Want an Easy TV Villain? Give Them a Cybertruck

Recently, in the span of three weeks, three entirely disparate TV shows on two different networks/streaming services had a surprising connection. One is a superhero series, the other a shocking (former) teen drama, the third a faux-reality comedy. Both in tone and execution, they couldn’t be more different. Yet when The Boys, Euphoria, and Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat needed a go-to sight gag to indicate their characters are absolute loser villains, only one car could do: the Tesla Cybertruck.

Does driving a Cybertruck make you an absolute loser villain? That’s up to [gestures] society to decide, as well as you, the reader of this article. But on TV at least, the trend is clear, with a relatively minor number of exceptions.

In fact, Tesla’s boxy monstrosity has been the subject of mockery on TV for a while now, including appearances on HBO’s The Righteous Gemstones, Netflix’s Nobody Wants This, FX’s It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and kicking off this big, bad year for Elon Musk’s brainchild, Chad Powers on Hulu. It’s the latest in the long line of quick and easy jokes to pervade television, but the preponderance and specificity of this particular trend points to a larger shift in cultural conversation that you may be able to intuit yourself.

We’ll get to that in a second, but to lay out A Brief, Incomplete History of the Cybertruck on Television, let’s actually start with a little timeline about the Cybertruck itself. First introduced as a prototype in 2019, the truck hit the streets in 2023, but arguably didn’t become a flashpoint for cultural conversation until Musk became a prime booster of the Trump campaign in 2024.

TV production schedules, though, take time. For example, the first big salvo in TV’s War Against Cybertrucks wouldn’t air until March of 2025, in HBO’s Righteous Gemstones. The fourth and final season was filmed between May and October of 2024, so by the time the fourth episode, “He Goeth Before You Into Galilee,” aired, we were already well into both the Cybertruck era and the era of Trump 2.0 con Elon – making the appearance of the vehicle perhaps more pointed than it was meant to be back when production started.

The episode in question kicks off with a long tracking shot of all the characters unloading their various cars, ending with a kicker: the reveal of a Cybertruck parked on the water. It’s a bit of a head-scratcher until the very end of the episode, when we discover the truck belongs to Baby Billy (Walton Goggins), easily the worst and most huckstery of an entire clan of hucksters. He’s a character who constantly buys into (or sells) pyramid schemes and scams, so you can draw your own conclusion about what the show means to indicate, given he eschews the massive Escalades of most of the rest of the clan for the Cybertruck.

Soon after in July of 2025, FX aired the It’s Always Sunny episode "Thought Leadership: A Corporate Conversation." (The 17th season of the series was filmed from October through December of 2024). An extremely loose parody of HBO’s Succession, the episode found the Paddy’s Pub gang drinking water (probably for the first time) and, along with glimpses of a few corporate clips on YouTube, going all in on business speak and wearing fleeces. That included a total obsession with the Cybertruck, which found them spewing catchphrases like “I love that truck. I’m furious that all cars don’t look like that,” and in a backhanded compliment, “It’s like a rhombus on wheels.”

While the Cybertruck in It’s Always Sunny is more of a plot point than a throwaway gag, it’s clear that the show sees the vehicle (which Glenn Howerton’s Dennis effuses about the sexual aggression of) as the epitome of everything wrong with silicon valley/corporate culture. It also tracks that the unequivocally terrible Gang at the center of the show would become obsessed with it, while other characters like the much-lumped-upon Waitress (Mary Elizabeth Ellis) would be less enthused. When she finds out they’re giving away a truck in exchange for winning a slap fighting championship, Charlie (Charlie Day) proudly clarifies “a Cybertruck” to which she replies with a withering “eh.”

The Fall of 2025 was a big moment for the electric crew cab, appearing on three different TV shows between September and October. On Hulu’s Chad Powers, the vapid former football star played by Glen Powell drives a Cybertruck, which the show tells us only adds to his general douche-osity. Still, the truck is more than a one-and-done, as it becomes not just a place for Chad to have some awkward backseat sex, but also ends up getting a character to the hospital after a health scare. Similarly, Paramount+’s Tulsa King straddled the line in a third season episode that found Tyson Mitchell’s gangster purchasing one and touting its bulletproof hull, as well as that it’s “how a gangster’s supposed to roll,” while Martin Starr’s marijuana dealer shoots back, “Yeah, in Blade Runner. Real life we don’t drive around in a refrigerator.” Later on, someone tries to shoot up the Cybertruck with a tommy gun, and indeed, the bullets can’t pierce the exterior of the car, saving lives.

The third series is Netflix’s Nobody Wants This Season 2, where one of the characters delightedly scratches a Cybertruck that almost ran over a baby in a stroller, while Adam Brody and Kristen Bell’s characters look on in horror. That’s not even to mention episodes of Apple TV’s Platonic, which found Seth Rogen’s character pairing the rise of Cybertrucks with the ruining of a Los Angeles neighborhood, or an episode of Apple’s Loot that depicts D’Arcy Carden’s con-man Ashlee rolling in a hot pink Cybertruck with the license plate “SPAGHET” while chugging energy drinks and singing (badly) to System of a Down. But let’s take a little step backwards to talk about the first two, since there’s more meat to dig into there.

