WiC Watches: Avenue 5

Image: Avenue 5/HBO/Alex Bailey

Episode 1: “I Was Flying”

Armando Iannucci is stretching himself. His last two shows, The Thick of It and Veep, were intimate political dramas. Avenue 5 is science fiction, about a space cruise ship — named the Avenue 5 — that gets knocked off course. Iannucci’s last two shows were mainly episodic. Based on the premiere, Avenue 5 is going to be highly serialized; “I Was Flying” ends on a cliffhanger, with Captain Ryan Clark (Hugh Laurie) confirming to the passengers that everything they’ve heard is true: the lot of them are going to be stuck together for the next three years as the ship winds its way back to Earth. This trip just got a whole lot longer.

Iannucci’s last two shows employed a lot of handheld camera work, good for improvisation. Avenue 5 is shot more like an expensive episode of Star Trek, with slick tracking shots following our characters as they walk and talk through the atrium and the bridge and the cabins. The set design is ambitious, and the colors are like something out of the space age dreams of the ’60s, vibrant and crisp and clean.

Image: Avenue 5/HBO

There are also complicated crowd shots you would never see on an episode of The Thick of It or Veep. The inciting incident occurs about a third of the way through, when a stupid request by the cruise’s ultra-rich owner — Herman Judd, played by a heedlessly clueless Josh Gad — results in the gravity of the ship being flipped around, and a bunch of people crash into a window that’s now a wall. If this were a different kind of story, this would be a thrilling action scene. Here, it’s a chaotic rain of bright yellow and purple and green, and I’m sorry, but was that one girl killed in the ball pit? And what about the guy getting acupuncture who was thrown into the wall back-first?

Image: Avenue 5/HBO

So the show is not boring to look at. Visually, this is unlike anything Iannucci has attempted before. It’s a lot more ambitious, and I love it for that.

The visuals also make for a great contrast with some of the themes. The show looks like a sci-fi utopia, like a live-action Jetsons. But although the first episode doesn’t go all-in, there are signs that this world  is anything but idyllic. In this future, the Moon is a massive prison. Judd causes the accident with his incompetence, but no one blames him, and shortly afterward he and his right-hand woman Iris (Suzy Nakamura) are more worried about the company stock holders than the injured passengers. Everyone thinks Captain Clark is a decorated leader, but he’s a fraud and a figurehead hired to be the face of the cruise, while the actual decisions were made by an engineer named Joe, who dies in the incident.

So in Iannucci’s future, humanity hasn’t gotten any smarter. Rich idiots are calling the shots, and although technology has gotten more advanced, that just means we can screw up on a grander scale.

Image: Avenue 5/HBO

This is all rich material to mine, but “I Was Flying” is too busy being a pilot episode to really do anything with it. We meet a few other characters, notably demanding passenger/stowaway Karen Kelly (Rebecca Front), customer relations head Matt Spencer (Zach Woods), second engineer Billie McEvoy (Lenora Crichlow) and Mission Control head Rav Mulcair (Nikki Amuka-Bird). As with any Iannucci show, there are plenty of good zingers (“This may be the worst disaster since Google folded.”), but there’s no time to really let anything sit. I get that the series has to be on its way, but part of me wishes it had saved the accident for the very end and spent more time relaxing with the cast. That would have made for a better cliffhanger than the one we got, at least.

Overall, though, I think I talked myself into liking the episode more than I did while watching it. And I love that it’s something different. I hope it becomes as good as it promises to be.

Grade: B-

Bullet Points…In Space!

• “That’s science, probably. Check that it’s science.”
• “Apparently his breathing sounds fat.”
• “I need to know what just happened, and who’s to blame…and if you’re okay.”
• “I think I just swallowed a tooth. I don’t think it’s one of my teeth.”
• “The floor is very soft!”
• “If it’s any consolation he had very few loved ones.”