Obliterated Season 1 Review: Debaucherous Action Comedy Fails to Detonate
Obliterated, a new action-comedy from creators Jon Hurwitz, Hayden Schlossberg, and Josh Heald, relies on a fairly simple premise. What happens when The Hangover meets Mission Impossible?
The answer is 8 episodes of debauchery, high-octane action, and adult humor. It’s a recipe that should work but fails to reach its explosive potential.
Obliterated follows an elite special forces team that learns after a night of partying that the bomb they deactivated is fake, and they must race against the clock to find the real bomb. It’s not an easy task when they’re tripping on drugs and battling hangovers as well as occasionally each other.
The team is led by CIA agent Ava Winters (Shelley Hennig) and SEAL team leader Chad McKnight (Nick Zano), with the two serving as the glue of the show with their will-they-won’t-they tension and chemistry. Rounding out the squad are NSA tech specialist Maya Lerner (Kimi Rutledge), bomb tech Hagerty (C. Thomas Howell), sniper Angela Gomez (Paola Lázaro), their muscle Trunk (Terrence Terrell), and pilot Paul Yung (Eugene Kim).
Each character starts the series as a one-dimensional archetype and only a few get to graduate beyond that. Ava is the straight-laced over-achiever, Maya is the nerdy tech girl, Paul is the conservative dad of the group, and so on.
Archetypes are useful, but Obliterated‘s over-reliance on the characters playing those out makes the humor fall flat in combination with its bawdiness. There is an attempt over the eight episodes to explore each character, but the ensemble is too big to really give each character their due.
For example, Gomez’s late realization that she treats everyone in her personal life as a target just like she does at work falls flat instead of providing any real emotional catharsis. Paul’s anxiety over being a good father leads to a kidnapping sequence that takes up too much of an episode for it to only end up being another drug-induced hallucination.
Instead of the longer run-time helping, it ends up hindering a story that could benefit from tighter pacing. Attempting to match the eight hours left before the bomb goes off with eight hour-long episodes is a misfire.
As a result, the premise gets stretched way too thin. It’s too much time left to fill with the same recurring jokes and gags about how incapacitated the team is at any point.
Your mileage will vary on how much you enjoy the humor which is pointedly low-brow and not afraid of bodily fluids or sexual innuendos. Low-brow is not synonymous with bad, but in this case, it’s not paired with enough substance to prevent it from veering into failed parody.
A CGI goblin induced by hallucinations and voiced by Jason Mantzoukas is actually one of the smarter gags of the series, which says a lot.
The talent of the cast is a silver lining of the show, and they do their best despite the flimsy character motivations to still manage to develop real chemistry. You’ll believe McKnight cares about his squad under all his macho posturing and are touched by how vulnerable he gets when confronted with the loss of his best friend.
Those intimate character moments when the team gets to demonstrate their love and appreciation for one another are some of the few reprieves from the maximum action and gags. They also feel the most real given the bonds that develop when you work so closely together with someone like this team does.
Obliterated even manages to eke out a believable romance among the chaos thanks to Hennig and Zano’s chemistry.
Although its humor runs out of steam quickly, Obliterated does deliver impressive action sequences and tension as the team must find the bomb and fight a cadre of competing villains. The effort to shoot some complicated sequences on location in Las Vegas pays off big time as you get the real feeling of the Strip.
It’s not a show about spies without a double-cross, and viewers won’t be disappointed with the twists the story has up its sleeve. The show may be silly in tone but the villains pose a real threat and keep viewers and the team on their toes throughout the season.
Overall Obliterated is something different than Netflix’s usual offerings and has some commendable elements, but it fails in the mission to deliver a must-watch action comedy.
What did you think of Season 1 of Obliterated? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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Obliterated Season 1 is streaming now on Netflix.
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Breeze Riley
Breeze Riley is a pop culture enthusiast who decided to turn her love of watching too much TV into a hobby writing about it. Although she's a convention-going sci-fi and fantasy nerd, she's just as likely to be watching an off-beat comedy or period drama. She is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic.