George TsagkarakisA cop and a killer drive a car that runs on human blood across a fractured America. That’s the premise. That’s the whole show. And Alan Ritchson spent a year of his career on it before the network dropped it the same day the finale aired.
The series is called Blood Drive, it ran on Syfy in 2017, and it deserved better than the hole it fell into.
Ritchson plays Arthur “Barbie” Bailey, an officer of what’s left of the LAPD. Christina Ochoa plays Grace D’Argento, a femme fatale with a violent streak who becomes his partner whether he likes it or not. Together they enter the Blood Drive, a car race where the vehicles are fueled by exactly what the name suggests.
The world ended because of fracking
The setup is specific in a way most post-apocalyptic television isn’t. A run of massive earthquakes, caused by fracking, splits the United States along a gigantic ravine where the Mississippi River used to be. A megacorporation called Heart Enterprises moves into the vacuum and takes control.
So you’ve got a wasteland, a corporate overlord and a blood-powered road race. The influences aren’t subtle, and the show doesn’t pretend otherwise.
The cars and the carnage point straight at Mad Max. The wasteland Barbie and Grace drive through will remind plenty of viewers of that franchise’s Australian Outback. The uneasy truce between monsters and people after the end of everything is pure Fallout, which makes Blood Drive feel stranger now than it did in 2017, when it arrived years ahead of the comparison.
Every episode is a different B-movie
Here’s what makes it work. Each episode is built around a grindhouse concept and then fully committed to. Post-apocalyptic monsters. Cannibals. Cults. Evil lawmen. Sexually charged Amazonians.
One episode has Barbie and Grace accidentally eating people at a monstrous BBQ. Another drops them in a mental hospital where the residents are addicted to candy.
Things get weird, and the show never apologizes for it. Every hour lands like a pulp comic magazine come to life in all its improbable glory.
Syfy shows flirt with the line; this one walked past it
That’s the real difference. Syfy has a long history of series that go right up to the edge of over-the-top guts, nudity and language and then stop.
Blood Drive crosses over. It’s colorful, gruesome and delightful, and it carries roughly the same horsepower as the cars in the race it’s named after.
The show sits at 80% on Rotten Tomatoes, which is the part that stings. It wasn’t buried because it was bad. It got canceled the same day its finale aired, and maybe the network’s speed in cutting itself loose is exactly what shoved it into the forgotten lands of television.
Ritchson has been doing this longer than you think
He was the funniest guy on Blue Mountain State, a football show almost nobody watched. Now he’s a legitimate action star thanks to Reacher, and a permanent fixture of television.
But the decade between those two points wasn’t empty. Ritchson kept trying to break into the mainstream with a handful of excellent performances in shows and films that simply didn’t stick. Blood Drive is the one most worth going back for.
His run as Jack Reacher will end whenever he decides he’s done with it, and the career after that looks long. In the meantime there are 13 episodes sitting out there where he drives a blood-hungry muscle car through a country split in half by an earthquake, and hardly anyone saw them.
