Picture a cop and a murderer sharing a muscle car that burns human blood for fuel, tearing across an America that has broken in two. That is the pitch, and that is the entire series. Alan Ritchson gave a year of his working life to it, and the network cut it loose on the very day the last episode went out.
The show is Blood Drive. It aired on Syfy in 2017, and the obscurity it vanished into was never what it earned.
Ritchson takes the role of Arthur “Barbie” Bailey, a cop serving whatever remains of the LAPD. Opposite him, Christina Ochoa is Grace D’Argento, a femme fatale with a taste for violence who ends up his partner regardless of his opinion on the matter. The two of them sign on for the Blood Drive, a race in which the cars run on precisely what the title implies.
Fracking is what ended the world
The premise carries a specificity that post-apocalyptic TV usually skips. Fracking triggers a string of enormous earthquakes, and the United States tears open along an immense ravine that used to be the Mississippi River. Into that power vacuum steps Heart Enterprises, a megacorporation that seizes control.
The result is a wasteland, a corporate ruler and a road race fuelled by blood. None of the influences are buried, and the series makes no effort to hide them.
All that metal and mayhem points directly at Mad Max, and the wasteland Barbie and Grace tear across will look awfully familiar to anyone who knows that franchise’s Australian Outback. The wary coexistence of people and monsters once civilisation collapses is Fallout through and through, which is why Blood Drive plays even odder today than it did in 2017 — it turned up years before that comparison was available.
A new B-movie every week
This is the part that clicks. Each installment picks one grindhouse idea and then goes all the way with it. Monsters born of the apocalypse. Cannibals. Cults. Corrupt lawmen. Amazonians with sex on the brain.
In one hour, Barbie and Grace unknowingly tuck into human flesh at a grotesque BBQ. In another, they wind up inside a psychiatric hospital whose patients are hooked on candy.
It gets strange, and at no point does the show say sorry for it. Each episode plays like a pulp comic magazine given flesh, improbability and all.
Most Syfy shows tease the line — this one stepped over it
That is the genuine distinction. Syfy has produced no shortage of series that march toward the boundary of excessive gore, nudity and profanity and then halt.
Blood Drive keeps going. The thing is lurid, bloody and a joy, running at roughly the same horsepower as the vehicles in its own race.
Its 80% score on Rotten Tomatoes is the detail that hurts. Quality was not the reason it disappeared. Cancellation landed on the same day the finale aired, and how quickly the network washed its hands of it may be precisely what pushed the show into television’s forgotten lands.
Ritchson’s track record runs deeper than most realise
On Blue Mountain State, a football comedy scarcely anyone tuned into, he was the funniest presence on screen. Reacher has since turned him into a bona fide action lead and a fixture of the medium.
The ten years separating those milestones were not idle, though. Ritchson kept taking runs at the mainstream, turning in a string of strong performances across shows and films that never caught on. Of all of them, Blood Drive is the one that most rewards a revisit.
Jack Reacher will keep him busy for as long as he wants the part, and there is plenty of career waiting after that. Until then, 13 episodes are sitting out there in which he pilots a blood-thirsty muscle car across a nation cracked apart by an earthquake — and almost nobody has watched them.