Season Review: Doomlands Season One

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Danny Doom and his crew of oddities run bar in a post-apocalyptic wasteland full of violence, mayhem, comedic situations and weirdos at every turn.

Our Take

With the streaming landscape being the behemoth that it is, I sometimes forget how many services are getting in on the game. Case in point, I had no clue there were such things as Roku Originals or that they even had a cartoon coming up on their docket. Initially commissioned by Quibi for it’s “on-the-go” streaming service, Roku snapped up it’s library and is billing them as their own original programming. Misleading? Maybe. But really its not like Quibi’s around to complain.

Anyway, I was completely unaware of Doomlands when I first heard of it, and once I knew of its existence, I intentionally didn’t watch any trailers. A good comedy trailer is hard to fashion and I didn’t want anything coloring my perception of the show before I could give it a fair shake. So I just looked up the show’s basics. Post apocalyptic setting with a bunch a freaks running the joint. Sounded exactly like the sort of thing you’d see on Adult Swim back in the day, so I went in with a pretty open mind.

Built off the back of a successful Kickstarter, Doomlands is series’ creator Josh O’Keefe’s passion project. In a world populated by mutants, marauders and monsters, the show is centered around the Oasis Bar, a giant tavern/tank that roams the wastelands juxtaposing the nightmarish hellscape of a desert apocalypse with the inconveniences of managing a bar. Not too bad an idea for a ten minute cartoon.

The crew is pretty fun, if not a bit archetypical. You’ve got your lead guy and girl in Danny Doom and Lhandi, your relatively normal leads. Xanthena and Tetsuo, your quirky bar staff. And Jep, drunkard and multitool for comedic situations as needed. The plot really thrusts you into it, so you have to learn as you’re watching. But truth be told, one of the show’s strengths is that it doesn’t demand too much from the viewer.

Being built on a pile of horrible future/post apocalypse tropes allows the viewer to easily dip into the series, by placing familiar references and genre conventions all over the show. You can tell O’Keefe really, really loves these kinds of worlds because I saw references to movies I hadn’t seen in years (if there weren’t Hell Comes to Frogtown references in this show, I’ll eat my hat). But for such a small runtime, the show makes it work so it can dive straight into the comedy.

That being said, the comedy isn’t anything new or revolutionary. There’s jokes sure, and I was entertained enough. But I feel it fell victim to something a lot of adult comedies tend to do nowadays, which is where characters kind of awkwardly talk over one another in place of making actual jokes. It didn’t do that all the time, and there were some decent laughs, but I can’t say overall it’s the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.

And while I hesitate to call the show “ambitious”, I do want to give credit to O’Keefe for seeing his dream through. The cancelation of Quibi must’ve been a gut-punch, so the fact that Roku came in to save this show is kind of cool. I think there’s something here in this show that’s worth watching. Even just want to unwind with something while you have a decent buzz on, Doomlands is a pretty chill watch if you’re looking to find out what it would be like if It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia was set in the world of Mad Max.