While Chad Powers was filmed pre-election, Tulsa King was post; and the connection between both shows is that inasmuch as a TV series has political leanings, both series lean more right than the left-leaning series mentioned above. Chad Powers frequently throws around the r-word, is set in a conservative football town, and features broad gay stereotypes, among other characters. Tulsa King is part of the Taylor Sheridan Extended Universe (TSEU), and Sheridan has purposefully been obtuse about his politics, even leaving Paramount (reportedly) over being told to infuse his shows with more politics. Both series make jokes of Cybertrucks, then prove they’re actually pretty cool in retrospect.

Trucks, we might want to point out, do not have feelings; but owners of truck companies do, and Musk has proven time and again to be overly touchy about how people treat his vehicles, while telling others to have a sense of humor and stop being so sensitive. It’s hard not to view the disparity between how Tulsa King and Chad Powers treat the rhombus on wheels as bridging a political divide, or at least passing an olive branch over to the other side, while still getting some laughs about how silly the mode of transportation looks. It’s also not unimportant to note that both of these shows have characters who err toward being losers, but are not necessarily villains driving the Cybertruck… In a certain sense, the truck goes on a similarly redemptive arc in both cases as do the characters who drive it (with the lone exception being a wild, nihilistic swerve in the closing minutes of Chad Powers, but that’s another article entirely).

Digression for Cybertruck positivity over, that brings us to the impetus for talking about this at all: the past month or two of Cybertrucks on TV (tm). Prime Video’s Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat, the second season of the faux-reality show, introduced its corporate stooge villains from a private equity group called Triukas driving – what else – a Cybertruck. A little over two weeks later, HBO’s premiere of Euphoria Season 3 found Jacob Elordi’s Nate Jacobs – moving from a high school uber-male to an over-his-head and way-in-debt real estate developer with a doomed wedding on the horizon – driving, you guessed it, a Cybertruck. And to cap things off, three days later the third episode of the final season of The Boys featured an extended sequence with the biggest loser on the series, The Deep (Chace Crawford), driving a Cybertruck that, to add on the embarrassment, was blasting Limp Bizkit.

The short-winded explanation here is that the makers of TV think the Cybertruck looks dumb, and believe only dumb people drive the car. Is that actually true? Maybe, maybe not, but it’s an easy visual indicator that tells you everything you need to know about a TV character in a simple way, whether they’ve got hot pink paint or merely pilot the silver, basic model… The Cybertruck, as far as these shows are concerned, is an exemplar of crass taste and poor decisions, a modern car that looks like, to borrow a popular meme, it hasn’t finished rendering. There’s also clearly the post-election correlation of the Cybertruck with Elon’s connection to DOGE, government gutting, and the political divide between those who support MAGA and those who do not. Not to make broad, unsupportable statements, but for the mostly liberal-leaning Hollywood it seems likely that one could equate a character driving a Cybertruck with the word “bad.”

But perhaps more than that, it’s an easy punching bag because, like the DeLorean before it (which was made cool by Back to the Future, though arguably was used as a joke “future” car there, too), it’s not selling well. At all. A recent report from Bloomberg revealed that not only have Cybertruck registrations fallen over 50%, but 18% of sales both in the final quarter of 2025 and first quarter of 2026 have been to Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Meaning Elon’s Tesla is essentially selling cars to itself.

This raises (and perhaps answers) another question: Why is Tesla allowing the Cybertruck to be constantly mocked on TV? It could go back to that old adage that all press is good press if these are media tie-in deals or product placement; in which case, Tesla has approved of the use of the Cybertruck. You could posit that the same people who miss the not-at-all-subtle idea that Homelander (Antony Starr) is the villain of The Boys might see The Deep driving a Cybertruck blasting “Rollin’” and think, “Cool, I gotta get me one of those.”

Far more likely, these shows have just gone ahead and purchased or rented Cybertrucks themselves, which they’re allowed to do under the umbrella of free speech. Per a report from the LA Times, generally car companies don’t like to do product placement deals when those driving the cars are villains, or the cars are wrecked in stunts. With the exception of Tulsa King, one would think Tesla would be hesitant about letting out the Cybertruck to be driven by, say, a homicidal, sexually abusive fish-man.

Ultimately, like the hucksters, con-men and villains who drive Cybertrucks on TV, there’s the underlying thread that perhaps the truck isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. As Dee admits late in the episode on It’s Always Sunny, “I gotta come clean… I think the truck is ugly.”

Whether you think it’s ugly, or the coolest thing on four wheels, for now, at least, it’s an easy way for writers to let the viewers know: This character sucks.

Tesla did not respond to repeated requests for comment on this article. Representatives for The Righteous Gemstones, It’s Always Sunny, and Jury Duty declined to comment, while nobody on Nobody Wants This wanted to do this.

You can chat with Alex Zalben on BlueSky @azalben.bsky.social, or find him regularly yapping on the Comic Book Club podcast.