This review is a bit unorthodox for me, since when I usually review a series of something, it’s generally something that airs on TV or on one of the numerous streaming services out there. Dimension 20 kind of falls into that realm, since it does air on a streaming service called Dropout, but Dropout itself is more closely related to online video than TV since it’s created by Collegehumor, a company that makes internet comedy videos. So, Dimension 20 does exist in that weird space between online video and TV, but since it’s something I really wanted to review, I’m going to review it under a TV slot since I generally don’t review online video that much.

Anyway, why did I want to review Dimension 20 then? Well, it’s a Dungeons & Dragons show, which was very much outside of my usual comfort zone. See, I came at this show as someone who has never played Dungeons & Dragons (or, D&D as I’ll refer it to from here on). Not only that, but I kind of hated it for a long time. It was one of those things where I didn’t hate it because of the game itself, but rather because of the fanbase surrounding it. I’ve had so many experiences where someone has asked me if I play D&D, and when I’ve said no, they’ve proceeded to go on and tell me for an hour why I should play it and why they love it. These people winded up talking about the game in a way where I had no idea what they were talking about, and so what winded up happening is that whenever I’d have a conversation about D&D, I always wanted to immediately get out of it as soon as possible. Because of this, I’ve generally tried to avoid the whole game for a long time, and so I’ve ended up treating it like it’s something terrible despite never playing it.

Well now you may be thinking, “Jon, if you hate D&D so much, why did you watch a D&D show then?” Great question. Dimension 20 just winded up coming out around a fortunate time with fortunate circumstances. See, it was one of the first shows to premiere on Dropout, which first debuted around the beginning of fall in 2018. I winded up being interested in Dropout itself since it had other shows that I wanted to see on it, and so I figured that if I was paying for the service, I might as well see what it had to offer. So, I decided to give the first episode of Dimension 20 a shot, fully thinking that I was probably going to hate it, but that at least I’d have given it a shot. Imagine my surprise when I loved it so much that it instantly became my favorite show on Dropout.

Before I get into why I ended up loving it so much, let me describe what exactly this show is. The obvious surface-level answer is that it’s a group of people playing Dungeons & Dragons. However, unlike other D&D series out there on the internet that just keep going indefinitely, Dimension 20 is sort of an anthology series. It’s going to have seasons of the show, and so this first “season” is a campaign that they called Fantasy High. It runs for 17 episodes (each of them being around the range of 90-120 minutes on average), and it has a very distinct structure. The first episode is a story-based episode that introduces the characters and sets them out on their adventure, and then the second episode is one giant battle. The show then keeps this pattern going, alternating between story episodes and battle episodes. I really liked this structure, and it kept things going quite nicely.

If the title isn’t obvious, Fantasy High is set in a high school of fantasy-based characters. It takes place at the Aguefort Adventuring Academy, where young adventurers go to learn the tools and skills they’ll need to set off on their own adventures. There are six main characters that we follow: Fabian, a spoiled rich kid who is the son of a famous pirate; Kristen, a devout religious girl that starts to struggle with her faith; Gorgug, a “gentle giant” type who is just trying to make friends and find his father; Adaine, a girl that struggles with panic attacks and a terrible home life; Riz, a little goblin that wants to be a detective; and Fig, a girl that attempts to put on a facade of being a badass that doesn’t care because she has daddy issues. The six of these characters all go to Aguefort for their first year, and they end up getting wrapped up in a plot where some girls start to go missing.

So now I want to talk about why I love this show so much. Honestly, I think that Fantasy High itself was the perfect type of campaign for someone like me, who was never able to connect with D&D because of the high fantasy tropes associated with it. I always thought of D&D as the ultimate nerdy thing (not that there’s anything wrong with that, it was just too far down the rabbit hole for me), where a bunch of virgins put on wizard hats, rolled dice, and pretended to fuck elves and slay dragons because they couldn’t do anything cool in real life. I really want to dispel this notion, because Dimension 20 showed me that a game like D&D can be so much more than that. Sure, you can have those super high-fantasy stories and dungeon-crawling types of campaigns if you want, but you can also have something that’s way more accessible and improv-focused like Fantasy High. I typically love any kind of story that’s set in a school setting, so I felt like this was the perfect kind of campaign for me to get invested in. I felt like I was actually able to connect with it, which is something I was never able to do before with D&D.

Like I said, I think the big draw to me here is the way that the game is played here. I think it really helps that everyone involved in playing the game are comedians, because it really feels like they’re all playing characters and doing improv with them, which has always been super fun to me. This is what makes Fantasy High easy for me to recommend. If you enjoy improv comedy, then you can enjoy this show even if you know nothing about D&D like me. It’s easy to pick up on the rules when you’re watching it, and so the comedy is really what keeps you around.

While I think that all of the cast members that are playing as characters in the game are super talented and funny, the undeniable star of the show here is the dungeon master himself, Brennan Lee Mulligan. Brennan has been DMing for over 20 years, and so he has a real talent for it and mastery over the craft. He’s able to create a huge world filled with all sorts of interesting characters. I found that some of the characters he creates and provides voices for are some of my favorites of the whole series, such as Fig’s step-dad, or even the owner of a local ice cream shop. He breathes such life into these side characters, and it makes the whole experience really engaging and entertaining.

On the subject of characters, I just briefly want to say that if I have to pick a favorite among the main cast, it’s a tie between Gorgug and Fig, played by Zac Oyama and Emily Axford respectively. These two were always some of my favorites in Collegehumor, and the characters they created here are so funny. The great thing here is that I don’t dislike any of the other characters either. Everyone has their moments on the show, and so I was really invested in all of them.

This review is honestly much longer than I was expecting, but I just wanted to talk about Dimension 20 because of how much it surprised me. I went from hating D&D as a whole to loving a whole series about it, which is a miraculous feat to me. I’m not going to say the show is perfect, because it’s not, but it’s all-around an amazing production that had me hooked. A brief shoutout as well needs to go to the prop-makers, who make a bunch of set pieces and character figurines for the battle episodes. This just adds to the fun, and so Dimension 20 just ends up feeling like a fun time the whole way through. The first half of the season is available on YouTube for free if you want to try it out, but otherwise it’s exclusive to the Dropout service, so getting that is the only way to watch it. It’s hard to recommend something that you know “won’t be for everyone,” but honestly I never thought a D&D series would be for me, so I guess I would recommend Fantasy High to anyone that likes improv comedy.

4.5/5