Knuckles is barely on his Paramount+ show

I had high hopes for this ankle It’s a live-action miniseries, which, as it turns out, was perhaps a little too pretentious. But I don’t think there’s any expectation that it’s the titular echidna voiced by Idris Elba To be featured on a show with his name at the top was outrageous. I’m sad to report that Knuckles is only in a fraction of the show named after him.

We won’t go into major story details or spoilers here, but after watching everything ankle

In the series, I was stunned to realize that the punch-throwing echidna barely appears in it. The story is not about him; He spends large portions of the series noticeably absent, even in crucial scenes, and even when he is around, he is rarely at the center of the action. This series is actually all about Wade Whipple, the cartoon cop you’ll remember from the series Live action Sonic the Hedgehog Films.

The first few episodes do a pretty good job of dividing time between Knuckles trying to make sense of the world and Wade’s action at the bowling tournament. But there’s a scene at the beginning of the fourth episode where Wade gets caught up in his own subplot and Knuckles tells another character that he’s going to let the cop save him as part of his “training.” Then it makes it clear that Knuckles will be vibrating off-screen for an entire episode. He appears again in the final scene, but only closes the episode.

This imbalance between Knuckles and Wade’s screen time became so apparent in the second half of the season that I went back through all six episodes to break down, in minutes and seconds, how much Knuckles actually plays on his show. And folks, Elba does voice work for about 76 minutes and 47 seconds of a 172-minute season. These are just scenes that Knuckles is in, without regard to whether or not he actually makes a meaningful contribution to the scene. That’s less than half of the six-episode running time.

I imagine both Elba’s time and the process of animating Knuckles are expensive, but more importantly, the show was essentially positioned as an MCU-like piece for the beginnings of an expanded universe beyond the films. Its severe lack of screen time suggests that the live-action universe may not have its priorities right if it’s willing to spend more time on its less compelling human characters than the one this series is named after. Here is hope Sonic the Hedgehog 3 better manages the time between its anthropomorphic characters and the human characters that no one buys tickets for.