Comedy
Dead Boy Detectives
Dead Boy Detectives targets teens in style and story. But it comes with very adult, problematic content.
And you thought video gaming was just a way to kill a little time.
When you (or your son or maybe your mother) spent hours upon hours trying to get past that one seriously unfair boss, you weren’t just saving the world figuratively, but in reality, too. Turns out, all our so-called dependency on fossil fuels and our handwringing over carbon footprints was just so much bluster.
Here’s why: The world is actually powered by video games. All the joystick-moving and button-mashing and VR-headset-wearing keeps the world’s energy banks filled, and that’s whether you get a high score or not.
But as any video gamer worth his overly muscled thumbs knows, not every game goes according to plan. They glitch. They crash. Sometimes, they can become downright unplayable.
And that, my friends, is where the Alpha Team comes in.
To call the members of Alpha Team “do gooders” is, well, probably a stretch. “We never do the right thing!” team member Mason proudly says.
“I know, right?” chimes in Tommy, the vehicle expert on the team. “Like the time I killed that old guy in real life!”
But they are pretty good at video games, and that makes them the perfect people to dive into a given game as virtual facsimiles of themselves to serve as the ultimate cheat code, fixing whatever problems that are keeping people from spending hours upon hours upon many, many more hours playing them. As Allison, head of the United States’ Energy Division explains, the games are meant to be addictive: Make them too easy or too hard or, let’s face it, too boring, too many people will turn ‘em off and, I dunno, play outside, and the power grid would run dry. Can’t have that.
So Mason and Tommy spend countless hours playing games for the sake of humanity—joined in their sacred duty by Eddie (who often serves as a given mission’s point person) and Buck (a self-proclaimed explosives expert).
But even as they play, is it possible they themselves are being played?
Of course they are! Otherwise I wouldn’t have mentioned it.
See, Allison hates the members of Alpha Team, so she secretly sends in members of her own super-secret Bravo Team to sabotage the games and to get the Alpha Team collectively fired. Because a world without power is, apparently, a small price to pay for the humiliation of these four arrogant 20-somethings.
This adult animated show on YouTube is a collaboration between four of the platform’s most popular content providers: VanossGaming (Evan Fong), BasicallyIDoWrk (Marcel Cunningham), I AM WILDCAT (Tyler Wine) and Terroriser (Brian Hanby). They boast a collective 40 million subscribers, and the show’s early numbers reflect that. In its first day, the pilot episode of Alpha Betas garnered a tidy 2.4 million views.
We don’t know how many kids watched the show in its first day of streaming: We can only hope the answer is not many.
Alpha Betas stuffs a hard-R-movie’s worth of problems into each 30-minute episode, albeit in animated form. Sex jokes are plentiful. Cartoon heads and limbs are lopped off with frightening regularity, always accompanied by lots of cartoon blood (and occasional cartoon innards). F- and s-words pepper the dialogue.
And even if the show was free of such content, you’ve got the rather amoral lead characters facing a bevy of explicitly immoral bad guys. It’s a series that can, at times, feel like it’s not trying to debunk the less-savory stereotypes of the “gamer,” but confirm them.
As the United States’ super-secret Energy Division is audited, the Alpha Team responds to a “Code Black,” where the world’s energy supplies dip to dangerously low levels (and might allow a bevy of aliens kept in Area 51 to go free). To do so, they have to dive into a Western-style videogame (Red Head Redemption) and rescue a bunch of non-player characters that were being held captive by a rogue NPC.
While in the game, the Alpha Team runs into a character that one of the team’s support personnel refers to as a “fake hooker.” She dresses provocatively (in an Old West sort of way) and refers a sexual act she’s willing to perform (as well as her fee). At one point, she seems to wife bodily fluid off her dress. We hear a few jokes related to performing oral sex on TikTok (on oneself), see a sex doll (and hear gags related to it) and deal with discussions related to sex and sex trafficking. A dancer does her thing on a phone screen. An Area 51 alien reads a magazine titled Alien Porn.
Several “characters” are decapitated (often by gunfire, once by a shovel). A couple of guys smash into cacti, and one man is skewered by a cactus arm (displaying his intestines). A dead, bloodied body is used as a surfboard another dead, decapitated body is vacuumed up by a sentient vacuum cleaner. A couple of folks are melted. A character suffers a serious, blood-spurting wound to the leg. Someone’s head is stepped on and crushed by a horse.
We hear flatulence. The f-word is used three times and the s-word is used four times. We also hear “b–ch,” “h—” and “sucks,” and God’s name is used inappropriately about a half-dozen times.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
Dead Boy Detectives targets teens in style and story. But it comes with very adult, problematic content.
An elf mage contemplates on connection and regret as she watches her human friends grow old and pass away.
