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Nowadays in the entertainment industry, it feels that the only things getting made are adaptations of previous work. There's very little room for brand new ideas or stories (which is a different discussion we'll save for later). In this time where intellectual property is king, how can we do the original work justice while making the story work for another medium? How can we get more Project Hail Marys and less War of the Worlds (2025)? One man seems to have cracked the code.
Years after his legendary Cartoon Network show Infinity Train was unceremoniously cancelled, Owen Dennis and his team are back on the small screen! Among Us was quietly shadow-dropped onto Paramount+ on June 5th. And to absolutely everyone's surprise, the show is fantastic. The question that I'm asking myself is... How?? How is this adaptation of a game that has the online reputation of Among Us so good?
Hey. Listen. I know, okay. This is an article about the Among Us TV show. But just bear with me. I promise there's something insightful and interesting to talk about here. I mean there better be. I'm at risk of being laughed out of the entertainment industry.
First thing to do when making an adaptation is look at the source material and figure out the things that it does well. Among Us is a social deduction game where players are thrust into an environment where one or more of their teammates are "imposters" secretly working against them. For the imposters to win, they must kill every other player while avoiding suspicion. If the other crewmates suspect one of the players as the imposter, they can call an emergency meeting and offer evidence to the other players that this person is the killer. At the end of the meeting, they vote one player out to be killed. This gameplay loop forces players to lie, cover their tracks, and keep a mental note of where every player is at all times.
Truly, it's an incredible gameplay loop. It emulates what it would realistically be like to be a suspect of a murder mystery in real life. Or you can try to live out your fantasy of being Benoit Blanc. Your pick. Of course, the natural path is to make the show a murder mystery in the same style as the game. Though that can't be it.
Another strength of the game that the TV show uses to its advantage is the fact that the game doesn't take itself seriously. In the good way! Humor is littered across the whole game. From stupid background details, wacky player costumes, and cartoonishly over-the-top death animations. Good news for the TV show! With that in mind, now the TV show can be a murder-mystery dark comedy. Tone is an understated, but very possibly the most important aspect to get right in an adaptation.
Now that we know the things to keep from the game, we look at what we can add that's new for the TV show! This, I feel, is a step that's often overlooked. Adaptations of my favorite stories, especially books, often try to do the story 1 for 1 without accounting for how the new medium changes things. Book characters written in first person perspective often lose the very things that make them interesting. Additionally, adaptations often don't have the time to adapt a FULL story, so some cuts or changes have to be made to make it fit. Keeping the core and tone of the story, making that story fit in whatever amount of time you've got, and making sure the character is unharmed between mediums is a very tricky balancing act. But interestingly enough, Among Us has the opposite problem.
While movies, books, and TV shows are storytelling mediums first, video games are more focused on the gameplay aspect of their art form. Not to say there aren't games with incredible, dramatic, and gripping stories like the God of War or Hollow Knight, but their artistic goals are just different. Games (most of the time) are primarily focused on the actual gameplay. Many games' stories are built around the fact that they are, well... games.
One round of Among Us takes no more than 15 minutes. And whatever story and characters there are, are built between the friends on video calls while they play. So how do you adapt that? How do you stretch that minuscule story into a whole 10 episode TV show? How do you make it engaging?
Well, the show takes a gamble. Since the story is so thin and without any notable characters, the "murder mystery" aspect of the show becomes secondary to the comedic aspect. The show frames the kills as dramatic at the very start, but then takes kind of a backseat, drama-wise, until the last couple episodes. The kills and scenarios the characters are in are pretty much just used as excuses to make jokes! So what's the gamble? It's that, for the entire show to work, it HAS to be funny. And at least in this writer's opinion, it is.
On top of spectacular comedic writing that knows its internet-brained demographic very well, the show knew it needed some A-tier voice talent to truly make it work. The cast of this show is actually astonishing: Randall Park, Ashley Johnson, Elijah Wood, Yvette Nicole Brown, Kimiko Glenn, and many more.
The Among Us show knows exactly what it is. It's not trying to take itself too seriously and it knows its place in the current cultural zeitgeist. It was a very smart adaptation of the game, and ensured that the parts that needed to work, worked. Hats off to Owen Dennis and his team! Can't wait to see what they've got cooking for us next.
