Growing up, there was really only one kind of ‘videogame fan,’ and it was the kind who played videogames. Yes, the Console Wars gave us the illusion that our tastes were as diverse and varied as our choices but at the end of the day, if you owned a console, you pretty much played whatever came out on it. Videogaming in the 16-bit and earlier era had its preferences and niches, but in-general: you played what you could get your hands on. Until the Playstation erupted onto the scene and suddenly with the advent of 3D polygonal graphics, everyone was “a gamer.”
I’m not going to litigate whether or not the jump to 3D graphics was premature. It was, of course, but it did open the door to entirely new, hitherto unheard of genres on console especially. While the PC had a number of driving and car-combat games, Twisted Metal was the first one that felt like a true product of its time. Yes, Carmageddon had come out and introduced the idea of blood-soaked, ’70s exploitation behind the wheel to gamers but that was homage more than a snapshot of the times. It was the slick presentation, wild-eyed nihilism, and bonkers cast that looked more at-home in a fighting game than in a demo-derby that really made Twisted Metal stand out.
So when Twisted Metal 2 arrived on the scene, people stood up and took notice. Gone were the minimalist character backstories and lackluster text-crawl endings, replaced with an incredibly modern, ultra-stylized comic book aesthetic that future consoles would run into the ground whenever they needed a “low-end” ending for DLC. Calypso had morphed from a sinister, Freddy Krueger-like deformed freak into a handsome, charismatic, and theatrical imp of a man with facial scarring so minor, I actually didn’t even notice it until years later when it was pointed out. And the endings had a much greater sense of irony and comeuppance, even toward Calypso sometimes as one or two drivers manage to get the better of the supernatural shyster.
Then came the bad times. The 3, 4, and Small-Brawl times. The games were taken over by another developer entirely, and while little changed on the surface, the heart, ironically, was ripped out of the games. 3, 4, and Small-Brawl felt like they were made by fans of the trappings of Twisted Metal, but the soul of the game was gone.
They weren’t bereft of quality, I think a lot of people were introduced to some pretty great music by the 4th game specifically, and the idea of Sweet-Tooth overthrowing Calypso, and him becoming a playable character for the first time in the game’s history wasn’t a terrible idea! But ‘ideas’ were all the games seemed to have, the execution was lackluster in the extreme. And the boss fights were straight-up bullshit.
The series went dark, in-terms of output, and then extremely dark in-terms of tone. Twisted Metal: Black was more than a return to form, it was a return to the series’ creative roots of being edgy in the extreme. But I always had an appreciation for the kind of ‘edge’ that Twisted Metal brought to the table. None of the characters ever felt like they were supposed to be ‘in the right,’ which is a mistake a lot of edgelord media makes that dooms them to bargain bins and longboxes. And while it was pretty clear from the outside that mascot character Sweet-Tooth was the apple of everyone on the dev team’s eye, Black rendered the character in such a way that there’s never enough of him to get sick of. Unlike a lot of other characters that led franchises, Sweet-Tooth always felt like a driver who stood out, rather than the “correct” choice across the board.
Then things get a little weird. Twisted Metal: Head-On and Twisted Metal (2012) were returns-to-form in some ways, and drastic departures in others. Head-On, especially the Extra-Twisted Edition, was a sequel in every sense to Twisted Metal 2 and actually tied the story up in a way that was both satisfying and even wrapped up the big twist from Black that the entire game was set in the mind of Sweet-Tooth. Hence why everything was darker, more grim, and far more apt to let villainous drivers get away with their wish actually being exactly what they asked for. While the few heroes find themselves at the wrong end of a gun’s barrel more often than not, and of course: the man himself Sweet-Tooth is the only one who truly gets one-up on Calypso. 2012, for its part, tried something new and I can’t fault it for that. Its focus on multiplayer faction battles is more a sign of the times than anything else, and is probably what led to it being rather quickly shelved and forgotten. But that stylized FMV story mode actually told a compelling narrative, one that basked in the other-the-top excess of the previous games while keeping just enough of that old-school edginess to be recognizably Twisted Metal.
