Some know him for the people’s elbow, some for his larger than life action movies like Fast Five, but starting tonight we’re all about to learn more than we might have wanted about Dwayne The Rock Johnson as NBC’s new primetime comedy Young Rock tells the developmental stories in the life of The Rock.
Dwayne Johnson is a proven Hollywood commodity who could have easily made a short docu-series with him just sitting in a chair telling the stories of his youth and it would have drawn in 2 million wrestling fans… easily. But it took executive producers Nahnatchka Khan (Always Be My Maybe) and Jeff Chiang (Fresh Off The Boat) to find the humanizing elements of Johnson’s life and turn it into a story with universal coming-of-age elements and relatability to anyone who grew up in a minority family bouncing from town to town.
On its surface, viewers will get entertaining dramatizations of stories from pivotal times in the life of Dwayne Johnson. Made even a bit more bombastic as they’re wrapped in a (for now) make-believe 2032 presidential campaign interview by future journalist Randall Park. But there’s more than just performance to these based on true stories events. From the get-go, Young Rock is an Iliad to his family particularly to his legendary father “Soulman” Rocky Johnson along with the Samoan dynasty his mother comes from. It isn’t acting when Johnson, on-camera, details the great moments and flaws of his father. You can hear the emotional crack in his usual suave voice and see the out of rhythm breathing delivering exposition when the show highlights his late father. We see Dwayne Johnson the human being, the base of the gimmick he works and we still love him just the same.
Khan and the show put together a terrific introduction to the three phases of Young Rock we will see throughout this first season. Adrian Groulx plays 10-year-old Dwayne Johnson growing up around wrestling legends like Andre The Giant and The Wild Samoans. Bradley Constant portrays Johnson in early high school during a time when he’s the outsider freshman with a full mustache. Uli Latukefu plays 18-20-year-old Dwayne Johnson starting out at the University of Miami where we start to see flickers of the man who would raise the people’s eyebrow. The performances are all well nuanced to what audiences know about Johnson and surprisingly in synch between the three actors who can only interact with one another off-screen since their each acting as they’re in different decades.
No chronicle about the life of Dwayne Johnson would be complete without some inside baseball about the wrestling business and the show is loaded with portrayals of iconic wrestlers such as SGT. Slaughter, Iron Sheik, Macho Man Randy Savage, and Andre The Giant. Of course the highlight is Joseph Lee Anderson putting on the boots of DJ’s father Rocky Johnson. Anderson really captures the jive of Rocky without turning it into a caricature, in a way he does it even better than the time The Rock played his own father on Fox’s That 70s Show.
I’ve watched three episodes of the series thus far and the pilot is what it absolutely had to be. Inviting. The Rock has millions and millions of fans who love him for his days as a WWE Superstar and there’s an entire generation now who know him as the action movie megastar. Young Rock’s pilot manages to humanize how the larger-than-life figure by literally doing just that. After opening with the hilarity of Johnson’s, hopefully, 2032 presidential campaign, his stories about being a small kid who only hung around giants, a shoplifting teenager trying to impress girls, a coming-of-age man finding who he is through the crucible of college football. Like every good sitcom, we get to experience how the teachings from his ecosystem shape the man now known to the public as “Dewey”.
Young Rock has a real shot at being the undisputed champion show of 2021. And just wait till you get to the “My Day With Andre” episode.
Young Rock premieres tonight at 8/7pm EST/CST on NBC.
