Blockbuster TV Review

Last Updated on November 9, 2022

Plot: Timmy Yoon is an analog dreamer living in a 5G world. And after learning he is operating the last Blockbuster Video in America, Timmy and his staff employees including his long-time crush, Eliza fight to stay relevant. The only way to succeed is to remind their community that they provide something big corporations can’t: human connection.

Review: I can say without any doubt in my mind that the best job I ever had (aside from working here at JoBlo.com, of course) was the years I spent at Blockbuster Video. Through my high school and college years, I was an assistant manager at my local Blockbuster and had a blast working with friends, renting movies before they came out, recommending my favorites to people, and meeting some weird characters. Losing the video store was a blow to my childhood even if streaming offers thousands of options I never had on the shelves of my local store. In the decade since Blockbuster liquidated the majority of its locations, the legend of the Last Blockbuster in Bend, Oregon has become a pop culture benchmark and even earned its own documentary. Now, the very company that drove Blockbuster to an early grave has taken the iconic franchise and turned it into a comedy series from one of the writers of Brooklyn Nine-Nine and The Good Place. The question you are likely wondering is whether Blockbuster is any good.

I wish I had better news, but Blockbuster is generic and dull without any real laughs to be had. Originally set as a project at NBC, Blockbuster has the look and feel of virtually every network sitcom of the last thirty years. Despite the excellent series that pepper the resumes of the writing staff, this series fails to take advantage of the freedoms of being on a streaming platform as well as never capitalizing on the brand and nostalgia of Blockbuster Video. Sure, there are some movie jokes in every episode, but the video store merely serves as a backdrop for the ensemble cast to get involved in cliche shenanigans and comedic plots that range from pratfalls to mistaken identity and even the requisite “will they/won’t they” romantic chemistry between the lead characters.

Blockbuster opens with the announcement that all remaining Blockbuster Video locations are going out of business, leaving Timmy Yoon (Randall Park) as the sole owner of his Michigan store. With five employees, Timmy must contend with all the challenges of running an antiquated business in the age of streaming. There are occasionally jokes about how this version of Blockbuster Video exists to provide senior customers who don’t understand streaming access to movies the old-fashioned way, but the jokes never take advantage of the countless movie-related opportunities inherent at a video store. Even Kevin Smith’s Clerks was able to mock the types of customers that visit video stores, but this series could have easily been set at any type of business and the plots would have still worked.

The cast of Blockbuster is definitely not the problem. While Randall Park essentially plays the same character he always plays, the rest of the ensemble is quite good. Melissa Fumero plays Eliza as a Harvard grad and Timmy’s childhood crush similarly to her Brooklyn Nine-Nine character Amy Santiago, but the pair do share some chemistry. Tyler Alvarez plays Carlos Herrera as an aspiring filmmaker who takes his job very seriously despite being shy when it comes to attention. Madeleine Arthur plays Hannah as a kooky but sweetly naive employee who is reminiscent of Lisa Kudrow as Phoebe on Friends. Olga Merediz plays Connie, the retiree working at the store but is by far the most fun character in the cast. JB Smoove and Kamaia Fairburn play Percy and Kayla Scott. Percy is Timmy’s best friend who owns the neighboring party supply store and the strip mall the Blockbuster is located in. Fairburn is his daughter who begrudgingly works at the video store and acts like she hates her job. There are also recurring characters that pop up throughout the episodes but most of the stories focus on the six store employees.

Through the ten episodes of Blockbuster, each story has the standard format of the main plot which engages Timmy and one or two of the other characters along with two secondary plots that follow the rest of the cast. Each episode leads into the next from an overall narrative flow but they can all be watched as standalone sitcom episodes. The problem is that all of the episodes are light on anything truly funny and feel as artificial as the outdoor set scenes that all take place in the mall parking lot without any visible skyline. The entirety of Blockbuster is artificial and feels thrown together without any of the charm or witty dialogue that made Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Superstore feel like they were improvised. This series feels overwhelmingly scripted and struggles to muster even a few laughs.

I wanted to love this show and I really don’t even like it. Blockbuster had a lot of potential as a series, but it fails to really capture any of the true humor that even the real last Blockbuster’s tweets manage to convey in a single sentence. Despite the best efforts from the cast, Blockbuster doesn’t even cut it as a workplace sitcom and wastes what little legacy Blockbuster Video may still have as a brand. I would not expect this series to last beyond this single season but I appreciate that something like this exists for those of us who worked at the namesake franchise. I just wish this show was as fun as the actual time I spent working at Blockbuster.

Blockbuster premieres on November 3rd on Netflix.

Blockbuster

NOT GOOD

4