The difficulty with television comedies is that they are rarely perfectly shot right away. Some of the most beloved, such as ‘Seinfeld’, ‘The Office’ or ‘Parks and Recreation’, did not finish finding their tone and characters until well into the second season. At this point, both screenwriters and actors have a better understanding of what works and what doesn’tand what kind of series they seek to be.
Sure, that’s incompatible with this “golden age of shows” where they’re sent en masse to the meat grinder to be gobbled up, and if they don’t work immediately they are ostracized from which they will only come out through a small accident of the recommendation algorithm. And by then they may be finished, without having the luck to grow that they really deserved. The recently canceled ‘Space Force’, from the Netflix catalog, is an example of this.
take off as you can
At this point it is already a bit lazy to talk about expectations to explain why something has not finished working, but in this case they are relevant. ‘Space Force’ came from the hand of greg daniels Y Steve Carelltwo of the main forces that made ‘The Office’ a success – one as a creator and another as a star.
Netflix invested a lot of money in this project that they made with intention to satirize the unsatirizable: a space military force created in real life by Donald Trump.
With these names, the idea was a bit the least of it. The streaming platform thought it had its own ‘office‘, but with references to space and NASA, material full of keywords to highlight. They spared no expense on their investment, and there Daniels and Carrell found themselves a bit overwhelmed.
The temptation to use such amounts for their budget almost forced them to prioritize ambitious set pieces that were also not the highlight of the series.
Beyond powerful-scale training missions, the best finds that made ‘Space Force’ highly esteemed were on a smaller scale. His cast, which in addition to Carrell included contrasting people such as John Malkovich, Lisa Kudrow either Ben Schwartz plus interesting new faces like Tawny Newsome, Jimmy O. Yang either Diana Silvers, it got working almost immediately. They found a particular key for their respective characters and little by little they established dynamics that worked, both in jokes and in emotion.
‘Space Force’: better with heart than with ambition
We usually use the qualifier “nice” in the same way that that possible partner with whom they want to mess with calls her “nice”, but in the case of ‘Space Force’ it is something that really suits her. Its sitcom spirit allowed these interactions between characters to be explored with care, to test subplots with different characters to see what came out, and the actors had the opportunity to fully outline the strengths of your characters in the comic section.
It didn’t always make you laugh, or touched your heart, but it really I had tools to grow way to get there. But the low-key way in which the first season went by ended up making Netflix nervous. Its second season, premiered behind the scenes a few months ago, seemed much more limited in resources.
Something with which they laugh in the series itself, making the arc of the season revolve around the budget cuts that this branch of the armed forces has, and that must meet the objectives to not be closed, so the people who made the series knew what was there. Ironically (spoiler), the characters achieve their goal, but not the series itself, which leaves without the opportunity to fully find its potential.