Can you smell 2032 cooking?
A new TV series about the early life of Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson will exist inside of a fictional interview happening in the future. The upcoming series Young Rock, which is basically the Rock’s answer to Everybody Hates Chris, but instead of the adventures of Chris Rock as a little kid, Young Rock will be about…well…you get it.
On a scale of 1 to unnecessary, the trailer for Young Rock looks totally inoffensive and actually does something smart by using the actual Rock sparingly, and instead, relies on younger actors serving as Rock ciphers. If we smell what the Rock is cooking correctly with this series, it seems like one of the ingredients is restraint. An entire series about the Rock, featuring the Rock in every scene might be just too much Rock to handle. But, if normal Rock is the framing of each episode, and then you’ve got faux-Rocks doing the heavy lifting, well, that’s just smart. It’s like The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles of fake biopics about wrestlers turned superstars, which is to say, yeah, there’s not a clear analogy. Let’s face it, when the Rock did The Scorpion King 2, he starred in the first sequel to a spinoff of a sequel of a remake, ever. And things have just gotten stranger since. A biopic about his entire youth, narrated from a fake point in the future, well, that’s new, too.
There is only one Rock, but what Young Rock presupposes is, maybe there isn’t? Maybe multiple Rocks, at different time periods can be just as effective. Still, all of this ignores the brazenly weird assertion that the entire show is happening inside a documentary from 2032 in which the Rock will run for President of the United States, and looks exactly the same way he looks now, in 2021. Okay, so let’s face it, the Rock probably will look exactly the same way he looks now in 2021, but with Young Rock is he low-key just announcing that he’s running for President in 2032? More to the point, is it working?
If the Rock does run for President in 2032, children in the future will have to learn the way he announced his candidacy, which means, my feelings about the strangeness of Young Rock, will inevitably be a part of a monumental shift in history. Forget about rewriting the past. The Rock has already started curating the future.
Young Rock will air on NBC starting on Feb 16, 2021.
