[COLUMN] Knuckles is a Surprisingly Splendid Sonic Sitcom | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

NOTE: This piece contains light spoilers for Knuckles, but it’s a show that very much lives or dies in the execution rather than the particular twists. If you want to go in completely blind, feel free to bookmark and come back. I’ll admit: I was honestly surprised at how much I enjoyed it. The production team weren’t Echidna-ing around.

It is almost a shame when, halfway through the final episode of Knuckles, the villain known only as “the Buyer” (Rory McCann) smashes his way into a Reno bowling tournament wearing a superpowered suit of armor for a climactic showdown with Knuckles the Echidna (Idris Elba). It’s not that the spectacle is underwhelming or that the action is disappointing, it’s that it exists at odds with the relatively modest scale of Knuckles, which is so much of the show’s charm.

Knuckles arrives as a six-episode streaming spin-off from Paramount’s recent Sonic the Hedgehog movies. As tie-in projects go, it’s something of a no-brainer. Streaming services rely heavily on brand recognition and existing intellectual property, and the Sonic movies have managed to gross over $700m combined and were relatively well-received critically. Building an event miniseries around Knuckles, the beloved video character and breakout addition to the second movie, makes sense.

These days, it’s something of a cliché to joke about the perceived poor quality of video game adaptations. In the past couple of years, shows like Fallout and The Last of Us have proven that it’s possible to adapt video games into compelling television narratives. However, Sonic the Hedgehog arrived at a point where, allowing for Pokémon Detective Pikachu, video game movies were still a roll of the proverbial dice. The film’s success was far from assured.

Jeff Fowler’s Sonic the Hedgehog shrewdly decided to pitch itself more as a children’s movie than as a direct adaptation of the video games, eschewing a lot of the distinctive visual and aural aesthetic of the classic SEGA games for a fairly conventional road movie plot about a human guy, Tom Wachowski (James Marsden), who embarks on a journey with an anthropomorphic cartoon animal named Sonic the Hedgehog (Ben Schwartz). It was basically Hop, right down to the casting of Marsden.

To be fair, the films mostly worked. They were broadly entertaining and they avoided the sorts of embarrassments that accompanied earlier adaptations like Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel's Super Mario Bros. However, it was also somewhat disappointing that a property with such a distinct style and energy was rendered somewhat generic in the rush to make it marketable and accessible. It was hard to shake the sense that the Sonic the Hedgehog movies should be more playful.

Interestingly, Knuckles largely adheres to the same basic plot template as Sonic the Hedgehog. The show is, once again, a road movie focusing on the adventures of a human guy paired with an anthropomorphic cartoon animal. Obviously, Knuckles is stepping into the role played by Sonic. Tom Wachowski is replaced by Wade Whipple (Adam Pally), a supporting character from both of the previous films. While Tom and Sonic were going to San Francisco, Knuckles and Wade head to Reno.

However, Knuckles ultimately works much better than either of the Sonic the Hedgehog movies. While it follows the same basic structure, it shifts tones. This makes sense, considering the different formats in play. The Sonic the Hedgehog movies were theatrical blockbusters and so were big, broad, family adventures. In contrast, portioned into six half-hour episodes, Knuckles pitches itself closer to a sitcom. This makes sense; Pally was a series regular on both The Mindy Project and Happy Endings.

The show leans into this mode and aesthetic. The cast and the production team are stacked with comedic talent. Taxi veteran Christopher Lloyd has a recurring role as Pachacamac, an Echidna who serves as spiritual guide to both Knuckles and Wade. British comedian Julian Barratt plays Jack Sinclair, Wade’s bowling buddy and professional bounty hunter. The show’s standout fourth episode is directed by Lonely Island member Jorma Taccone and even features “a low-budget rock opera” with the voice of Michael Bolton. It is delightful.

While the two Sonic the Hedgehog movies had to dabble in the sort of apocalyptic spectacle that define modern theatrical blockbusters, the stakes on Knuckles are endearingly low. Much of the first episode is given over to Knuckles’ existential ennui in the wake of the events of Sonic the Hedgehog 2. “We won,” Sonic explains. “Robotnik’s gone and there’s no new battle to fight, no new quest to embark on.” As Sonic narrates to the audience, “Knuckles’ only mission is to relax and enjoy Earth.” Knuckles asks Pachacamac, “With my work complete, what becomes of me?”

Naturally, Knuckles gets drawn into Wade’s decidedly silly personal quest. Wade plans to journey to Reno to bowl in a professional tournament. This is ultimately just an excuse for Wade to confront his long-absent father, 27-time champion bowler "Pistol" Pete Whipple (Cary Elwes). Inevitably, there is some action along the way, as the anonymous Buyer plans to hunt down Knuckles and harvest his energy, leading to one action scene per episode. But the focus is decidedly personal.

