And what's with the robot?

Continuing my trip down Empire's Top 50 TV Shows of 2023 

#15 : Scott Pilgrim Takes Off

When BenDavid Grabinski and Bryan Lee O'Malley casually mentioned they'd made a 'few' minor updates to the Scott Pilgrim story for this Netflix animated re-telling, they might have undersold it slightly. Almost a What If....? event in its own right, this sense-assaulting, joy-explosion of a series imagines what might have happened if one key event had ended slightly differently. The result is an absolute riot, one that not only pulls Michael Cera back into the title role, but reunites him with the entire cast of the movie, each returning to their respective characters and lending their voices to the sumptuous animation by Science Saru which, in turn, perfectly captures the vibe of O'Malley's iconic series. Regardless of whether you're a Pilgrim newbie or a veteran of film, comic and video game — you are not prepared for Scott Pilgrim Takes Off.

Skipping over Colin From Accounts (#16 here, #14 in The Guardian) brings us to something I've watched, but approached with trepidation.  I love Edgar Wright's film but part of the charm is the way it combines live action and animation, so I wasn't sure how a fully animated version was going to go.  I also had no idea what the story was going to do, but hey - I was still looking forward to it.

What I wasn't expecting it to do is accurately reflect the film (and the graphic novel), which it totally does (as far as I can remember) for 90% of the first episode with the dialogue and a large number of the actors having the same roles.  All of which made me think - why?!?  But then, Matthew Patel, Ramona Flower's first evil ex rocks up to fight Scott and, in a slight change to the film, kills Scott.  Oh OK - that wasn't expected.

And so the rest of the film deals with Scott's (spoiler alert, not actual) death as Ramona tries to work out what happened and, unsurprisingly, much interaction with her evil exes results ("we're not really evil - it's just branding").  And boy does it go to some strange places.

There's a nicely meta subplot where the cast of this version of Scott Pilgrim make a film of Scott Pilgrim's life which, completely coincidentally, kinda reflects his life in the film, with various members of the cast of the animated series playing different people in the film in the animated series (you confused yet?) - and the director is, of course, Edgar Wrong (and Simon Pegg and Nick Frost also have cameo roles).

Unfortunately, the film fails (pretty quickly), so they obviously decide to make a musical of the making of the film - yeah, you get the general gist.  None of it makes the slightest bit of sense and the ending makes even less sense but that's kinda what you expect, isn't it?

It's all very cute and it shows off various animation styles, but I'm not sure even the biggest fans could call it essential - nicely diverting, but no more than that.  The story is at least nicely different (after the first episode) and populated with characters you like (if you like the film) so you feel comfortable in their presence. It's also nice that they got most of the cast of the film back, but because it's animated you lose most of what made them so fricking good in the film.  The robot is a nicely quirky new touch though - "What's more powerful that a human vegan?  A ROBOT vegan.  A robot that's never eaten meat!  That's never had dairy!".  Don't worry, this isn't a spoiler! 

The voice acting is all perfectly fine from a cast that you know can do this sort of thing in their sleep - it's nice if you've watched the film but if you're coming to this fresh then you must wonder what all these people (Michael Cera, Mary Elisabeth Wanstead, Kieran Culkin, Chris Evans, Anna Kendrick, Aubrey Plaza, Brandon Routh and Jason Schwartzmann, amongst many others) are doing in a reasonably low-key animated series.  But they obviously have a great deal of affection for the film - if you've not seen the 10th anniversary table read then it's well worth a watch.

I liked this - you don't have to have seen the film beforehand but I feel it does help explain some of the nonsense here, but even for someone who has seen the film multiple times there's an awful lot of nonsense here and you just have to run with it.  It's on Netflix but I'm not entirely sure who I'd recommend it to if they've got no frame of reference - recent Star Trek is probably the closest thing I can think of (it might be like Below Decks, but I've yet to check that out except for the slightly bizarre, but well done, SNW crossover episode).  If you like the film, I can't see any reason you won't like this, but make sure you don't ditch it before the end of the first episode thinking it's exactly the same - because it certainly ain't!

#17 - Perfectly fine, but not even close to the best telly of the year
#14 - Surprisingly enjoyable horror