Someone needed to call an emergency meeting to prevent this adaptation

I’ve always been of the opinion that the vast majority of TV and film adaptations of video games have been painted with an undeservedly bad reputation. While there have been some true stinkers over the years — shoutout to Mike Newell’s offensively bad Prince of Persia movie starring Jake Gyllenhaal – there have also been some phenomenal takes on our favorite video games. Just look at Amazon’s Fallout show or the Sonic the Hedgehog movies to see what a great adaptation of a video game franchise can look like.

CBS Studios and Paramount’s Among Us is not one of those greats. In fact, after watching the first five episodes of the original animated series — and thus only wasting a little under two hours of my life — I’m still confused about why it exists in the first place.

The online multiplayer video game debuted in 2018, but shot to fame years later after being promoted by popular online personalities on Twitch and YouTube, such as Markiplier, during the early period of the COVID-19 pandemic. Players take on the role of crewmates on a spaceship, completing various tasks. However, while most players are friendly, there are one or two imposters (depending on how many people are involved) who try to sabotage the ship and kill everyone on board. Through the use of social deduction, crewmates needed to find these impostors and eject them into the dark depths of space.

Outside of being a free and fun way to hang out with your friends online, Among Us came at the right time when a lot of people were starved for connection — even if that connection was becoming an alien hybrid and chomping down on your friends.

Paramount’s animated series, created by Owen Dennis (Infinity Train), follows a similar premise. Among Us centers on a group of chromatic blobs, also known by their in-game lexicon as crewmates. Green, voiced by Elijah Wood, is an unpaid intern who, alongside Patton Oswalt as the rich and not-afraid-to-flaunt-it White, is one of the new hires set to join the Mira Corporation on a space mission. The mission? Transporting Ore+ from an asteroid to a Mira refinery called Industria. Unfortunately, there’s also someone else onboard who is eager to cause trouble for the crew.

Alongside Wood and Oswalt, Among Us boasts a remarkably star-studded cast. There’s Yvette Nicole Brown as Orange, Kimiko Glenn as Cyan, Liv Hewson as Black, Ashley Johnson as Purple, Wayne Knight as Lime, Phil LaMarr as Brown, Randall Park as Red, Dan Stevens as Blue, and Debra Wilson as both Yellow and the ship’s Computer.

With so much talent crammed into this series, you would be forgiven for thinking Dennis would take advantage of the opportunity to do something unique with an admittedly pretty sparse concept. An attempt is made to give the crewmates personalities — Cyan is a gem-loving hippie, Blue is a sexy doctor with an even sexier voice, Yellow and Brown are union-loving cooks, etc — but these characters and the jokes surrounding them quickly become grating. There are some standouts, such as Johnson as the no-nonsense security guard, Purple; and Yvette Nicole Brown as Mira HR’s liaison, Orange; but even the few laughs they got out of me was not enough to keep my attention for long.

Image: Paramount/Innersloth

The biggest crime Among Us has, however, is its deep commitment to being a worse version of the video game it came from. Each 10-to-15-minute episode feels an awful lot like Dennis taking viewers through the same narrative beats of the game, but with the enthusiasm of watching paint dry. Even when death seems to lurk around every corner, it stops feeling relevant the moment the corpse is off the screen. Unlike in the game, there is no real urgency or camaraderie to be found in trying to find the impostor.

Instead, much of Among Us is dedicated to nonsensical B-plots that often hold no relevance at all and were only there to pad out the episode until it reached its overused cliffhanger conclusion. One such plot is Cyan’s attempt to bounce back after Black rejects her friendship and practically declares her job is fake. Considering we spent so little with Cyan and Black in the first place, I’m unsure why I should care about that relationship in the first place.

Image: Innersloth/YouTube

There is, however, one thing I can say I enjoyed and cared about without qualms. Titmouse has served as the animation studio behind many fan-favorite adaptations, such as Critical Role’s The Legend of Vox Machina and The Mighty Nein, and has done a phenomenal job in giving its projects their own style. For Among Us, the studio has played it a little safer by making it resemble the game, but there is a particular episode that really proves Titmouse’s ability to get a little weird without completely compromising the game’s style.

I won’t pretend Dennis had an easy job in trying to adapt something that relies so heavily on player interaction as Among Us does. But the least he could do is try to do something interesting outside of a lot of bad jokes and wink-wink-nudge-nudge moments. Unfortunately, the most interesting thing you can do with this series is turn it off and play the game instead.

Among Us is streaming now on Paramount Plus.