Spaced out
From Avenue 5 to The Right Stuff, Hollywood is moving toward the sky
With everything burning on Earth, Hollywood has turned to space. This isn’t by any means a new fascination, as any frequent consumer of Ben Affleck’s cheeky Armageddon DVD commentary will tell you. ( Just us? Cool.) Remember how enraptured we were by the ingenuity with which Matt Damon grew potatoes on Mars? Remember Matthew McConaughey and the bookshelf tesseract thing?
Of course, space movies are complicated and a separate entity from space television, now created by folks who appear to have taken the lull in time between those famous space movies as some sort of challenge to produce content.
Crave’s Moonbase 8, now streaming, is at least the fifth television series about astronauts to première this year.
Moonbase 8 features Fred Armisen, Tim Heidecker and John C. Reilly as incompetent astronauts training for their first lunar mission at a NASA camp in the Arizona desert. The series is framed as a workplace comedy, with Michael ‘ Skip’ Henai ( Armisen), Scott ‘ Rook’ Sloan ( Heidecker) and Robert ‘ Cap’ Caputo ( Reilly) having been stationed together in isolation for months. The humour is dry and subtle, much of its success hinged upon your feelings toward Armisen (who seems to be given more to do than Reilly).
Here’s a look at some out of this world streaming opportunities.
SPACE FORCE
Steve Carell co- created this series about the sixth branch of the U. S. armed forces with Greg Daniels, his boss from The Office.
Joining Carell’s General Mark R. Naird onscreen are Dr. Adrian Mallory ( John Malkovich), the Space Force’s chief scientist, and F. Tony Scarapiducci ( Ben Schwartz), the social media director, among other characters played by the late Fred Willard and Lisa Kudrow. The show should’ve done gangbusters, right? But Space Force didn’t quite hit the mark, with critics referring to it as “a massive misfire” and “astonishingly bad.” Streams: Netflix
AVENUE5
Avenue 5? is from an acclaimed creator: Armando Iannucci, best known for the evergreen political satire Veep. His second series for HBO takes on a similar tone, lampooning corporate culture and bureaucracies through the lens of an interplanetary cruise ship that, after accidentally veering off course, has a three- year journey back to Earth but only eight weeks’ worth of supplies.
Hugh Laurie plays Ryan Clark, a British actor hired to pose as the Avenue 5’s captain — the ship is actually helmed by an engineer who dies in the pilot — and is accompanied by Josh Gad portraying the ship’s billionaire owner, Herman Judd. Zach Woods and Suzy Nakamura round out the cast as other Avenue 5 employees, all of whom bumble around while attempting to maintain order on board. In February, HBO renewed the wacky series for a second season.
Streams: Crave
THE RIGHT STUFF
Loosely based on Tom Wolfe’s 1979 book of the same name, The
Right Stuff takes viewers back to the early days of the space program and follows seven test pilots who will eventually become the first American astronauts. The series streams on Disney+, signalling a much tamer telling of the story than Philip Kaufman’s 1983 feature adaptation. Among the show’s leads are Jake Mcdorman ( as Alan Shepard), Patrick J. Adams ( as John Glenn) and Aaron Staton (as Wally Schirra) — a trio making this one of those “hey, I remember that guy!” kind of shows, depending on your consumption of Greek, Suits and Mad Men, respectively. Have fun, kids.
Streams: Disney+
AWAY
A disclaimer to those who get easily invested in television: Away was recently cancelled by Netflix, meaning the single season available to stream will also be its last. But the show might still be worth a watch for fans of the Friday Night Lights and Parenthood brand of familial emotional turmoil, as Jason Katims, a creative force behind those two series, also served as an executive producer on the newest one.
Created by Andrew Hinderaker, Away stars Hilary Swank as former Navy pilot Emma Green, who is tasked with commanding a threeyear space mission launching from the moon. As one might expect of a Katims show, it is less concerned with the physical obstacles involved and more so with Emma’s emotional ties to Earth — namely, her husband, Matt (Josh Charles), a former astronaut stuck on Earth thanks to a medical condition, and their teenage daughter, Alexis ( Talitha Bateman), a high school freshman.
Streams: Netflix