Among Us Full Series Review - Better Than Expected, But Not by Much
In the fifth episode of Among Us – titled “Good Vibes Only” – the crew of the spaceship finds itself at a party and proceeds to collectively trip in a sequence that abandons the show’s normal visual language entirely and plays with the grammar of animated storytelling in ways that are unexpectedly inventive.
It is the moment when Among Us most clearly reveals what it could have been across its entire run – and, by implication, what it mostly isn’t.
Owen Dennis, the creator of Infinity Train, is a creative talent with a demonstrated gift for finding genuine philosophical and emotional weight within the medium of of animated television. Infinity Train – canceled far too early by HBO Max – was one of the more extraordinary animated series of its era, a show that used the conceit of an infinite magical train to explore questions of identity, growth, and the sometimes painful process of becoming the person you are meant to be.
Among Us is not that show.
That is not entirely a criticism. The source material – Innersloth’s 2018 social deduction game, which became a global phenomenon during the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020 when approximately a billion players discovered the particular pleasure of accusing their friends of being alien impostors aboard a spaceship – is not exactly a wellspring of narrative potential. The game’s characters are distinguished solely by color, have no faces to speak of, and exist within a world whose lore, drawing heavy inspiration from John Carpenter’s The Thing, extends approximately as far as “someone on this ship is trying to kill everyone.” Adapting this into a serialized animated series was always going to require an act of considerable creative invention, and the degree to which Dennis and his team have succeeded in that invention is genuinely more than the premise deserves.
The series arrived on Paramount+ over the weekend as a surprise drop – two years after it had been completed and largely vanished from public conversation, the show appeared without significant announcement, which the creators have described as an intentional decision. Whether that strategy was chosen to generate word-of-mouth or to manage expectations is unclear. What is clear is that the show that finally arrived is a brisk, frequently funny, occasionally inspired piece of animated comedy that never quite coheres into something you will be thinking about a week after you finish it.
The voice cast is the series’ most consistently reliable pleasure. Ashley Johnson, reuniting with Dennis after Infinity Train, brings the warmth and specificity that has characterized her best work across a career that has ranged from The Last of Us to The Legend of Vox Machina. Randall Park’s captain, defined by an equally desperate need for approval, provides the series’ most sustained comic thread. Elijah Wood’s intern is a reliably absurdist presence, and Wood plays the escalating desperation with a commitment that makes jokes land that might otherwise feel thin. These three actors in particular carry the show, and the rest of the cast does just as admirably with what they are given.
The episodes are short – thirteen to fifteen minutes each, brisk enough that the show’s pacing problems never become genuinely damaging over the course of its roughly two-hour run. There are occasions where the story lags, but then the characters will pull you back in various outlandish ways. This is the structural logic of the original game translated into serialized comedy: momentum maintained through surprise rather than sustained investment, each episode functioning as a self-contained round of something that is fun while it is happening and forgettable once it is done.
“Good Vibes Only” is the clear exception – the moment when Dennis most fully flexes the creative muscles that made Infinity Train so remarkable. The trippy party sequence plays out in a way that suggests what the series might have been if Dennis had been given the freedom, or had allowed himself the ambition, to pursue this approach across the full run. It is almost as inventive as Infinity Train at its best, and it stands alone in the season as an episode that earns genuine admiration rather than simple enjoyment.
The idea of adapting a premise as thin as Among Us into a complete narrative seemed sus to begin with – and one senses, at times, that the show is aware of this limitation and has accepted it rather than challenged it. One-note characters, no matter how appealingly voiced, remain one-note. A premise this thin, no matter how skillfully inflated, retains the shape of something lightweight, because this property simply did not have very much to give.
Among Us, in the end, has about as much to offer as a round of the game that inspired it: Genuinely worth experiencing once, but probably not worth going back to.