SPOILER ALERT AND WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Average Joe Season 2, Episodes 1 and 2. It also contains a mention of suicide.
The Average Joe Season 2 premiere can best be described in one reaction: WTF. The show wasn’t exactly relaxed in Season 1, but after a years-long break and a merger between BET+ and Paramount+, it comes back with a vengeance. The first two episodes are a rolling tide of disbelief, ending with a genuine “oh hell no” moment.
“67 Days Later” is so named because that’s the break between seasons, and mercifully there’s a brief recap for anyone who either missed Season 1 or doesn’t remember it, because Season 2 relies on having a basic knowledge of what happened before. Joe certainly hasn’t forgotten it; the entire start of the new season is watching him try to cope with his reality. All he has is his found family—Touch, Cathy and Leon—and this mystery. Deon Cole has three different scenes in the first two episodes where Joe faces a massive reveal, and that sets the tone for the whole season. The show is not messing around. In fact, it takes a significant leap by moving the action all the way to Cape Town, South Africa.
Keep in mind, the series didn’t necessarily have to do this; it could have just kept the action in Pittsburgh and nobody would have complained, and it’d probably have been easier from a production standpoint, too. But it helps to separate Average Joe Season 2 right away. The show has a different color palette and visual style in South Africa, and while the tone is still the same—equal doses snarky humor and startling violence—there’s now a “fish out of water” quality to play with. The characters were in over their heads before, but now they’re completely out of their element. And that adds a degree of difficulty to everything that follows.
In terms of the ongoing mythology surrounding Teddy, the first two hours are well-balanced in terms of giving Joe (and by extension the audience) something to chew on, but adding enough wrinkles to keep going. There has to be a real hope that this ragtag crew is going to get anywhere, but also a reason for the viewer to come back. The biggest update is that Joe has a half-sister, Imani, because Teddy had an entire second family. This once again allows creator Robb Cullen to play with the juxtaposition between Joe’s biological family and his found family, but now there’s Imani to physically represent all the things that Joe doesn’t know.
On the flipside, there’s one awesome villain for Joe to eventually come up against. Sipho is played by Hakeem Kae-Kazim, whom audiences will likely remember as Ike Dubaku in 24 and Sulaimani on Strike Back. Both of those shows are tough as nails, but what Kae-Kazim does in Average Joe is more disturbing than anything he did on either of them. The audience is quickly conditioned to feel dread whenever he appears on screen. The actor Erik Todd Dellums once said that when playing drug kingpin Luther Mahoney on Homicide: Life on the Street, people would cross the street to avoid him, as he was that intimidating. Kae-Kazim is that effective and then some.
To break up all this, Average Joe never loses its signature rapid-fire humor, often at inopportune times, which is part of the joke. Leon goes on a rant about rental cars in Episode 1 that is not only random, not only funny, but as any fan of Top Gear will tell you, factually correct. Malcolm Barrett carries most of the humor, but everyone’s got a good moment or two. Cynthia McWilliams is spot on when Cindy is asked to talk to Imani, and cold-cocks her instead. And then there’s Michael Trucco, who’s mastered snark both in dialogue and in the “are you fucking serious” looks he gets to fire off. The laughs are important, because when these two episodes get dark, they get really dark.
This is not a season premiere for the faint of heart. When characters die, they die brutally. One of the most difficult scenes involves the murder of an entire family the audience doesn’t even know. There’s also an explanation of how Touch didn’t actually kill himself last season, but not before viewers have to see him making the attempt. (It is deeply appreciated that the show takes the time to include suicide prevention resources at the end of Episode 2. For those of us who have mental health battles to fight, it’s good to see a series that doesn’t just use the topic as a plot point and then forget about it.)
But these are two episodes that cram in everything but the kitchen sink: big plot reveals, several shootouts, lots of laughs, emotional heaviness and one exploding boat. It’s amusing that Leon ruining everything by setting off a flare gun is then followed a short time later by Joe saving the day by firing a second flare gun, as if Average Joe is almost poking fun at itself. The biggest flaw is just wondering how the season is going to sustain itself at this breakneck pace, because there’s still a long way to go.
Yet the final few minutes, with Joe realizing that Cathy and Leon knew Teddy was alive, and the domino effect of the whole group turning on each other, sum up the Season 2 premiere quite nicely. It’s a shocking sequence with a ton of dramatic effect, but the audience’s first reaction is heartbreak, because they know how painful this is for Joe before he ever slugs Leon. There’s a metric ton of mayhem in Average Joe, but the chaos works because the audience is rooting for Joe all the way.
Average Joe streams Wednesdays on Paramount+. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Paramount+.
Article content is (c)2020-2026 Brittany Frederick and may not be excerpted or reproduced without express written permission by the author. Follow me on Twitter at @BFTVTwtr and on Instagram at @BFTVGram. For story pitches, contact me at tvbrittanyf@yahoo.com.