All that is to lay the groundwork for when NBC and Peacock announced there was going to be a TV show starring the likes of Anthony Mackie and Stephanie Beatriz, with Joe “Samoa Joe” Senoa and Will Arnett teaming up to play the iconic, and echoic, Sweet-Tooth…it was oddly a time for eye-rolling and jerk-off gestures. And that’s because the show’s earliest trailers made it clear that while car combat would play a role in it, this was some kind of post-apocalyptic character piece, more in-line with prestige shows like The Last of Us or The Walking Dead. Plus: it was a videogame adaptation, and just ask that Metal Gear Solid movie how often those actually come around much less are any good.
Though unlike the previously mentioned shows, Twisted Metal’s marketing seemed to really focus on the madcap tone of Twisted Metal, but it was doing so in a way that reminded me more of stuff like the Borderlands movie or the absolute worst of Deadpool and The Joker: perfectly fine in small doses, but overstays its welcome quickly. The tone seemed to think it was very edgy, but at the same time had no interest in the darker aspects of why everyone is so extra and over-the-top as they try to murder one another for a wish. It didn’t seem ashamed to be based on a videogame, as so many are, but it didn’t seem to want to embrace that idea either. And then the season 2 trailer came out. And, boys-and-girls, they got me.
Cars lining up and revving their engines, Sweet-Tooth making casual jokes about ‘murdering our fans for sport,’ and then a Dragula needle drop to tease things like a scythe-wilding Mr. Grimm deflecting missiles, Sweet-Tooth’s truck firing sidewinding rockets out of its eyeholes, and a driver named John Doe being front-and-center for everything??? What was this, some kind of…Twisted Metal adaptation??? Knowing I’d want to at least check it out, I decided: what the Hell, let’s check out the first season to see if there’s anything to it. To quote an early PSX ad: I was not ready.
The post-apocalyptic setting was jarring to a lot of fans for a simple reason: the games are more about the tournament causing the fall of society as more and more people are drawn into Calypso’s destructive, lawless game. Especially after his ability to grant ANY wish is confirmed real, despite downplaying truly “supernatural” elements outside of a few drivers like Mr. Grimm. In most games, Calypso was a normal man whose family was killed in a series of car accidents, some perpetrated by him, some random chance, who sold his soul to a demon in-exchange for the power to come back and bring Hell to Earth in the form of a demolition derby that grew from L.A. to encompass the entire world in violence and open bloodshed.
What the show’s marketing really failed to do is pretty simple: it made the show look like an also-ran. Like it had just taken the name Twisted Metal and grafted it onto a pre-existing concept to pop the marks like me and you who will pay at least a little more attention to a thing that’s sporting a recognizable name from our past than if the show was called Carpocalypse Now. What it didn’t do was let it be known that the references were just window-dressing, which is what they should be. Yes, the fact that John’s car can only be started by using the gear shift and inputting an old controller code that would give you a special attack in the games is fun, but it serves the story to show that John is protective of his car and doesn’t want just anyone driving it, which we get fleshed-out reasons for as the show proceeds. The showrunners also did something very clever and very risky when they decided to pull drivers, reference points, and even lore and plot beats from the games that people didn’t so much like. 3 and 4 get a lot of love in this show, and there’s never a moment when the show does the “DmC Dante in a white wig just to make fun of it” moment, or the “character in a movie tears up a comic book and says it’s kiddie shit,” it uses every single piece of the franchise’s extensive lore, because I am sure there are people who really do have a soft-spot, if not full-blown love for, Twisted Metal 3 and 4, and even as someone who doesn’t think much of them: I think the show is way cooler for including that stuff than to pretend it didn’t happen, or that it wasn’t worth anything. Small-Brawl, though…maybe it’s okay if we just gently forget that one happened. Or, Hell, maybe season 3 will surprise us and bring some R/C cars to the dance! I wouldn’t be mad about it.
The world of Twisted Metal, the show, is one where an apocalypse happened, something vague enough that it doesn’t actually matter, that took out mass-communication and isolated pockets of survivors, with only cars to cross the expanse of America. And that’s another thing the show gets just right: it is an American-ass-American production.
If this were set in any other country in the world, it wouldn’t work as well, because the story of America is the story of the automobile. America isn’t just geographically enormous, it’s got massive population centers dotting across it, hence why you can go from California to Louisiana and encounter as many different cultural markers as you can going from London to Venice. The language is still “English” in America, but as any British tourist can tell you: “English” can mean something entirely different on the beaches of Malibu than it does in the bayous of New Orleans. To say nothing of driving from somewhere like New Jersey to somewhere like South Carolina. All that to say: this is one of the most California-coded shows that’s ever been put out, which ties into the fact that the first game was limited to Los Angeles.
