Among Us Review: The game that took over the internet gets a stellar TV makeover

Among Us is a genuinely fun watch, and smarter than it has any right to be.

Created by Owen Dennis (of Infinity Train fame) and produced by CBS Studios and Titmouse, the series takes the deceptively simple premise of the 2018 multiplayer game and stretches it into something that functions, rather brilliantly, as a ten-episode detective thriller.

The setup will be familiar to anyone who has spent time shrieking accusations at friends online: a crew of eccentric, monochromatic crewmates aboard a ship transporting junk across the galaxy must root out an Impostor in their midst before they fall victim to its villainous designs.

Where the show complicates things is in making the Impostor not merely a fellow crewmate with a knife, but an alien shapeshifter — a creature that is actively hunting the crew one by one, leaving the survivors in an ever-tightening spiral of suspicion, grief, and increasingly unhinged group dynamics.

There's roughly one murder per episode, with the crew frantically trying to find the impostor in between deaths — and the pacing, aided enormously by the fact that episodes clock in at around 12 to 15 minutes apiece, keeps things punchy and propulsive. There is no filler here. Every scene is pulling weight.

The voice cast is, frankly, extraordinary. Randall Park voices Red, Ashley Johnson voices Purple, Dan Stevens voices Blue, and Elijah Wood voices Green — and each of them brings something genuinely distinctive to their respective crewmate. Park's Red and Johnson's Purple have an unexpected, quietly moving friendship at the heart of the series that I did not anticipate caring about as much as I did. That a show about cartoon blobs in spacesuits managed to make me invested in an interpersonal relationship is, objectively, an achievement.

Then there is the matter of Blue. Dan Stevens voicing a character whom every other crewmate appears to have developed a hopeless, barely-suppressed crush on is casting so perfectly aligned that it borders on self-aware. The writers clearly knew exactly what they were doing, and leaned into it with gusto.

One particularly hilarious sequence revolves around Blue, the ship's doctor, conducting routine body scans on the crew. As Blue calmly explains the procedure and details exactly what the scans will reveal, the crewmates' collective crush on him becomes impossible to ignore. One by one, they blush, stare dreamily into space and, in a wonderfully ridiculous running gag, literally say "swoon" out loud. A couple of them are so overwhelmed that they promptly faint on the spot.

There is an entire sequence — which I shall describe only as "the drawing incident" — in which the oxygen-deprived crew, deep in collective psychosis, engages in a group activity involving Blue's various physical attributes. It is genuinely questionable viewing. It is also extremely funny.

The psychosis episode deserves its own paragraph. When the ship's oxygen begins to deplete, the crewmates collectively lose the plot in spectacular fashion: backpacks are removed, pizza materialises and is consumed with great enthusiasm, and a series of increasingly surreal personal revelations follow. Green — voiced with perfect, baffled sincerity by Elijah Wood — confesses, in the haze of oxygen deprivation, that he once kissed a worm. Green grew up on a worm farm. He had never told anyone.

He believed, with apparent earnestness, that it constituted worm adultery. It is the most absurd piece of character writing I have encountered in recent memory, and it works completely.

The show nails a distinct tone of drama, comedy, and light horror that defines the experience of playing the game itself — and that tonal balance is harder to achieve than it looks. Among Us the series takes its source material seriously without ever becoming po-faced about it. The jokes land. The tension holds. And occasionally, when you least expect it, something genuinely affecting sneaks up on you from behind.

It isn't necessarily groundbreaking storytelling, and there are moments where the show's brevity works against it — certain character dynamics feel like they could breathe a little more. But as a piece of adaptation, it is a quiet triumph: respectful of the source material whilst finding something new to say through the medium of television.

For fans of the game, for lovers of absurdist animation, or for anyone with a functioning sense of the ridiculous: consider this an emergency meeting worth attending. Sus-pect the best.

Among Us is available to stream now on Paramount+.