What to Watch
Yes, this column is called What to Watch, but I figure, when the situation demands, it is only fair to take a few moments to warn you, esteemed reader, What Not To Watch.
Or, indeed, what to gouge your own corneas out with a dull plastic spoon to avoid catching even one benighted moment of.
We are talking, of course, of Netflix’s sci-fi series Another Life.
Now, by the trailer alone, you might consider taking a look at Another Life. And no-one would blame you.
I watch more TV than most these days, and I’m a fan of any half-decent sci-fi, so I fell for its siren’s call myself.
There’s Katee Sackhoff for a start, as the captain of an interstellar long-haul flight, tasked with boldly going to the home world of unseen alien nasties who have landed in rural America in a ship that looks to be mostly made of old hubcaps and rejected concept drawings from Arrival.
Sackhoff once upended a generation of viewers by taking the role of Starbuck in the 2004 Battlestar Galactica reboot of the much-loved 1978 series. It was a gender-flip a decade before the lost souls of Reddit and 4Chan even learnt the term. And it worked a treat. Sackhoff brought more ass-whoopery to each episode than
1978 incumbent Dirk Benedict could have found in a year.
So, the idea of Sackhoff in space again was enough for Mrs Tuckett’s boy Graeme to make a date with the telly and get ready for some retro fun. But, nah. Another Life is dumber than a bag of hammers.
The cast, mostly young and improbably well groomed, spend an unfeasible amount of the show running about in little but their undies and sports bras, shouting dialogue and enacting scenarios that remind me more of Married at First Sight than any sci-fi I’ve ever seen.
The plot can’t even be bothered hiding the Arrival, Alien and Lost In Space steals the script is built from.
Meanwhile, the sets, special effects and costuming are at a level even the original Battlestar would have thought were a bit B-grade.
Crescent spanners? Glass windows on a ship that travels faster than light? Red Dwarf and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy truly worked harder for credibility than this does.
Another Life isn’t merely bad. It is a show of such jaw-dropping inanity and ineptness that aficionados of lousy television will quite probably adore it.
Future cult-viewing status seems inevitable.