(COURTESY OF NETFLIX)
After you’ve gotten your binge on with surprise No. 1 Netflix
NFLX
show The Night Agent, there’s another even more unlikely secret operative you might want to check out. This one has some serious sideburns, a distinctive curl to his lip, and an amusingly alternative take on mid-20th Century history.
The adult animated show Agent Elvis arrived on Netflix just before The Night Agent, with a top-drawer voice cast led by Matthew McConaughey as Elvis (more or less, Texas isn’t Tupelo), plus Tom Kenny and Don Cheadle, and a 2-D visual style built on 1960s/1970s anime and Vegas excess, where the show’s putative events partly unfold.
The historic figures who surface include a bonkers Howard Hughes, Richard Nixon, Charles Manson, the Rat Pack, Redd Foxx, and so many more. Robert Goulet is a long-time nemesis. “Explanations” emerge episode by episode for big events such as the moon landing, that 18-minute gap and plenty else.
TCB, shorthand among the singer and his real-life posse for “Taking Care of Business,” has a whole new meaning in Agent Elvis. And there’s a lot of Elvis Presley music, always a good thing. The show is even executive produced by the King’s widow, Priscilla Presley, and John Eddie for Sony Pictures Animation.
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So, yes, we’re talking about that King of Rock’n’Roll, though in this telling, Elvis much prefers to dabble in saving the world by stopping various evil masterminds than he does about recording yet another lucrative though admittedly forgettable late-era movie or TV special.
It’s very much adult-focused fun, though, with plenty of salty language and liberal application by some characters of alcohol and various pharmaceuticals. Elvis himself is called “a possibly delusional Manchurian Candidate-style killing machine who also sings Viva Las Vegas.”
There’s lots else here to love, including plenty of surprise cameos by some of the biggest names in front of and behind the camera and a genial swagger rather like that in some of Presley’s 30-odd movies.
Also, there is, as the song suggests, a little less conversation and a lot more action, though when you call the action cartoon-ish, that is the point.
It’s not the deepest take on mid-century mayhem, with ingeniously reconstructed cultural and political history that’s as dubious as a third-rate AI’s term paper, but it’s consistently amusing. Agent Elvis’ 10 episodes may not be here for a long time, but as Elvis himself may have said (for real), they’re definitely here for a good time.
