After a quarter of a century in wrestling, John Cena is retiring from in-ring action later this year. However, the longtime WWE superstar (and recent Hollywood mainstay) has no dearth of projects to keep him busy. He’s been a part of Vin Diesel’s Fast & Furious family for two (going on three) entries. He’s hosted several game shows, including Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader, Wipeout, and American Grit. He even has a leading role in the superhero series Peacemaker, which returns to Max in August. However, his latest series — Roku reality show What Drives You, which he also executive produced — stands apart.
The show, a combination of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee and MTV Cribs, isn’t exactly original in format, but with Cena at the helm, it’s surprisingly fun. With the snappy editing and thumping soundtrack of mid-2000s VH1, Cena briskly introduces the concept at the start of each 20-minute episode, then picks up his celebrity guest at their home and has them drive him to a place they like to visit. That’s it. But the simplicity results in surprising intimacy, much of which is owed to Cena’s self-deprecating charm.
As it happens, the first four guests on the show are much like Cena himself: people whose careers have hopped the line between wrestling and other Hollywood ventures. There’s YouTube star Logan Paul, who found recent in-ring success as WWE’s United States Champion. There’s Mike “The Miz” Mizanin, who started out on MTV’s The Real World, broke into wrestling through WWE’s reality show Tough Enough, and eventually competed in the main event of WrestleMania (against Cena, no less). There are also musical artists like country rapper Jelly Roll and Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker, who have performed on some of WWE’s biggest stages.
But does that make What Drives You a wrestling show, or even a wrestling-adjacent one? Not quite. Cena had some interesting opinions on the subject during our chat, many of which he expressed in distinctly automotive metaphors; for instance, wrestling occupying a “parking spot” in people’s brains. (Whether it’s media training or simply Freudian, it’s a delightful quirk.) He also had illuminating thoughts on how the series’ camera setup bolsters its authenticity — and what that word even means in the age of reality TV and, as WWE is often called, “sports entertainment.”
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