TSS Review: Knuckles (TV Series)

Way back in 2020, my expectations for Paramount’s first Sonic movie were exceedingly low. I was familiar with the “live action adaptation of a cartoon character” song and dance by then, and I was expecting nothing more for Sonic. Then the movie came out, and surprised me by being good. I didn’t love it, I had my issues with it, but a combination of decent writing, heart, and solid action sequences won me over. Sonic 2 would do the same a couple years later, albeit with higher highs and lower lows. A solid 7.5 out of 10. This whole time, the Sonic movie franchise has felt like it’s been walking a tight rope, being just good enough, while still being one misstep away from becoming garbage. Paramount’s new Knuckles series, which hit Paramount+ a few days ago, comes perilously close to falling off that tight rope entirely.

Knuckles falls into the exact live action adaptation pitfalls the movies had been so adept at avoiding. For one: it’s not really about Knuckles. It’s about Wade Wipple, the goofy comic relief cop from the previous movies. The central premise of the show is that Knuckes is supposed to train him in the ways of the warrior. To be honest, I think this would be fine on its own. Knuckles is still in the show, after all, and he’s got a decent amount of screen presence throughout most of it. 

It’d fine a long as he and Wade have decent on-screen chemistry, and this is where we hit our second pitfall. Wade and Knuckles simply do not work well on screen together. Their interactions are uninteresting, and the writing does nothing to play their personalities off one another well. Finally, even Wade himself gives viewers scant reason to care: he isn’t that funny, or that interesting, and his character arc is as shallow and by the numbers as it can get. 

What’s especially odd about this show is that it barely even executes on its central premise. Despite how much Knuckles talks about “training” Wade, he never actually trains him. He never teaches him anything, or makes him practice a skill, or even strengthen his friggin muscles. Nothing Knuckles does could be considered “training Wade in the ways of the warrior.” Wade doesn’t even want to be a warrior! He wants to win a bowling tournament, his team is just called “The Warriors.” The closest Wade ever gets to training is in the one episode where Knuckles is barely featured. If anything, the thing is mostly a roadtrip, since Wade and Knuckles spent much of the show trying to get to Reno for a bowling tournament.

While the show fails in executing on its premise, it does have its share of redeeming qualities...and some significantly bigger failings. From here, I’m going to briefly go over each of the six episodes, so if you’re still avoiding spoilers, just skip to the end for this review’s conclusion. For everyone else: this is what the Knuckles show actually is.

The first episode is the closest this show really gets to being the “Knuckles” show. It starts out focusing on him struggling to adjust to a more relaxed, suburban lifestyle. Directed by Jeffrey Fowler, the episode also guest stars Sonic, Tails, and Tika Sumpter’s Maddie Wachowski, and is probably the best of the series. The jokes are funny enough, and the interplay between the Wachowski family has the sort of heart I’ve come to expect from the movies.

And then Wade Wipple shows up. And it is, again, what I’ve come to expect from these movies when Wade is on screen: awkwardly not funny.  The scene is about him being so bad at bowling that he is defeated by an 8-year-old girl, causing his “best friend” Jack Sinclair to replace him with her on the team. The actual events of the series are set off when Knuckles, trying to figure out what to do with himself, asks the “Great Echidna Elders” what he should do, and Chief Pachacamac (voiced by Christopher Lloyd) descends from the heavens and tells him to train Wade Wipple for some reason. 

I enjoy Pachacamac’s scenes, but as a means of kicking off the central premise of the show this is incredibly contrived. And it never really gets better from there. Knuckles helps Wade because a ghost tells him to and Knuckles’ relationship with Wade never really develops from that. Knuckles just tells Wade he’s going to train him and they go on a roadtrip. Over the course of the latter half of the episode, we learn about how Wade’s dad would take him bowling and eventually abandoned him at a TJ Maxx, which at least serves to set up Wade’s own motivations. It’s here that the show comes the closest to giving Wade and Knuckles some kind of chemistry as they bond over lost fathers and bowling, but that would quickly dissipate by the next episode.

The end of the first episode and the rest of the second introduces the series’s villains, Ellie Taylor’s Agent Willoughby, Scott Mescudi’s Agent Mason, and Rory McCann’s  “The Buyer.” And they certainly are there. Mescudi’s and McCann’s performances feel incredibly phoned in throughout the series. Ellie Taylor definitely puts some effort into it, and at times she almost comes across as a decent enough B-villain, but these are not characters anyone is going to remember. 

The whole premise of the episode is Wade rescuing Knuckles from Mason and Willoughby. It’s here where the show gets one of its few laughs out of me: the show spends a whole scene building up the ridiculous way Wade intends to rescue Knuckles, and instead of any of the individual parts of his plan falling apart, he just...accidentally blows up his car.

Episode 3 introduces Wade’s family, and is easily the low point of this whole show.  Wade’s mom, played by West Wing alumni Stockard Channing, is decent enough, but his sister Wanda Wipple is an absolutely wretched character. The premise of this episode is Wade and Knuckles hiding out at his mom’s house, which happens to coincide with Shabbat dinner and a visit from his sister, and Knuckles meeting them. As Wade’s mom tells Knuckles about the Wipple family’s Jewish heritage, Wade and Wanda engage in an increasingly grating sibling rivalry.

