WiC Watches: Avenue 5

Episode 2: “And Then He’s Gonna Shoot Off…”

Avenue 5 has a lot going for it. I talked a lot about the aesthetic in the premiere episode, bright and controlled and a million miles away from Veep and The Thick of It. Just look at the shot of Iris stealing a moment alone in the Avenue 5 chapel, isolated and angry among these cheery space age colors.

Image: Avenue 5/HBO

Avenue 5 is fond of finding fun compositions that draw relationships between people and their environment. The image of the recently dead passengers orbiting around the Avenue 5 after their coffins are jettisoned into space — the ship is so big it has its own gravitational pull — is particularly inspired, morbid and hilarious at once. The show is not boring to look at.

There are plenty of good one-liners, too, as there are on any Armando Iannucci show. “I have had enough of your tall attitude and high mouth,” Karen tells Matt, in the first of what I can assume with be a great many Jonah Ryan-esque tall jokes. “Is that the figure or the phone number we call to get the figure?” an incredulous Rav asks a NASA worker offering to help Herman Judd’s company out of this mess…for a very high price.

Josh Gad, who I’ve honestly never been that impressed with outside of animated movies about snow sorceresses, makes the most of what he’s given. A powerful idiot is a great asset for any comedy, and Gad sells the hell out of Judd’s aggressive cluelessness. “What if we slingshot around Joe’s coffin?” he confidently suggests as a way to get home faster. “Space is a vacuum! That means that a piano falls at the same rate as a feather or a baby girl!” I wonder if he’s ad-libbing some of these, since that’s a talent of his.

Judd is the focal point of the satire, too. If this man had the know-how to build his business, he certainly doesn’t have the responsibility to be in charge when real human lives are at stake. And yet he’s still calling the shots because he’s at the top of the corporate ladder, even if he’s dangerously unqualified and his priorities are all out of whack — he’s willing to cut off the Earth’s oxygen supply as a way to threaten people into not suing him, for example, a real supervillain move. It’s not hard to draw comparisons to corporate oligarchs of our day, from Mark Zuckerberg to Jeff Bezos and on and on, people who have huge influence over modern life but who might not use that power responsibly. If Karen and the other passengers rise up and overthrow Judd, it’s not like I wouldn’t see where they’re coming from.

But more likely, they’ll go for the frontmen, people like Captain Ryan Clark or maybe Billie, who gets glib with the impatient passengers when Captain Clark railroads her into addressing them. The show definitely has a mob mentality theme going on.

And the show has more to say about capitalism run amok. The competent Billie has informed everyone that the Avenue 5 has a three-year trip back to Earth, but when junior engineer Cyrus (Neil Casey, wearing clothes Captain Clark describes as “insolent casual”) tells the team he thinks it could take as short as six months, you’d best believe Judd and Iris and Clark all run with the good news, even if it’s clearly not the truth. It reminds me of Chernobyl, where the people in charge knew of dangers but went ahead anyway because they already had a specific result in mind and didn’t accept anything that contradicted it, even if that meant letting people die. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the Brumadinho dam disaster…corporate-driven catastrophes like this happen all the time, and if Avenue 5 is to be believed, it’s only going to get worse in the future.

So again, Avenue 5 has stuff going for it. But I don’t think everything is gelling the way it should. Maybe the observations are too obvious, maybe it’s that we don’t know if the show has real stakes yet, or maybe it’s that there’s a lot of fat on the bones. I like Zach Woods as much as the next guy, but do we really need Matt Spencer around if all he’s going to do is being a very tall punchline machine? Worse are Ethan Phillips as out-of-touch ex-astronaut Spike Williams, and Kyle Bornheimer and Jessica St. Clair as bickering marrieds Doug and Mia. Those characters are dead weight without a single laugh to their name. I mean, maybe the show will find a use for them eventually, but right now, they’re cliches looking for a purpose.

This show needs something to push it to the next level. It needs to deepen the characters, or develop a serialized plot worth hanging onto, or kill off some characters to establish stakes, or be a whole lot funnier, or…something. I like the show, but I don’t see it really gaining a following until that happens.

Grade: B

Bullet Points…In Space!

• “Use English!” “Which one of those words was not English?” “Propellent?”
• “Ryan betrayed me, like a character in a Shakespeare movie.”
• “That pregnant pause was in its third trimester.”
• “Classic Jesus: You mess with his money, he fucks you right up.”
• “We kill problems like they’re babies.”
• Obviously Judd has a golden coffin.
• “Today’s been like Black Friday for emergency mental health care.”
• “NASA stands for…Not anymore, stupid assholes!” Best line of the episode.
• “Oh, shitting aunts!”
• “Iris, come find me, I’m in chickens.”