3 new TV shows to watch for an adventure
Adventure comes in many forms. Three new series — the teenage spy drama “Alex Rider,” the teenage space drama “The Astronauts,” and the middle-aged spacetraining comedy “Moonbase 8” — offer disparate examples. None is particularly plausible, but none is dumb, either. All are very good, in fact: well-made, wellplayed. The kid shows are genuinely tense and exciting; the grown-up comedy, unexpectedly touching and sweet.
• “Alex Rider,” a presentation of IMDb TV, streaming by way of Amazon Prime, screams “teenage James Bond” from tip to toe. Indeed, Anthony Horowitz, on whose books the series is based, is also the author of the latest two post-Ian Fleming Bond novels and wrote the screenplay for a 2006 film adaptation of the first Alex Rider novel, “Stormbreaker.” Fourteen years later, the second book, “Point Blanc,” with the origin story flown in, gets its miniseries adaptation.
Alex (Otto Farrant), when we meet him, is a simple London teenager, living with his uncle Ian (Andrew Buchan); he is a little sensitive, a little serious, a little shy. When Uncle Ian turns up dead, it turns out he wasn't a banker at all but a spy. Alex, who by now has himself displayed the skills, brains and nerve of a top-flight secret agent, finds himself an unwilling recruit to the same nameless branch of British intelligence for which his uncle worked — just the fellow they need to infiltrate a posh school for the troubled children of billionaires where murky deviltry is afoot.
• In Nickelodeon's “Astronauts,” which has Ron “Apollo 13” Howard as an executive producer and premieres tonight with back-to-back episodes, five middle-schoolers sneak aboard a rocket ship only to find themselves blasted into space from the combined effects of youthful curiosity, the desire for selfies (it is powerful), an unbelievably porous security system, general adult inattention and some yet-to-be-understood hacking of the spacecraft's AI, named Matilda (Paige Howard).
Created by Daniel Knauf, it must surely be the most expensive Nickelodeon series ever, with special effects so special, and so omnipresent, you don't notice them at all. What most sells the show is Miya Cech (13, playing 11) as Samy, the level-headed, supersmart one — she skipped “two grades” — whose mother was supposed to command the mission.
Her accidental crewmates represent a range of types. Some are kind of annoying, which is a testament to the performances in a way, and I assume they will be allowed to grow more complex and subtle and likable in the infinite expanse of space. One wonders what sort of adventures, beyond fixing things that go wrong around their extraterrestrial motorhome, they will have. I have seen only the first two episodes, and I expect much to be revealed before we get a second season — which I also expect.
• “Moonbase 8,” on Showtime, is the collaborative work of Fred Armisen, Tim Heidecker, John C. Reilly and Jonathan Krisel. All write. The first three star; the fourth directs.
“Moonbase 8” finds them living together in a “simulation base” in the Arizona desert, practicing to live on the moon; practically speaking this means they wear spacesuits when they leave their pod and eat canned bagels and “beef-style stew.” One might reasonably wonder what sort of space agency would take three middle-aged men with questionable qualifications and saddle them for hundreds of days with meaningless tasks while younger fourth teammates come and go.
There might be an answer to that question, but it is not explored this season. It is profitable coincidence that this series about community in isolation, first announced in 2018, has arrived in this time of COVID-19. (Treating the environment as lunar, the characters wear protective gear to go outside; there is even a quarantine-themed episode.)
They will sometimes drive one another crazy and often humiliate themselves, but in their own way they get the better of, or at least survive, most situations. Though they might be failing in some worldly sense of success, they are succeeding within the bounds of their base, and one suspects they are better off in this desert out of Beckett than they would be anywhere else. It is a kind of love story, finally.