Normally when you say that, it means “LA by way of Vancouver,” but in the case of Twisted Metal, it means California-ass-California. It means knowing the reference “You know she’s from Molesto, right?” isn’t just some writer pointing to a city on a map and coming up with an edgy name for it, that is what the people from Modesto call Modesto (that or Methdesto, depending on the company you keep), and it’s just one joke amongst so many that shows that this creative team, wherever they’re actually from, did their homework. Not just for the location, but for the source material.
The show is also one of the most ’90s I’ve ever seen, and while it could use this to rest on its laurels and make musical cues that touch the perfect nostalgia centers of its intended audience of young Gen-Xers and elder-milennials, it doesn’t. The apocalypse occurred some time in the very early 2000s, and that was a very interesting time to be alive because it was the death-rattle of the mono-culture in America. In the years that followed, the internet gave us a strange boiling down of culture, and while lazy critics bemoaned the loss of the steam, others enjoyed the flavor of the gravy. Because what was happening was: people were finding their niche. This is nowhere more prominent than in music, with comedy being a close second, but it happened across the decades in a rather slow, gradual way as more and more people found themselves connected online. While in Twisted Metal, it happened all at once, without the unifying connective tissue of online forums or websites. So when John Doe plays his favorite mix-CD, and it’s just ’90s hit after ’90s hit, it feels real because that’s the last time the country was even close to being united in its taste. It’s the last time there was a truly “mainstream scene” to get everyone around the table and agree: this is what music sounds like. And in all the trailers and marketing, it looked like a cheap ploy for nostalgic cash-in, making the same mistake the first Suicide Squad made in aping Guardians of the Galaxy’s expert use of needle drops to bring home a momen. But, boys and girls, Twisted Metal’s creative team understood the assignment: the music has to mean something.
Season 2 was something else entirely. The first trailer was the selling-point, teasing that the time and money invested in the first season’s buildup was going to pay-off in what we’d all assumed the show would always be about: the actual Twisted Metal tournament. The first season gave us a couple of chases and one or two showdowns in an enclosed arena, but it felt like a tease for the main event. Calypso has assembled the best, most fucked-up crew from across the West Coast’s wasteland and cities, and he’s promising what he’s always promised: one wish. Anything you can dream of. Ironically, this time around, it was the show’s tender, beating heart that the trailer underplayed. There was a whiff that the character stuff might have been the thing to get out of the way, setting up the factions and their wants, giving new life to characters like Dollface who was one of those characters introduced late in the franchise, yet felt like she’d always been there. And what the show does with her and her faction is another sign of where it’s head is at, and that there’s going to be a lot more character drama to come, even during the tournament itself. The first season laid a strong foundation, made you care, and the second season has been set up to break your heart.
The show is quick, 22 episodes so far, each episode about 30 minutes, it’s only on Peacock, a streaming service that feels like it JUST missed being Quibi by virtue of having 30 Rock and The Office, but it uses that quickness with such wild efficiency and effectiveness. It’s left feeling more like a BBC drama: all killer and absolutely zero filler. There is no “beach episode,” there’s no “vacation episode,” no clip shows, and yet the characters all seem like real people in a real apocalypse. Something else the show does exceptionally well is that the factions, many of which were taken directly from the 2012 game, don’t just feel like Mad-Max or Final Fight dressup, they feel like they have reasons and rituals, they have the things that a small, isolated pocket of weirdos would have. The world the people inhabit is brutal and vicious, it’s vile and filthy, but it’s never joyless. That’s something a lot of apocalyptic fiction misses, mostly because it’s too busy propping up the ultra-libertarian prepper fantasy of being “right all along” to actually engage with how people act under constant stress and duress. And to see that, look out the window.
We’re in the midst of an empire falling apart in slow-motion, THIS is how people act in times of duress! They’re sad! They’re violent! They’re funny! They’re caring! They give hope and take it away, they abuse and neglect and care and fight and fuck and make up and fight again, they’re people. And I can’t believe I’m saying this, but the cast of the Twisted Metal TV show feels like people. I could go through the list of every single character, how they’re realized in the show, how their origins are a combination pulled from different games to make a cohesive vision, but it would probably double the length of the article. And believe it or not: I can only write so many words.
