Cast of Knuckles TV show way too good to be cast of TV show about Knuckles

What the hell is going on with this Knuckles TV show?

Normally, we wouldn’t devote large portions of our brains to thinking about a television show about Knuckles—the small red dog-man from the Sonic The Hedgehog video games, and the subsequent movie Sonic The Hedgehog 2. But Paramount seems bound and determined to make us care, having revealed today that it’s packing the Paramount+ series—which, yes, we know, is actually about an echidna, an animal doomed to only ever comes up when people are talking about Sonic The Hedgehog—with a ton of big name comedy stars, out of what we can only assume was some sort of sinister effort to make us spend the rest of today thinking about Knuckles.

You’re going to have Idris Elba, who voiced the character in the film, in the mix, obviously, and Adam Pally is already on board to reprise his comic relief role from the movies. But Deadline reports that the show has just added five new cast members, and get a load of these names: Christopher Lloyd, Stockard Channing, Cary Elwes, Paul Scheer, and Rob Huebel. That’s a lot of star power to stand around and go “What’s this stoic dog man getting up to next?!” They join a cast that includes Edi Patterson, Julian Barratt, Scott Mescudi, and Ellie Taylor, which means we now also have to consider how Judy Gemstone would handle being stuck in a world that also contains Knuckles The Echidna. (Dramatically, obscenely, and just generally not well, would be our guess.) Like, we know the Sonic franchise was already swinging for the fences with Jim Carrey in the lead villain role, but this is kind of ridiculous in terms of sheer/Scheer volume of comedic ringers.

The Knuckles show is being executive produced by Jeff Fowler, who directed both of the Sonic films; the movie will land in between Sonic The Hedgehogs 2 and 3 in the grand chronology of the series. The film will center on Elba’s character and Pally’s resident doofus Wade as Knuckles “agrees to train Wade as his protégé and teach him the ways of the Echidna warrior.”