This Paramount+ Sci-Fi Series Based On A Video Game Is The Best 2026 Animated Show You're Not Watching

The Innersloth video game "Among Us" was released back in 2018, and it took the internet by storm. The premise of the game is simple, extrapolating the old party game "Werewolf" into an online, sci-fi experience. Each player takes control of a cute, cartoonish astronaut (only named for their color) working on a mining starship and is given ultra-simple tasks to perform to keep the vessel operational (with each task being represented by a small mini-game). 

One or two players, however, are secretly assigned the role of a shapeshifting alien imposter, and it's their job to sabotage the ship and murder their crewmates. If the imposter among us (hence the title) kills enough players, they win. 

The players, however, can call emergency meetings and vote on which players they suspect of being imposters. Suspects can then be ejected into space, but it's possible — and common — for players to accidentally eject their allies, leaving the imposters at large. It's thanks to "Among Us" that we picked up the colloquialism of "sus" (i.e. "suspicious"). Daniel Craig's Benoit Blanc can even be seen playing the game with the likes of Angela Lansbury in "Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery" (although Lansbury herself never actually learned how to play it).

In 2023, it was announced that Owen Dennis was adapting "Among Us" into an animated series. On June 5, 2026, the show, kind of without warning, finally premiered on Paramount+. Because there wasn't much fanfare, it's possible that "Among Us" has passed you by. The series, however, is pretty fun, retaining the premise of the game while also telling a comedic (and gory) murder mystery story. It's like John Carpenter's "The Thing" for the 10-and-up crowd, as well as a slapstick riff on the Agatha Christie classic "And Then There Were None."

It was wise of the makers of the "Among Us" TV series to retain the game's cartoony style. The characters aren't humans in colored spacesuits, they just happen to be spacesuit-looking humanoids. Like in the games, they don't have hands until they are needed, and their hands float freely from their bodies, sans arms. Also like in the game, the crewmates' skeletons consist of a single gigantic bone that's exposed when the shape-shifting alien rips them in half.

The characters all refer to each other by their colors as their names, and they are all genderless. Together, they work in a different department for the corrupt Mira Corporation on board the USS Skeld. The ship's captain is Red (Randall Park). The chief bureaucrat is Orange (Yvette Nicole Brown). Black (Liv Hewson) and Cyan (Kimiko Glenn and Kate Micucci) are the ship's geologists. Lime (Wayne Knight) is the chief engineer, while Yellow (Debra Wilson) and Brown (Phil LaMarr) are the mess hall chefs. Then there's Purple (Ashley Johnson), the chief of security, and Green (Elijah Wood), the summer intern.

Meanwhile, Dan Stevens plays Blue, the ship's doctor, and every other crewmate swoons in sexual ecstasy whenever they enter the room (a problem, I imagine, that Dan Stevens has in real life as well). Finally, Patton Oswalt plays White, the spoiled rich kid who's just along for the ride.

The alien impostor(s), notably, don't have a motivation so far as we know. They just love to kill. The imposter(s), like in "The Thing," look like pustule-riddled, pulsating wads of fleshy bubble gum. And they can imitate a crewmate right down to their memories and behavioral tics.

"Among Us," I should note, is a comedy series. Its characters are all broad archetypes, and their squishy, armless bodies are cute and silly. The show, however, doesn't shy away from the gore. When the first victim is killed, their arterial spray gets all over the floor. Indeed, some of the deaths in "Among Us" are aggressively gruesome, but, you know, in a playful way. The gore gives the show some much-needed edge.

Heck, the overall tone of "Among Us" is downright dystopian, an element clearly borrowed from Ridley Scott's sci-fi horror touchstone "Alien." Mira HQ cares more about ore shipments than human resources on the Skeld, which is itself dingy and prone to breaking down. More so, a sense of corporate neglect manifests in everything in the "Among Us" universe, speaking to its inhabitants' bleak, eroded quality of life.

And into the middle of all this is a pretty spot-on murder mystery. It's hard to tell which character(s) may be the imposter(s), and when they're revealed, you realize that the series played fair. Is it the gentle hippie? The corrupt captain? The uncaring Goth? The insensitive HR head? The paranoid engineer? "Among Us" is a great primer on Agatha Christie for kids who aren't yet familiar with Agatha Christie. Lots of characters fail to make it to the end of the series, and when a character dies, the show's opening credit sequence changes to accommodate their bloody death. By the last episode, the opening credits are pretty sparse.

Altogether, the "Among Us" TV show is both entertaining and faithful to the spirit of the video game that inspired it. Paramount+ may not have heavily advertised its release (sus!), but it's worth checking out.