I’m not saying “Away”, the Netflix series about the first manned mission to Mars, is the worst thing on the platform. I am saying it is the worst thing on the platform I have ever watched all the way through.
I am a sucker for stories about space travel in general, and Mars in particular. I also hate spoilers, so I studiously avoided any review or comment on Away until I had the time to binge it, which I did last night and this morning. It is aggressively, offensively, almost intentionally bad. It is the Donald Trump of Mars space program shows. I kept with at first not believing it would not get better, and then when it was clear it had no aspiration to being better, plowed through as punishment for all my past sins. Most average to good television shows are spoiled by stereotypical, one dimensional melodramatic depictions of adolescents. Away does treat it’s adolescent character in this manner, but is spoiled by depicting its five international astronauts in the same way. What I am interested in is, how does a show like this get to be so bad? It has several big named actors, but feels like both story and dialogue were written by someone asking: “How would a poor man’s Shondra Rhimes write this?” I get that they were not really interested in the actual science or engineering involved in traveling to Mars, and wanted to focus on the human elements, but did they have to take such a stinky dump on the technical elements, while giving them the middle finger? I did not like this program. On the others hand, a month ago I stumbled upon a show called The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix before it started trending and without knowing anything about it. So good. So I will call it even with Netflix for now. -- Sent from Gmail Mobile -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tvornottv/CAKGtkYLiXQuykdeWfVP2eX5prpD4%2B6yVHVer802YC%3Ddbvods_Q%40mail.gmail.com.