Far be it from me to suggest it’s all sunshine, lollipops, and missiles mounted on cars, this show has a lot to say about class struggle and the role of police in said struggle, especially the first season. Less about the system in which they operate, that system doesn’t really exist in the show, the Law is just another faction of gangs trying to carve out a piece of America for themselves (so nothing like real-life, right? Right?), but there’s little to the racial nor classist commentary of modern law-enforcement, and that does make a certain degree of sense. There is no “State” to uphold, so they fight for the concept of law-and-order itself. But Agent Stone, played to absolute perfection by an incredible Thomas-Hayden Church, yes really, doesn’t want law-and-order in the way someone like Judge Dredd does. He craves power, obedience, and what he thinks is respect but is actually fear. And he is shown to be every bit as sadistic, small-minded, and myopic as the people he purports to enforce order upon, but given his role and given his backstory, he is the worst of them all. Not a single one of the gangs is shown to have the needless brutality of the Law, and no one character plays the villain of the first season the way Stone does.
It’s no coincidence, then, that the exploitation of John Doe, played by Mackie, by the various powerful forces that command him is the driving force of the first season. Neve Campbell (YES, REALLY!) plays Raven, goth queen of New San Francisco and of my heart for the past 25 years, and while she’s barely in the show, it’s made clear that her opulent wealth, tinged with just a hint of supernatural power, is just as much a problem as the roving gangs of violent thrillkillers all vying for a little bit more on the outside. And that’s all to set up the second season.
I was skeptical, how could I not be? What the hell is Twisted Metal without the Twisted Metal tournament?! What it is is: characters you actually care about in situations where safety is not assured. It’s Sweet-Tooth being a compelling murder-clown completely separate from any we’ve seen prior (he’s not just “big boi Joker”), a psychopath seemingly unable to be killed and whose mood swings from ‘delighted and whimsical’ to “shut up and BLEED, motherfu-” with the drop of a hat and the shift of a hormone. He is unchained id, and both Arnett and Senoa really deserve props for working so well together to bring such an icon of ’90s edginess to the screen, and giving him a shocking amount of pathos. You rarely feel bad for Sweet-Tooth, but in a strange, fucked-up, twisted way you absolutely can understand him. In the same way you can understand Stephanie Beatriz’s “Quiet,” an absolutely incredible original character, perfectly named and with a backstory that feels real, feels like it matters, and feels like it informs everything she does with a performance to match. The show has a lot of new drivers, a few that are riffs on pre-existing ones, but I had to look up every single one to make sure they weren’t based on a previously existing videogame driver, that is how good they are and how much they fit with the overall tone of Twisted Metal.
Season 2 brings an entirely new setting to the show. Starting off outside, anyone who can make it into the gates of Calypso’s fortress, a re-purposed high school of all things, can compete. And not everyone does make it. I can’t even get into how perfect the casting of Anthony Carrigan as a Calypso that somehow embodies a portrayal of the character culled from every game at-once. And even more shockingly: he makes it work to pitch-perfection. But I think saying any more gets into actual spoilers, suffice it to say: they needed someone perfect, and they found him.
We meet some new faces, get reacquainted with some old. Some survivors we thought were dead come back, and others are lost, but the show seems to turn and twist around a single newcomer: the self-dubbed Mayhem. The youngest driver by a fairly wide margin, the relationship she develops quickly with Quiet is one of sisterly unity. Mayhem is very much “the next generation” in a single character: she’s got the brainrot and she’s got it bad, but rather than do the thing that so much entertainment did before, Twisted Metal takes another unexpected swerve and I think May is a litmus test for the show overall. If you don’t like her, you think she’s annoying, she’s got go-away heat for you, I’m not sure the show is for you. She’s the future that suddenly John, taking on a more paternal role, and Quiet are supposed to be fighting for. If they rejected her, if they just told her to ‘sit down and let the grownups work,’ and that was the narratively correct answer, it would be a betrayal of the show’s strange, wonderful tone of hope in the future.
