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.
