Mike Myers is both the best and worst part of The Pentaverate

The Pentaverate, Netflix’s new conspiracy-laden six-episode comedy series, has many questions on its mind. Questions like, “Can objective truth exist in the digital age?” “What hole in the American spirit do fevered QAnon imaginings fill?” “Can a small group of elites ever be trusted to wield power on behalf of the masses?” And, of course, the biggest question of them all: “Does anyone actually want a Mike Myers political comedy with a bunch of dicks and vomit and accent jokes in the year of our lord 2022?”

It has, after all, been 14 years since The Love Guru, Myers’ last star vehicle—a film so misguided, and so poorly received, that it ended his reign as one of Hollywood’s most consistently bankable comedy stars pretty much overnight. Some of that rotten DNA makes its way into The Pentaverate, which bogs itself down on more than one occasion with the delusion that a bad Russian accent can be both the start and the stop of a scene’s comedic premise, or that puke and punchlines are easily interchangeable.

And yet, there’s an undeniable thrill to watching Myers, still a comedy genius when he cares to be, go for it, to seeing an energetic performer who’s been absent from the landscape for so many years throw himself into caricature after caricature of broken, insecure men. The basic concept of The Pentaverate sees Myers pulling double, triple, and occasionally quintuple duties in its scenes, and while the show’s surprisingly high-quality prosthetics, wardrobe, and CGI do some of the heavy lifting, it’s Myers’ nuanced, specific sketches of different facets of white male obsolescence that keep the whole endeavor from falling prey to its—and its creator’s—worst impulses.

The premise (as laid out in a series of escalatingly silly gags from guest narrator Jeremy Irons) is suitably goofy, touching lightly on any number of “real” conspiracy theories: The Pentaverate is a secret society of five men who work behind the scenes to control and/or preserve the world, with one key difference between them and your various run-of-the-mill Illuminati-types: “They’re nice.”

Purported niceness is called immediately into question though, seeing as the series starts with the abduction (and faked death) of Professor Hobart Clark (Keegan-Michael Key), a cold fusion specialist who’s quickly informed that he’s been forcibly recruited to join a Russian priest (Myers), a clear Rupert Murdoch stand-in (Myers), actual former Alice Cooper manager Shep Gordon (Myers), and an aging British lord (yes, Myers) in ruling the world. To be fair to, well, Myers (and his co-writers Roger Drew and Ed Dyson), the fact that the guys pulling the strings on the planet all have roughly the same face is a feature, not a bug, of The Pentaverate’s whole mission statement. As a later joke about Key’s character being all four of his co-Pentaverites’ “first Black friend” alludes, Myers has crafted a show that’s firmly interested in seeing what happens when the old order must make way for the new.

The series gets the rest of its ’70s paranoia thriller vibes from the adventures of Ken Scarborough (Myers), a local journalist whose Toronto-based beat is so folksy and old-fashioned that the whole dang country is depicted as though it were shot in fuzzy VHS. (The transition to crisp HD when Ken and his team cross the U.S. border is one of several genuinely clever visual gags that pop up throughout The Pentaverate’s run.) Informed he has to get a “big story” to keep his job, Ken teams up with a young camera person (Lydia West) and a deeply miserable American conspiracy theorist (Myers) to track down the five men who supposedly run the world.

Credit where it’s due: While the joke writing in The Pentaverate is occasionally lazy (Rex Smith, Myers’ take on Alex Jones-style conspiracy shills, ends up coming off as less absurd than the actual Jones, somehow), its production value never is. This is a resolutely interesting-looking show, from the retro sci-fi geometry of the Pentaverate’s base, to the bizarre and outdated costumes its various servants are outfitted with, to a couple of audaciously bold visual set pieces near its finale. It’s clear at every point that Myers and his team (including director Tim Kirkby, whose recent credits include Brockmire and Fleabag) were deeply invested in creating a real-feeling vision of a secret world increasingly out-of-step with the new.

And, y’know what? Sometimes the comedy of The Pentaverate lives up to those ambitious visuals, often with structural or meta jokes, like the silly Irons intros, or a running gag that is, hands down, the finest comedy work of Maria Menounos’ career. It doesn’t hurt that the show’s rare non-Myers stars—West, Key, Debi Mazar, Ken Jeong, Richard McCabe, and especially a typically scene-stealing turn from Myers’ old Shrek 2 buddy Jennifer Saunders—are genuinely great (and an occasionally nice rest from the prosthetic onslaught, if we’re being honest).

It’s also interesting to see Myers cut loose with an actual honest-to-goodness TV-MA rating, for one of the only times in his career. Early jokes about “close-up sex magic,” “locally sourced rimjobs,” and “an ass to mouth machine” got a surprise laugh out of us, and there’s an incredibly bold dick-based setpiece late in the series’ run that serves as a sort of logical endpoint for the old Austin Powers “hold up a vase to block the penis” bit.

The Pentaverate is more wistful than scatalogical when it comes to its satire, though. There’s a sadness to even the broadest of the characters Myers plays here—who, almost to a man, are flailing in the face of a world where purpose, and even truth itself, are flexible to the point of meaninglessness. The show’s messaging sometimes devolves to simple triteness; there’s a vein of “it’d be nice if people were nice” that periodically crops up throughout. But at its most poignant, Myers portrays even the worst of his characters as men who feel the world is slipping beyond their power to save. The heroes, then, are those who give up that power gracefully, moving into a supporting role so that a new generation can pick up where they left off. It’s a slightly ironic sentiment for a TV show where Myers has cast himself in fully 50 percent of the extant speaking roles—but a sweet one, nevertheless.