The rock testing political waters
LOS ANGELES • Young rock, a new TV sitcom about the early days of dwayne Johnson, can’t resist peeking into the future.
And there, the wrestler-turned-movie star is on the path to political glory.
The show is mainly consumed with telling cute and likable stories about Johnson’s upbringing as a child and his coming into his own as a young man.
Like a comic spin on This Is us with tricep presses instead of trauma, the show skips around three formative points in Johnson’s youth, then pivots into the future to show Johnson (playing himself ) running for president in 2032 and telling his story to the voting public, in scenes set on an interview show or on the campaign trail.
That he looks just the same as he does now is part of this show’s image campaign: It took a lot to make Johnson who he is today, and now he’s such an unshifting fixture on the landscape his childhood makes for a new folklore.
That within the framing device is amiable and pleasant, if consistently buffed to a sheen worthy of an image-conscious celebrity. The three young rocks (Adrian Groulx in childhood, bradley Constant in high school and uli Latukefu as a college athlete) are well equipped to play a celebrity whose chief selling point to fans is his charm. All manage to pull off consistent performances through the years as a young man coming into his own in a Samoan and black wrestling family.
The degree of difficulty may be lowered a bit, though, by the tendency of the show to play things fairly soft.
The edge of Fresh Off the boat, another period family comedy also executive produced by Nahnatchka Khan and Jeff Chiang, feels somewhat missing here.
For instance, high-schoolera dwayne’s taking a date to see his wrestler father (Joseph Lee Anderson) grappling in a makeshift ring at a flea market seems like it might have the potential for embarrassment — until the giddy joy of wrestling makes everyone happy.
“Working the gimmick was how my family lived, and we all embraced it,” Johnson himself says.
“The gimmick” is a sort of confidence game on a potentially hostile wrestling audience or a society that didn’t necessarily have room for a family that looked like the Johnsons. The show works a gimmick of its own, pushing a sort of relentless sunniness that it’d be churlish to reject out of hand.
The grown-ups — Anderson, Stacey Leilua as Johnson’s mother and Ana Tuisila as his wrestling-promoter grandma — add just enough heft to make the show work.
It’s in the framing device that I most strongly resisted the show’s pull. Johnson, in real life, has mused about a potential future in politics. As such, this show represents not merely a flight of fancy but, possibly, something like a test balloon.