In some ways it’s surprising that the show Agent Elvis, where Elvis Presley is a secret agent saving the world between Las Vegas concerts with a plucky chimp sidekick, doesn’t already exist. Throughout his career, his image was commodified and it’s easy to picture this show’s concept as a cartoon playing on Saturday mornings between Superman and Josie and the Pussycats to wide-eyed American children. But Netflix’s Agent Elvis is extremely child unfriendly and has more in common with Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood than Hanna-Barbera’s Super Friends.
This is a show where hot tubs are blocked by an excess of “monkey spunk”, Elvis’s surrogate mother has a friends-with-benefits situation with William Shatner and jars of Howard Hughes’ piss line the walls of Elvis’ spy plane. It’s a strange tone to initially settle into, somewhere between the outrageous comedy of the long-running spy parody Archer and the historical reimagining of Forrest Gump. It changes Elvis’s famous meeting with President Nixon into a spy mission that goes terribly wrong and involves a chimp doing cocaine in the Oval Office. While it takes a little getting used to, it’s easy to stay transfixed by the gorgeously bright and sharp animation, which shines most in the action scenes where Elvis breaks out his karate moves.
Those flying kicks are used at the behest of The Central Bureau, AKA TCB, a morally ambiguous secret organisation that has been “quietly shaping history” for centuries. They are proudly behind the hydrogen bomb and a Bureau beach day accidentally led to the Bay of Pigs. Their mission, and Elvis’s, is to “infiltrate, instigate, appropriate and fumigate to keep America safe”.
Matthew McConaughey plays Elvis, and unlike Austin Butler’s now permanent uncanny Elvis impersonation, the actor performs The King Of Rock’n’ Roll with his regular Texas drawl. He’s just as foul-mouthed as the rest of the cast but is more of a straight man than his unhinged acquaintances. His motives are spelt out while torturing a criminal in the first episode alongside his trusty ape companion Scatter, “I decided a while ago I wasn’t gonna just sit around while this country’s torn apart by all the chaos, the dirtbag hippies, the drugs, the crime.” Those pure motives aren’t held by everyone on the mission, though, we find out. “My chimp Scatter here – he just does it because he gets off to it.”
Sadistic chimp aside, Elvis’s crew is rounded out by It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia star Kaitlin Olson as CeCe Ryder, a hedonistic but highly skilled operative for TCB. Jackass legend Johnny Knoxville plays Elvis’s dim-witted best friend Bobby Ray, comedian Niecy Nash is Bertie – Elvis’s “rock” who has cared for him since he was a baby – and the celebrated Don Cheadle is The Commander who runs the bureau The central voices are uniformly delightful, but particular praise must go to Cheadle, who practically sings his dialogue and has sharp comic timing that brings the best out of even the silliest punchlines. The reasons for his bureau’s century-old use of celebrities as agents are breezed over hilariously, with Marilyn Monroe, Mark Twain and Jackie Robinson all identified as past recruits and Benjamin Franklin’s famous kite experiment reimagined as an instrument of torture. As Cheadle’s silky timbre tells new recruits: “If it wasn’t for TCB, half of you’d be toiling in a Japanese salt mine right now, the other half would be selling fetish sex for food in a Soviet Worker’s Paradise.” The hit rate of jokes is inconsistent, and the show seems to think that the mere mention of group sex is a gag that never gets old, but the frequency of punchlines means that even if only one in three elicits a giggle, it still works out as well over a laugh a minute.
Despite the scenes of Elvis tripping on LSD or pummelling various bad guys to death with his bare hands, this series comes with family approval, having been created by Priscilla Presley with first-time showrunners John Eddie and Archer scribe Mike Arnold. Priscilla also voices herself, as the series is set when they are still happily married and their recently passed Lisa Marie Presley is a babe in arms. Elvis is portrayed as a loving husband and father and is easily the most morally upstanding of the ensemble, but it’s still surprising that the extremely adult antics of the show come with his estate’s involvement, However, without the support of his loved ones, the show would be an uneasy prospect given that Elvis himself was ultimately a victim of those that sought to squeeze every dollar they could out of him.
While the talent of Elvis is a one-in-a-generation phenomenon, the show takes gentle jabs at his status as an icon (“He’s like Marvin Gaye for white people,” Bertie explains). But the talent of the voice cast extends into the many cameos made throughout the series, with particular highlights in Jason Mantzoukas’s “completely not insane” Howard Hughes and Fred Armisen’s Charles Manson. But the show has ambition beyond just being a who’s who of the late 1960s and the series builds up some intriguing mysteries and fun twists. But perhaps the funniest image of all is of the hundreds of unsuspecting parents who will probably be wrongfooted by the surprising direction this series has taken. As they settle in for this show with their children on a Saturday morning, they’ll have to scramble for the remote once a chimp starts shooting people in the face.
