Obliterated

Obliterated is such an amusing concept, executed with utterly reckless abandon, that it mostly steamrolls over is abundant excesses and the challenge of stretching it out over eight episodes. Proudly raunchy in a way that recalls Amazon’s “The Boys,” this series from the creative team behind “Cobra Kai” merits a toast, or in the spirit of the show, five or six of them.

It's not always effective, especially as the series begins to overstay its welcome. At its best, however, it's the perfect kind of comfort show that you'd watch in your college dorm room — one that proves to be raunchy and violent, but also oddly sweet.

Obliterated relies on its humor and charm to cover for its limited A-list star power and general lack of narrative momentum.

Obliterated is a delightful but frustrating watch, a square peg trying desperately to fit into a round hole. The cast has infectious chemistry, it makes creative use of its budget and its Vegas setting, and there’s enough raunch there to satisfy the whims of anyone bristling at how tame and puritanical mainstream media has become in recent years. But you have to sift through a lot of dead air, repetitive twists, and hazily-staged action.

While its talented cast does their best to liven things up, their contributions fail to keep Obliterated from being a boring and otherwise forgettable series.

Call off the search: the worst show of 2023 is here. That is, unless you’re a 13-year-old boy, in which case Obliterated (Netflix) is your dream product.

The pace is so excruciating and the show so repetitive that by the third hour, nothing would seem more heroic than someone detonating the bomb and putting us all out of our misery. The characters may look and act like good old-fashioned American heroes, but taking a fun premise and making it this boring is pure villainy.