Season Review: Doomlands Season Two

Almost secretly, Canada has been seeing a lot of wins in the adult animation comedy space here in America. Adult Swim America took a page out of Adult Swim Canada’s book from a year ago and just wrapped airing Psi Cops. The likes of FreeVee, Tubi, and other FAST networks all have amassing libraries with all sorts of content that we used to have to specifically hire writers in Canada for and that doesn’t appear to be stopping anytime soon. Checking in with their own Canadian-effort…The Roku Channel’s Doomlands season two.

After more than two years of waiting, the second season of Doomlands has dropped on The Roku Channel, however, it looks a lot different than before because while the show’s first season featured ten quarter-hour episodes, season two features five 30-minute episodes. And for those that don’t know, Doomlands follows the comedy hijinks of a bar called The Oasis and a ragtag group of employees managing to keep a business afloat despite the fact that it’s located in a monster-huge truck indicative of Mad Max-like vehicles just even more ostentatious than anything you could have imagined.

This season Danny opts to hit the open road and return to a town called Muckton which seems to have a better reputation for partying. And while we don’t spend TOO much time on it, we do get to peel away at the onion that is Danny’s past upbringings and learn that he was a one-time race car driver that had an unfortunate end to his last go…kinda like Star Wars: The Phantom Menace and the premise behind Anakin and the podracers. Danny’s aspiring bartender, Lhandi,is still trying to find herself and while at first it seemed like she was going to be a bigger part of the show, by the end of the second season Danny becomes way more of the focus with additional time being highlighted for Xanthena and sometimes Jep.

The ensemble cast of Doomlands is wildly entertaining with special attention having to go towards the voice of “Danny”, that being the hilarious Mark Little. Mark just BRINGS it and is fed some hilarious dialogue that’s laden in scenes that should make fans of Superjail or Mr. Pickles right at home with gratuitous violence delivered by way of gritty animation. In fact, the aesthetic of the characters could be the big gripe I have with this series in that the principle characters, mostly the newer ones that get introduced throughout the series, don’t distinguish themselves that much from the bunch of background NPC characters.

This gripe is helped by the fact that Doomlands gets itself a rather impressive guest star list for its second season featuring the likes of Rhys Darby, Michael Cusack, and others and an even more impressive lineup of songs featured as part of the series’ score with extra points given to whomever decided to give us a King Parrot song.

For my money, Doomlands works better as a half-hour series rather than a quarter-hour due simply to the size and scale of the landscape that provides for limitless characters and situations that should be further cultivated in future seasons to come.