A parody of a beat-’em-up survives on one discipline: somebody has to refuse to wink. The first trailer for Golden Axe is stuffed with the jokes you would expect a cartoon about a fantasy video game to make, and the jokes are fine. What makes them land is the voice grumbling underneath them, an actor treating a smelly dwarf’s grievances with the same clenched conviction he once brought to a Soviet sleeper agent.

That actor is Matthew Rhys, and the casting is the whole trick. He plays Gilius Thunderhead, a battle dwarf with a chip on his shoulder and, per the character’s own billing, exceptionally poor hygiene. Everything around him is designed to be absurd. He is designed to be furious about it. The distance between those two settings is where the comedy lives.

This is the thing the coverage keeps missing when it files the news under ‘prestige actor voices silly cartoon.’ Self-referential comedy is not carried by the referential part. Anyone can write a line that points at the sequential boss battles or the villain who keeps coming back to life; the trailer duly does both, with Death Adder refusing to stay dead and the sorceress Tyris Flare flatly narrating the plot as a difficulty curve. Those gags are the easy half. The hard half is a performer who plays the fantasy as if it were a hostage negotiation, so that the audience, not the character, gets to be in on the joke.

Rhys is unusually well built for that job, which is the second thing the ‘slumming it’ framing gets wrong. His prestige credentials are real, but so is a quieter second career in animation: a memorably chilly villain turn on The Owl House, work on the Gremlins series, a stint on Infinity Train. He even has a comedy Emmy nomination tucked into a résumé everyone insists is humorless. The joke of hiring the man from The Americans to snarl in a dwarf’s beard only works if you pretend he has never done anything but suffer beautifully in period costume. He has. He knows exactly what he is doing here.

The company he is keeping suggests the show knows it, too. Golden Axe comes from Mike McMahan, who spent years turning Star Trek into affectionate self-mockery on Lower Decks, and Joe Chandler of American Dad, who runs the room. That lineage is the tell. The best of these video-game and franchise send-ups treat their source with the exasperated love of people who actually played the thing, and they cast for control, not for zaniness. A parody performed by comedians all pushing in the same broad direction is exhausting; a parody anchored by one actor playing it as tragedy is what gives the rest of the ensemble something to bounce off.

There is a longer memory at work in the casting, whether or not the show intends it. Gilius has been swinging that axe since the arcade original, a squat, bearded figure defined entirely by grievance and a weapon. Handing that thumbnail of a character to an actor whose specialty is interior weather, all the feeling a person is trying not to show, is its own small act of adaptation. The revival’s instinct is not to make the dwarf bigger. It is to make him deeper than a sprite has any right to be, and then let the width of that gap generate the laughs.

The logistics are straightforward. All ten episodes arrive at once on Paramount+ on September 16, a series that started life at Comedy Central before migrating to the streamer, animated by Titmouse and rounded out by Lisa Gilroy, Liam McIntyre, Danny Pudi and Carl Tart as a cheesy humanoid panther lifted from the games’ deeper cuts.

Which leaves the one gamble nobody is naming. A show whose central joke is that these things repeat forever, that the boss always comes back and the quest never really ends, is being dropped as a single binge you can exhaust in an afternoon. The trailer promises a straight man who never breaks. Ten episodes in one sitting will find out whether the bit can hold as long as Rhys’s face can.

Tags: paramount+, Matthew Rhys, Golden Axe, Mike McMahan, video game adaptations