There is an easy charm to Knuckles. In the third episode, Knuckles attends Shabbat with Wade’s mother Wendy (Stockard Channing) and his sister Wanda (Edi Patterson). The result is a series of scenes that could never justify their existence in a gigantic crowd-pleasing blockbuster, including a surprisingly sincere sequence in which Stockard Channing discusses the meaning of Shabbat with a computer-generated Echidna while munching on Key Lime Pie and watching Pretty Woman.

Freed from the expectations of a big-budget tentpole, Knuckles can even get weird. In the fourth episode, Wade journeys to a spiritual plain in order to learn his companion’s tragic backstory. However, Wade is somewhat unimpressed with his surroundings. “The Great Battleground in the sky is a bowling alley?” he asks Pachacamac. Pachacamac sighs, “Well, for you it is.” What could easily be a clumsy exposition dump becomes something far more creative, a rock opera in a bowling alley.

Knuckles is never embarrassed of itself, never worried that the audience might dismiss it as “silly.” That backstory is delivered through old-fashioned theatrical techniques. Wade dresses up in onesie as Knuckles and plays against a variety of puppets and muppets. Knuckles is not a cheap show, but this interlude is deliberately and pointedly lo-fi. It’s a visual sugar rush. The absurdity and ridiculousness are never a mockery of the character or concept. Instead, they are a celebration.

It helps that the show understands the milieu in which it is operating. Knuckles isn’t just an extension of an iconic gaming brand, but situates the property in its larger context. Knuckles understands that Sonic the Hedgehog is a property that speaks to a certain Gen X aesthetic, and so roots itself in that. Wade’s childhood bed is still adorned with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle sheets. His bedroom walls are a “pantheon of heroes” to “all the greats”, hosting posters of “Stallone, Keanu, Bryan Adams.”

There is an infectious joy to the show’s embrace of not just specific cultural markers, but a broader aesthetic. Forget the obligatory boss battle, the season’s true climactic show-stopping sequence might just be a montage of a bowling tournament being broadcast on ESPN-8 (“the Ocho”), the de-fictionalized sporting network from the comedy Dodgeball, set to Paul Engemann’s Scarface (Push It to the Limit). The show is remarkably committed to the joke, as the screen splits and tiles like the climax of a 1980s sports movie.

There’s a tendency to dismiss comedy as an artform unto itself. This is obvious in cinema, but it’s also reflected in the lack of respect paid to the sitcom as a uniquely American artform. In reality, comedy demands just as firm a grasp of structure and rhythm as drama, and requires just as much skill. It is frankly surprising that Knuckles lands as many punchlines as it does, but the show also has a much stronger grasp of narrative and theme than either of the two Sonic the Hedgehog movies that spawned it.

The stakes of the show are fundamentally ridiculous, tied to a bowling tournament in a city that one ESPN host (Paul Scheer) dismisses as “Las Vegas for losers.” However, there’s a reliable plot and character engine ticking away beneath the absurdity. Wade’s journey to confront his father, even in something as low-stakes as a bowling alley, is a beat from the classic Campbellian narrative. “Are you strong enough to strike down your own father in battle?” Pete taunts his son as they square off.

It's a joke, juxtaposing Knuckles’ literal-minded self-seriousness with mundane reality, but it’s also a surprisingly satisfying journey for the show’s human lead. Even within the framework of a broad sitcom, Wade ends up feeling much more developed and nuanced than Ted did in either of the two feature films. Part of this is just Pally’s obvious skill with the material, demonstrating well-honed comedic chops, but it’s also because the show takes the character’s emotional arc seriously.

While the demand for spectacle-driven set-pieces occasionally clutters the narrative, these sequences are often brief and character-driven enough that they don’t distract from the show’s real charms. It’s surprisingly satisfying to watch Knuckles push the show’s array of stock villains out of the way so the series can get back to the Whipples family dysfunction. Against all odds, the result is a streaming brand extension that feels far more satisfying than the overwhelming majority of Marvel Studios and Star Wars streaming shows.

Watching Knuckles, it’s hard not to feel like this is what those sorts of tie-in streaming shows should aspire to be. It’s light. It’s fun. It’s playful and it’s creative. While it clearly builds out the world established in the films, it is not “essential” to the unfolding narrative of the larger universe and it is also not beholden to the same sorts of commercial constraints that burden most mass-market theatrical releases. It can be goofy and low-stakes. It can give its characters room to breathe.

Most importantly, Knuckles makes a case for itself on its own merits.