syfy Archives - Ian Thomas Malone

Devil May Care finds humor and heart in the depths of hell

Written by Ian Thomas Malone, Posted in Blog, Pop Culture, TV Reviews

TZGZ -- "The Influencer" Episode 102 -- Pictured in this screen grab: (l-r) Devil, Beans, President McKinley -- (Photo by: SYFY)

The past year has had a tendency to make one rethink the literal visualization of hell of earth. If hell was meant to evoke fear, the idea of a warm place larger than one’s living space might instead bring about some envy from a reasonably-minded individual. The hell crafted in SyFy’s new animated series Devil May Care looks like a pretty cool place to be.

The series follows Beans (Asif Ali), a millennial facing eternal damnation in a rosy-colored interpretation of hell. Beans finds work as the social media manager for Devil (Alan Tudyk), ever concerned with the public relations branch of his fire and brimstone empire. Beans’ coworkers in Devil’s office include Head Demon Gloria (Stephanie Beatriz) and President McKinley (Fred Tatasciore), who acts much like Devil’s personal valet.

Created by Robot Chicken head writer Douglas Goldstein, Devil May Care essentially functions as part workplace comedy, part social satire on modern America. There’s a lot of humor centered around social media’s effects on our psyche and Devil’s efforts to make his kingdom more hospitable for his constituents. Ali and Tudyk have great chemistry, elevating Beans beyond the function of the straight man at the heart of the narrative.

Goldstein pulls off an impressive feat for comedies with eleven-minute runtimes, a format that generally puts a fair bit of strain on the balance between jokes and character developments. The world-building is welcoming, a space where you want to spend time with the characters rather than merely laugh nonstop until the credits roll. There’s a relatable sense of found family to be had in this merry bunch of misfits.

Much of that dynamic is thanks to Devil, a heartfelt character with a lot of depth, perpetually enhanced by Tudyk’s range as a performer, delivering each line with a sinister sense of delight. The hell of Devil May Care isn’t for the evil, but rather the flawed and imperfect. The sinners aren’t just more fun than the saints, they’re the people you’d rather spend your time with.

Which isn’t to say that Devil May Care spends its time grappling with morality or life’s heavy questions. It is first and foremost a late-night comedy that exists to make you laugh. On that front, it succeeds quite well.

Laughter isn’t the only escape hatch that entertainment can seek to provide. There’s a sense of community sorely missing for too many this past year. It is easy to feel like we are living in hell, albeit a landscape that looks quite different than the palette put forth by Devil May Care. Created before the pandemic, the show rises up to a challenge that it wasn’t expected to face in providing a sense of relief to people who have had to lean on comedy quite a bit lately to give comfort where it cannot be found anywhere else.

Hilarious and thought-provoking, Devil May Care packs quite a punch with each episode. Night and day from Goldstein’s work on Robot Chicken, the show doesn’t necessarily swing for the fences with each line like the iconic Adult Swim staple, but each episode constantly challenges the confines of storytelling within the short-form medium. It might be a better binge than a week-to-week series, but animated comedy fans will find plenty to enjoy in this warm series.

Devil May Care airs 12:00 am Saturday nights/Sunday mornings as part of SYFY’s TZGZ block.

Syfy’s Nightflyers Is a Pitiful Incoherent Injustice to George R.R. Martin’s Good Name

For some reason, it feels weird when cable networks try to emulate their streaming counterparts and debut shows at a faster pace than the standard week-to-week model. The idea of broadcasting a new show on consecutive nights certainly can present the notion that such an occasion is “event viewing,” but the mind also wanders to the motive behind such a deviation from the typical rules that govern television. For SyFy, airing a show like Nightflyers four times a week over a two-week stretch could be advertised as a special holiday treat for those who detest Santa-themed offerings, but instead mostly comes across as an attempt to be done with this incoherent mess as quickly as possible.

Nightflyers is based off a novella by George R.R. Martin, written a little over ten years before the release of A Game of Thrones, the first volume of his magnum opus. With the wild success of his A Song of Ice and Fire series, it seems inevitable that more networks would want to jump in on adapting his extensive back catalog. The biggest problem for Nightflyers is that the show plays like somebody took that too literally, jumping into a series without taking the usual steps that go into crafting a narrative that anyone watching would actually care about.

The plot of the show is fairly simple. A group of scientists go looking for alien life and bad things happen. It’s the kind of show that spends such little time on character development that describing any of the people onboard the ship seems like I’m doing the show’s work for it. There’s an obligatory pain in the ass brought on the ship who no one likes and an engineer who seems to be doing an impression of an indifferent android. There’s romantic tension among the other characters. The show kind of throws this stuff out there without ever really conveying a sense that these are actually people anyone cares about. As a result, it’s hard to get invested in any of them.

That kind of hollow strategy might work over a ninety-minute horror movie, but falls flat over the course of a ten episode season. The early seasons of Game of Thrones each sought to adapt a thousand-page book. Nightflyers seems completely lost with one-tenth of the material. There’s a fair amount of filler, which is presented in a way that makes it hard to differentiate from the moments where it wants to advance the story. The show has random cutaways at times that feel like a student filmmaker fooling around in the editing room.

Nightflyers is the kind of show that feels like it exists solely because of the fame of the author of its source material, with little to no effort put in to actually create a worthwhile experience. The show has decent production values, even though much of it feels like it was created by a Kubrick fanatic assigned to knock off The Expanse. Nightflyers is a plodding derivative mess that never seems interested in giving its viewers anything to care about. SyFy appears to have dumped this one over a two week period in order to make sure everyone has forgotten about this turkey by the time the holidays are over.