A lesson in how not to remake a classic
Tom Wolfe’s “The Right Stuff,” which tells the story of the test pilots who became the first American astronauts — and was previously a big, long, A-list film directed by Philip Kaufman — has been adapted again as a smaller, longer, B-list TV series by Disney+.
From the five episodes (out of eight) available for review as of this writing, one may reasonably wonder why they bothered, apart from the fact that someone owns the rights to a prestige brand and that what looks good on paper and in executive offices sometimes looks less good in execution.
Still, it has been a while since the last historical space-race series — ABC’s “The Astronaut Wives Club” in 2015 and HBO’s “From the Earth to the Moon” before that in 1998 — so if you are a Disney+ subscriber looking
for something relatively grownup to watch or would enjoy a basic primer on the human side of NASA’s infancy or are a spacerace completist, have at it. It will do you no harm.
Produced by National Geographic, Warner Horizon Television and Leonardo DiCaprio’s Appian Way Productions, “The Right Stuff ” is not bad or even boring, just thin and unconvinc
ing. Its budget shows, in the negative sense, and its best points are to be found here and there in small things — individual performances, selected exchanges and assorted old gewgaws and gadgets that decorate the screen.
The series focuses on three of the seven Mercury astronauts: Alan Shepard (Jake McDorman), John Glenn (Patrick J. Adams) and Gordon Cooper (Colin
O’Donoghue). Shepard and Glenn, the two fliers most likely to be chosen the first to go into space, are each eager to be that guy; Cooper is interesting to the filmmakers mostly because of his messy personal life and for his wife, Trudy (an affecting Eloise Mumford), who was a pilot as well and who gets a bit of a storyline of her own.
You are not being shown so much as told a story, propelled by great bursts of expository dialogue. Some of it may be true — that some of it is not exactly is announced at the start of every episode — and perhaps you will be moved to do some independent reading on the subject to winnow fact from fiction. Trivial if not uninteresting facts are alluded to: Glenn played the trumpet; filet mignon was on the menu the morning of the first American manned spaceflight, potentially a last meal. From my own casual winnowing, the series seems basically true to the record. (I could not ascertain whether Wernher von Braun, played by a blustery Sacha Seberg, dressed as Santa Claus over Christmas 1959.) And yet rarely did I feel I was seeing something close to actual, any more than watching a middleschool performance of “Cats” might make you believe you were on Broadway.
Shepard and Glenn are a study in opposites, the Lennon and McCartney of the Mercury Seven. Glenn is abstemious, churchgoing, devoted to his childhood sweetheart wife; Shepard lives the rock-star life away from his wife, Louise (Shannon Lucio), drinking and philandering and cruising in a Corvette convertible. Glenn, who knows what to say to a reporter, is the popular face of the space program, conscious of public opinion; Shepard doesn’t care what anyone thinks of him, but he has the authority of an outlaw.
“The Right Stuff ” premiered Friday, Oct. 9, on Disney+.