Wanda is a complete misunderstanding of how sibling rivalry dynamics are supposed to work. Generally, for screw-up characters like Wade, their siblings are meant to represent a superior “idealized” version of them, to act as a contrast and make them feel more like a disappointment. On first blush, that appears to be what they’re trying to do: Wanda works for the FBI, she brags about being in the FBI, she literally wears an FBI shirt at all times, and makes fun of Wade for being a small town cop. But instead of actually being better than Wade, she’s worse in every way imaginable, aside from her occupation. 

She’s so immature and psychotic I kept expecting them to pull a joke where she wasn’t actually in the FBI, because even in this universe there’s no way the FBI would hire someone like this. At the very least, she’d had a really crappy job within it! But that twist never comes, leaving us stuck with a character more cartoonish, immature and grating than Wade, with a false sense of superiority she’s never able to deliver on. Whatever sort of joke or plot point they were going for definitely didn’t land, because all they succeeded in doing was making a character who single handedly made what might have been a harmless episode downright painful to watch.

As a Jew, I’ll admit I appreciate seeing Jewish tradition and dishes portrayed on screen in any Sonic property. Making Wade Jewish and setting an episode during Shabbat is interesting, and might’ve had potential in a more serious, less cartoony action adventure show. Unfortunately, due to this tone, the episode’s attempts at more emotional moments don’t really land. It tries to make connections between thousands of years of Jewish oppression and what happened to the echidnas, in the same scene where Wanda ends an annoying sibling argument by stabbing Wade in the arm with a fork. The tonal dissonance in this episode is just too much.

The episode ends with bounty hunters invading the Wipple household looking for Wade. Knuckles must save each family member, and it ends with an admittedly impressive little action scene involving him and Wade’s mom trying to “protect the Shabbat candles,” which they lit at the start of the dinner. She then thanks the family for “coming together to defend the candles,” which I guess is the episode attempting to have an emotional moment where the family makes up. Except the bounty hunters weren’t after the candles, the family didn’t fight together, and Wade still (rightfully) hates Wanda at the end of it. What was the point of all this again?

Episode four has Wade getting kidnapped by Jack Sinclair. Knuckles refuses to rescue him, as a part of his training. As I said earlier, this is the closest he ever gets to actually training Wade. Despite Knuckles not being in it, this is the second best episode of the series. It’s just fun! A good chunk of the episode is a rock opera taking place on a practical stage. The music itself, while nothing I’d listen to on its own, is fun!

We get to see stuff like the Sonic 2 special stage, rings, and freaking Iblis represented as stage props. Over the course of the musical, Wade gets a (canonically dubious) summary of Knuckles learning how to become a warrior and unlocking the move “Flames of Disaster.” Things culminate with Wade briefly learning this move and using it to bust out of a cage Sinclair had him in. He will never use it again.

The next episode has Wade, Knuckles and family finally getting to Reno. They meet his dad, played by the ever talented Cary Elwes (whom you might know from Princess Bride), who seems nice at first, but eventually turns out to be a dick. Wade qualifies for the bowling tournament finals while Knuckles gets a few jokes before spending the rest of the episode off screen in a hotel room.

There...isn’t really much to say about the last couple episodes, if I’m being honest. The bad guy duo from the first two episodes show up again and get beaten, which leads to The Buyer finally showing up with that mech we’ve been seeing in the trailers. And he’s just an absolute nothing of a character. He’s an utter and total waste of Rory McCann, and as the first big non-Robotnik villain in this universe, he’s incredibly disappointing. Wade wins the tournament, then saves Knuckles from The Buyer and helps him defeat his mech.

Then it all just sort of ends. Anyone expecting the after credits to tease something for Sonic 3 will be sorely disappointed. It’s nothing, just like this whole show is. 

Knuckles is a show that does nothing with its characters or its premise. The writing, while at times entertaining, feels empty. On the whole, I’d say this show is inoffensive most of the time, only occasionally terrible, and rarely manages to reach the highs of either of the Sonic movies. It’s problem isn’t that it’s not about Knuckles, or that it doesn’t include much Sonic stuff, or that it focuses on Wade. It’s that its execution of the story that it does try to tell isn’t very good. Even when met on its own merits, Knuckles mostly fails.

There are still some fun moments here, though. There are some good jokes, too. Pachacamac being a goofy fun grandpa, while not something that gels well with what Sonic 2 established, is still fun and Christopher Lloyd turns in a good performance. Finally, I’ll admit that I do enjoy the novelty of simply seeing these characters again, especially in the low stakes scenarios in episode 1. If you enjoyed the movies, I would at least suggest checking out episodes 1, 4 and 6.

While I wouldn’t call it the worst Sonic thing I’ve watched, it’s the first major dud of the movie franchise and the most disappointed I’ve been in a Sonic production in many years.

Knuckles is available exclusively on Paramount+, and can be watched now. You can also catch the first episode here.