I like it too, though I don’t love it. But it gets better as it goes.
The episode I just watched (the one with the recurring BEEP) is a lot of silly fun.
Edit: Yeah, just checked… it’s episode 6, the one dtolman just referred to.
One thing I like about the show, more so as it goes on…
Everything is way worse on the show than it is in real life. Considering real life - that’s something. I can watch the show and say, well at least things here aren’t THAT bad!
YMMV.
It’s hard for me to put a finger on, TBH. Part of it is definitely, as mentioned earlier, that none of the characters are likeable. Every single character in Avenue 5 is incompetent, shifty, and unsympathetic (the Captain and the Engineer are the only ones that come closest to likeable, without ever quite getting there). I find the jokes in the show land about as well as those told by the hapless stand-up comedian in the Avenue 5 bar (and the running joke of the show is how his jokes are absolutely awful).
Yeah… I’ve really wanted to like it and give it a chance, but after 5 episodes I think I’m done. Real pity, as on paper it sounds great! Scifi / dark comedy / Laurie / Iannucci all sounds promising, but the end product just doesn’t come together.
But two of us just reported that #6 is really funny! And you’re soooo cloooose. :D
Hehe… Ok, will give that one a shot!
Well, that’s a wrap on the Season, if I understand correctly. Don’t think I’ll spend any time on season 2 unless they change the premise entirely.
Thinking a bit on the question earlier, I think my problem with this show is two things: cardboard characters, and it never quite knowing whether it wants to be dramatic or funny, and thus ends up being neither. Of the two, it’s the first that is the worst problem. Which is a pity, because the cast are talented, but the characters pretty much exist to serve the punchlines and story beats, rather than having them come from the characters themselves.
And the “dramatic” moments don’t land for me, because the characters don’t exist to feel poignant, tense, or sorry for. E.g., Iris and Karen have a “tense” exchange about “rumors” that Karen and the Captain have a thing going. Except neither character has shown any indication they’d care about this, so why should the viewer?
The only consistency is that all the characters are stupid. Season finale continues that trend. Why does X or Y do stupid thing? Because he/she is stupid. YMMV, but I find comedy is most interesting when it’s clever. If I want to see dumb people doing dumb things, I can just look at a press conference with Trump.
Doesn’t help my interest in S2 that they take IMO the best character in the show and send her back to Earth. What a waste.
I binged this show this weekend. I’m surprised to see the negative reactions in this thread. I thought it was quite funny several times, and overall a very interesting journey for these people. I’m glad it’s renewed and I hope we get to see these people get home.
Using the wrong airlock at the end felt off though. I didn’t think that character was a fool, so it didn’t feel right that she would do something like that. And does that mean they were lining up at the wrong airlock the whole time? Somebody would have noticed that and pointed it out. And if not, she did it all in the hour they had in the last episode which also doesn’t feel like they had time for.
I started watching this. I enjoy the frictionless friction between a shallow society obsessed with apparences that is probably going to die and reality.
My HBO Max app just told me Season 2 is coming on October 10th. Yay!
Neat! I liked bits of this show. Enough to check out a second season, although I’m a little surprised it actually got one.
Season 2 just dropped in its entirety on NowTV. I actually really liked episode 1. Felt much more Iannucci-esque than season 1. I’m fully prepared for the rest of the season to disappoint though. At least it will do so quickly if so!
I liked Episode 1 as well.
At the time I watched it, HBO only had that episode up, so I haven’t seen the rest of the episodes yet.
Maybe after the World Cup stops taking up all my free time.
We just finished up season 2. Provided there’s a season 3, I’m sticking around exclusively for the one-liners. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen what is ostensibly a SciFi show so blatantly not give one single shit about the it’s own internal logic. It’s still a lot of fun though.
My wife and I keep watching it. It treads enough water that we don’t stop recording, but not enough that we actually like it. Its like someone had this half-baked fever-dream and convinced HBO to spend a ton of money on it. I think the comment above where someone said the comedy wasn’t very clever is pretty much on point. That said, i thought season 2 was better than 1 so…progress?
After they killed a few characters at the end of the first season I was hoping they’d really escalate in season 2, but we’re still moving towards disaster in slow motion.
Too bad, I think a comedic Aniara would be awesome.
I gave up midway in season 2, when they downplayed the core conceit of gradual doom and switched over to crisis-of-the-week - “Oh, now we’re plummeting into the sun! Now we’ve come across a space station!” etc. etc.
The whole point of the original setup was that the laws of physics are inexorable, no amount of screaming from Very Important People could change them, and doom comes not in neat dramatic arcs but gradually. That premise was very on point for a series that premiered in 2020, and was the main unique thing about the show.
Not that sticking to science necessarily makes a good series, mind you: it’s just that it was something that separated the show from other stuff on TV. With the crisis-of-the-week format, it’s just another show with hand-wavy plotting and not great jokes.
(I think the jump-the-shark moment was when they hand-waved away the speed of light, no doubt because some Very Important Person at the network gave them notes that the time delay in communications was annoying.)
Yeah… no surprise there.
Oh whoops, I need to watch season two!