The young and the weightless

Sweeping, soapy Netflix space series focuses on emotions of mission

My, how those past and future Oscar winners love to play groundbreaking astronauts soaring through space in movies and TV series. In just the last decade, the roster includes:

† Sandra Bullock and George Clooney in “Gravity” (2013)

† Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway in “Interstellar” (2014)

† Sean Penn in “The First” (2018) † Natalie Portman in “Lucy in the Sky” (2019)

† Brad Pitt and Tommy Lee Jones in “Ad Astra” (2019)

Add to that list two-time Academy Award winner Hilary Swank, who headlines the elegiac and gorgeously photographed albeit sudsy space soap opera “Away,” a 10-part original series from Jason Katims (“Parenthood,” “Friday Night Lights”), premiering Friday on Netflix. (Season Two has already been announced.) Filled with screen-popping visuals and never missing an opportunity for a dramatic cliff-hanger, “Away” deserves extra points just for a karaoke scene in which two characters sing along with Elton John’s “Rocket Man” including the immortal line, “Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids … ,” which is particularly apropos here because one of the characters is actually a mom who will be going to Mars on a three-year mission, and that ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids!

Hey. I didn’t make the claim “Away” is subtle. Consider the collection of stock characters accompanying Swank’s Cmdr. Emma Green aboard the Atlas on the world’s first trip to Mars, which will launch from the moon. We have the gruff, vodkaswilling Russian cosmonaut and engineer Misha (Mark Ivanir), who tells Emma from the get-go he doesn’t trust her leadership instincts; the robotically efficient Chinese chemist, Lu (Vivian Wu), who seems incapable of even considering cracking a smile; the sweet-natured rookie space traveler/ botanist Kwesi (Ato Essandoh), born in Ghana and raised in England, and the quiet