The Pitch: It’s a strangely prolific time for video game TV adaptations set in the post-apocalypse: HBO’s The Last of Us offered prestige-drama ruminations on the physical and moral crumbling of a world beset by zombies, and Netflix’s short-lived Resident Evil took a slightly campier approach. Now, new player Peacock has logged on, this time for a wacky, chintzy take on a decidedly less up-to-date video game series: Twisted Metal.

In this version, Twisted Metal is more of a Mad Max story — an apocalyptic event has left America in tatters, with roving gangs of gimmicky vehicular tyrants setting upon whatever poor soul wanders out from the few walled cities that remain. Their only hope for supplies comes in the form of “milkmen,” who ferry goods from one city to the other. One such milkman is John Doe (Anthony Mackie), an amnesia-ridden driver who loves quips as much as he loves blasting fools in his beat-up 2002 Subaru, Evelyn (“EV3L1N”).

Like so many of these stories, the ultimate “one last job” comes a-calling: He’s recruited by Raven (Neve Campbell), the mayor of the cushy, fenced-in New San Francisco, to retrieve an important item from New Chicago and bring it back in ten days’ time. If he does it, he can enjoy paradise. But to do so, he’ll have to outwit the dangers of the new world, from a tyrannical rent-a-cop with delusions of grandeur (Thomas Haden Church) to the psychotic Sweet Tooth (played by the hulking body of AEW wrestler Samoa Joe and the baritone voice of Will Arnett). His only ally in this fight is Quiet (Stephanie Beatriz), an unwitting passenger with mad axe-throwing skills and vengeance on the brain.

An Axle to Grind: For those young enough not to have the PlayStation 1 startup music burned into their cerebella, a primer: Twisted Metal was a gnarly, short-lived game series set in a deadly demolition-derby tournament, where over-the-top drivers used heavily-armed gimmick vehicles to smash, crash, and blast their enemies to kingdom come. The game’s mascot? A giggling, homicidal clown named Sweet Tooth, who blasts missiles out of a refurbished ice cream truck.

It’s not the strongest skeleton on which to hang a story, but Deadpool and Zombieland writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick (and writer/director Michael Jonathan Smith of Cobra Kai) fill it in with plenty of edgy gore and campy, self-referential humor. The upholstery is practically soaked with the meta-chaos of Reese and Wernick’s prior work: In the opening sequence, John narrates his way through a wild car-based shootout in an abandoned shopping mall, Deadpool-style; later, two men are captured by a band of cannibals who dust them with lemon pepper seasoning to make them more succulent. The apocalypse froze all of pop culture in 2002, so music is all Cypress Hill CDs, with decor featuring A Knight’s Tale posters.

The arch style can get pretty grating sometimes, especially in the early episodes where the tee-hee-ain’t-I-a-stinker tone is all the show has to go on. The budget is also one of the show’s greatest enemies: The vehicular combat the games are known for is mostly bookended on either end of the season, with a few decent car stunts sprinkled throughout. Otherwise, the sets and costumes feel pretty cheap, and the camp tone can only take such chintziness so far. (For good and ill, Twisted Metal gives off the vibes of a late-aughts Sci-Fi Channel original series: think Z Nation.)

Twisted Metal (Peacock)