of episodes especially pull zero punches. If you played the game, you’ll love this, but if you liked a single Alien movie, then you’ll love this too. 10/10

Alasdair Stuart

 

Among Us is on Paramount Plus and the first episode is on YouTube