Mayhem lies pathologically and easily, none of her backstory is ever really confirmed. She might have been a victim of an arranged marriage, American-style, she might have a kill-count that rivals most dictators (a genuinely touching, comedic scene where she and Quiet talk about their ‘first time kills’ and it clearly sounds like they’re talking about awkward first-time sexual encounters is shockingly adorable, and puts to rest any notion that she’s actually telling the truth about everything she says), she might be the best driver on the West Coast, but none of this can be proven. Nor disproven. What she is is a kid in search of her tribe, which certainly makes her sympathetic. And a lot of her prickly demeanor is clearly a defense-mechanism from having to make her way in a wasteland already picked over by a generation of survivors before her. She and John eventually have a shouting argument, the usual inter-generational squabble about who had it easier and who got fucked over by whom, but the show doesn’t pick a side, because the show’s heart still beats with that same class-consciousness: it’s neither of their faults. It’s neither of their generations’ faults. It’s the people at the top, pulling the strings. Pitting us against each other. This is what he does, to quote a much better orator than I could ever hope to be.
This show was marketed as “wacky fun edgy apocalypse variety show,” but it’s not that, at least it’s not only that. It’s a love-letter to the ’90s. The real ‘90s, the way it was. It doesn’t do that by claiming “every other decade sucked,” because nothing sucks more than right now, except, of course, what came before. The way people in 2025 often talk about the ’90s is strange to me, because I grew up with anxiety: a cursed blessing that let me see the truth behind the squeaky-clean suburbs I grew up in. It was the time of ‘stranger danger’ before cottage industries sprung up around True Crime and taught a nation that its uncles were more dangerous than its strangers, the time of celebrity heroin overdoses, of crack and school-shootings, of suicides, riots, and Downward Spirals. It was the Attitude Era, and if you don’t like jokes about how much women, gays, and minorities still suck worse than a man in a business suit peddling diet pills to anorexic models, you’re TOO GAY! and now all I hear about is how it was a time of real art and nobody hurt nothin’ for real, and we all got along, yadda-yadda-yadda- same ol’ shit, different decade.
When I watch Twisted Metal, I don’t see a post-apocalypse set in California and using the trappings of the ’90s, I see a show that’s mourning what we had and what we’ve lost, but about the reality of making a better tomorrow. For ourselves and for the people who have to come after us. Season 2 did a lot more with that concept, but even in season 1, the characters understand that they’re not going to save the world and rebuild a better one, but they also understand that hiding away and hoping it gets better isn’t going to work either, and retreating into bitterness and solipsy is the last, worst option outside of a bullet to the brain, self-administered.
Most of the second season takes place in the high school Calypso has set up to be the living quarters of his contestants. And yes, the show absolutely dives headfirst into the tropes and trappings of the setting: a sudden appearance of a third, hostile faction gives us an entire episode of “popular girls” and “nerds” VS the newcomers, there’s a whole-ass prom episode that does more with a soundtrack, a school gym, and a paper bag than most shows accomplish in an entire season. We get to Community levels of trope deconstruction and parody, but we do it in 1/10 of the time and with 0% the Chevy Chase, and the show feels like it earns its breakneck pacing. Things don’t ever slow down, even though the second season takes place in a single location, but it’s a show about cars, speed, and the end of the world. It’s okay to go fast. Oh and they have Axel. Like…full-on, real-vehicle, minimal-CG they actually built this fucking thing! And found someone to channel the pathos, and sheer intimidating cut, of the videogame’s character. Michael James Shaw was given an impossible task and not only accomplished it, he embodied every aspect of a surprisingly deep, complex character across just a few episodes.
The refrain ‘you can’t judge a book by its cover’ is the kind of saying that had whiskers on it when I was still a pup, but unfortunately in the day and age of streaming services that just need to keep your eyes on them so they can charge you for another month, it has become much more the done thing by necessity. It’s hard to watch a trailer that makes a videogame adaptation, a field that is crowded with utter failures and embarrassments, look like an also-ran. Harder still to put with ad-breaks and monthly fees, to take the plunge on a service you might not ever need nor use again, but will definitely wind up costing you more money, but every now and then: it’s worth it.
This isn’t a prestige show. It’s got ultra-violence and cussing, sure, it’s got a helluva script and actors great enough to speak that script to life, but it’s too bright, cheerful, and goofy to be ‘prestigious.’ And I think that’s its strength, it took the one thing the Twisted Metal games never had, because they never needed it, and welded it on like a cow-catcher on a pick-up truck. And as cliche as it sounds: while the lore has massive appeal to dorks like me, the heart is what makes the show great, and it’s the best thing the show could have added on. It makes the characters behind the wheel worth rooting for, or against, and it makes the show far, far more compelling than just about any videogame adaptation this side of Pedro Pascal’s mournful gaze could ask for.
