Season Review: Alpha Betas Season One

Last year, I caught my first glimpse of Alpha Betas when DrLupo premiered the pilot on his Twitch channel. I remember watching this, and I was blown away. The premise was that Alpha Team is a premiere team of gamers, who the CIA uses to get injected into games, and makes sure that the world’s energy grid stays up. How does this work? Well, the CIA developed a program where people playing video games creates energy for the world to feed on. I honestly didn’t think that a show written and produced by a bunch of streamers was going to actually be funny. I was wrong.

All around, there wasn’t anything bad about Alpha Betas. I thoroughly enjoyed the plot, and it was cleverly written. I’ll detail this a bit later, but having the conflict between Alpha Team and Allison’s Beta Team play out off screen was a clever touch. We didn’t need to see it. Everything played out to where it was inconsequential anyway. It was needed to make the show better.

Now, the rest of the season takes a sharp left from where the pilot left off. The pilot ends with Allison trying to shitcan Alpha Team by using Bravo Team to sabotage the Alphas. Meanwhile, all Bravo Team was able to do was murder Agent Bandit, played by Archer‘s Chris Parnell. Then, when episode 2 begins, Beta Team is gone, and the Alphas are gone. Mason, Buck, and Tommy are still friends and hanging out, but Eddie is long gone…kind of. He ends up coming back, motivated by revenge, but for some reason, that’s dropped by the end of the season. It just doesn’t make any sense to me, but I guess we just have to let it ride. If that’s the only plot hole we’re stuck with, I consider it a success.

That said, the new plot is one long story that could have easily been a movie. What makes Alpha Betas is all of the guest cameos. If you’re watching Twitch and YouTube streamers, you know a lot of these. Benjamin “DrLupo” Lupo played Muscles the Guard in the last episode. Lupo was surprisingly good in his role, because this not really jacked man played up the role of Muscles REALLY well. Marcel “BasicallyIDoWrk” Cunningham is one of the main characters, Mason. Jack “CourageJD” Dunlop is Eddie’s Best Buy manager, and Broadway star Jordan Fisher is Captain Whaler. These cameos were fucking hilarious, and added a sort of legitimacy for a lot of the fans of these streamers. It’s why I checked out the show.

That said, Alpha Betas gives us a pretty good use of video games. The premise of people using video games to power installations like the Pentagon, Area 51, and our entire country is so out of left field, that it feels actually refreshing. These clowns being nerds are their defining trait, but they are capable nerds while inside the video game. I was expecting a show almost like Big Bang Theory, but it ended up actually being entertaining. It’s very surprising.

The pilot was made to be a network show, but since the show was kept on YouTube, the episodes were kept at less than 15 minutes. The short format, longer story works. It’s easily digestible and a great, short watch. The immersion suffers from uninspired music. But I am trying hard to find something wrong. Overall, Alpha Betas was a great show. I hope there’s a season 2.

As I said before, the strength is the writing. This is a quick five episode series. If you think of the pilot detached from the other four episodes, you’ll see that the show got smarter. It avoided tropes like a good team and bad team created by the same person. Even better, it avoided the leader of the Beta squad, Edgelord. Five episodes was just enough to wet the appetite, and leave you wanting more.