Hulu’s ‘ The First’ an uplifting look into the future
NEW ORLEANS — These days, the most natural question to ask about a TV series set in the future is simple: How bad does it get?
The success of shows such as “Westworld,” “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Black Mirror” reinforce how dystopias — or, at least, deep discomfort — are resonating with viewers.
“The First,” the Hulu series from Beau Willimon about the space program in the not-too-distant 2030s is a bit of a curveball.
The show, to be released Friday, stars Sean Penn and Natascha McElhone as an astronaut and a private-sector aerospace mogul at work on the first manned mission to Mars. The series explores highlevel ambition and aspiration.
Willimon has plumbed the dark sides of these all-too-human traits before — through the manipulative and unpleasant power brokers who populated his Netflix series, “House of Cards,” and his plays “Farragut North” (which became the film “The Ides of March”) and “The Parisian Woman.”
In “The First,” it seems, he is reflecting a sincere, if guarded, faith in our better natures.
The optimism of frontiersmanship has long been a fascination for Willimon.
“I’ve always been interested in space and adventure travels,” he said by phone recently. “Not just space but also tales of people pushing themselves to extremes, to their limits — whether it’s climbing a mountain or going to the ocean depths, or Shackleton trying to traverse Antarctica.”
Willimon began working on “The First” shortly before leaving “House of Cards” after the fouth season.
His main character, Tom Hagerty (Penn, in his first major TV role), is something of a swashbuckler. He is torn, though, between the newfound, if shaky, stability of his daughter (Anna Jacoby-Heron) and the tantalizing skies.
Hagerty’s emotional foil, Laz Ingram (McElhone), is a cerebral but slightly awkward STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) visionary — all clockwork brains and fierce drive, frustrated by the tiresome bureaucracies that throw roadblocks in her path to the stars.
Another star, though inanimate, is the show’s setting: New Orleans.
“Here is a place that’s teeming with life in every sense — from this sort of swirling biological chaos of swamps and the Delta and the ocean to the swirling human chaos of a city that’s so rich in culture and history and every sort of person you can imagine,” Willimon said.
And the Mississippi River — the wide, earth-colored force that has both cradled and menaced the below-sea-level city for centuries — is the site of a tragedy essential to the plot.
As befits a show about the future, “The First” is full of neat gadgetry and believable technology such as self-driving cars, augmented reality and Google Glass-ish personal communication hubs. (The only thing that seems far-fetched is the suggestion that, in 2030, listening to voicemail messages will be common.)
Said Penn: “I think we all recognize ... this thing that is the explorer, the wanderer, the person who wants to take themselves out of either their own or society’s comfort zone.”