Carrell’s ‘Space Force’ blasts off but not a direct hit
Co-created by Steve Carell and Greg Daniels, “Space Force,” which launched May 29, reunites the star of “The Office” with the man who developed it from the U.K. original. Daniels went on to co-create the great “Parks and Recreation” and create the really quite good “Upload,” now streaming on Amazon Prime. Carell became a movie star. Yet “Space Force,” for all the talent it enlists, is less a guided missile than a splattering of buckshot. Some of it hits the target. More of it goes astray.
Carrell plays Gen. Mark Naird, newly promoted from to the unreal real world for another second, Trump recently unveiled his actual Space Force flag and touted the development of a “super-duper missile.” The parody is self-service.)
The assignment plops Mark, his unhappy teenage daughter, Erin (Diana Silvers), and his wife, Maggie (Lisa Kudrow), in a remote corner of Colorado. In a sprawling, not-verysecret secret base, scientists huddle over consoles and troops march by chanting, “I don’t know but I’ve been told/Outer space is very cold.” John Malkovich, muttering like John Malkovich, plays Dr. Adrian Mallory, in charge of the science portion of the program and almost always at loggerheads with Mark.
“As a scientist, you have a loyalty to reason,” Mark says to Mallory. “It makes you a little untrustworthy.”
“You were right about the launch,” Mallory says to Mark, who fired a rocket over his objections, “but you know nothing of science.”
Who will have whose back when it matters most to the story arc? I think you know.
Kudrow spends most of the season in a situation Netflix wants kept secret, as if it were a spoiler — though it hardly spoils anything, since it’s revealed 18 minutes into the first episode and is not ever accounted for either by explanation or anything we can divine from her character. Indeed, it seems to have been engineered simply to make Mark function as a distracted single dad and to give Erin extra room to act out, and I suppose they thought it would be funnier if they gave no reason for it, or else they just couldn’t come up with a good one. (The series originated with Netflix pitching the title to Carell, who called Daniels.) When Kudrow does appear, which is not often enough, she creates a little sphere of reality that humanizes whomever she’s with.
More sensitive scenes are often interrupted by some crazy emergency, killing a mood, and even among actors with a relatively generous amount of screen time, few get the opportunity to build a character.
Carell and Daniels have tried to be satirical without being insulting, mostly to the disadvantage of the satire, which is rarely more biting than the first lady proposing ridiculous new designs for the Space Force uniforms. Still, the creators do regularly insert Meaningful Statements about war and peace and the poor old Earth, signaling that they understand the times demand something more than silliness.