This was published 3 years ago
Steve Carell's new Netflix satire Space Force fails to launch
By Brad Newsome
It's too easy to miss brilliant streaming shows, movies and documentaries. Here are the ones to hit play on or skip.
Space Force
Netflix
In space no one can hear you stink. Which might be some consolation when it comes to this ill-crafted comedy series starring Steve Carell and John Malkovich. With such a terrific cast, impressive pedigree and obvious topicality it ought to be a rocket ride; instead it collapses on the launch pad on a pile of baffling characterisation and construction, and an ill-fitting decision to more or less endorse the very things it sets out to satirise.
At the centre of it all is General Mark Naird (Carell), commander of America's brand-new Space Force. The Space Force is a brain-bubble of a Trump-like president who never appears on screen, and whose desires must be inferred by decoding his tweets. When he says he wants "boobs on the moon" by 2024, for instance, the Space Force interprets this to mean he wants boots on the moon. Ho ho!
Naird's odd-couple partner in getting those boots there will be tweedy scientist Adrian Mallory (Malkovich). Sadly, there's little chemistry between them. Partly because Naird, like so many Carell characters, is blancmange poured into a costume and thickened slightly with sawdust. Partly because the Naird's and Mallory's relationship and balance of power oscillate wildly for no apparent reason.
There's little chemistry between Carell and John Malkovich's characters in the show. Credit: Aaron Epstein/Netflix
One episode Mallory might be an all-knowing puppet master; the next he's a hapless dork locked out because he forgot his ID pass. Other characters look promising to begin with but then disappear. Lisa Kudrow plays Naird's wife, Maggie, but she is suddenly sent to prison with no explanation and barely features in the series until near the end – when her biggest scene involves her giving Naird permission to pursue a love interest in which Naird has shown no interest and who has barely even been on the screen.
Similarly, Alex Sparrow (UnREAL) is fun for a couple of episodes as a smug Russian spy trying to get close to Naird's teenage daughter (Diana Silvers) before he vanishes. Ditto Fred Willard in his last, briefly hilarious, role as Naird's father.
Nim the chimpanzee was sent to live with a human family in New York in the early 1970s. Credit: AP
It's as if Carell and co-creator Greg Daniels (Parks and Recreation) shot two different series and crammed the leftovers together to make this one. Not that they don't have time to develop things. Episodes bloat out past 30 minutes, but that only exacerbates the lack of pace and decent gags. Best to bail out early and revisit something properly fast, funny and relevant, like Veep (Foxtel On Demand).
Project Nim
Docplay
You might have seen Tiger King (Netflix), but are you ready for the baby-chimp version? In 1973 a two-week-old chimpanzee named Nim was taken from his mother and sent to live as a member of an ordinary a human family in an ordinary terrace house in Manhattan. Psychology professor Herbert Terrace's idea was to see whether chimps could learn sign language; Oscar-winning documentarian James Marsh has rather more success in getting those involved with the program to reveal themselves. Some don't come off terribly well.
Schitt's Creek
Netflix
Schitt's Creek is the little show that really could. The big-hearted riches-to-rags tale has won more and more fans each season, made something of a star of Dan Levy, and shown a whole new generation what a comedic marvel Catherine O'Hara is.
O'Hara and the wardrobe department are particularly fabulous together in the sixth and final series as her character, faded soap star Moira Rose, lets herself believe that a role in a cheap horror movie is about to resuscitate her career. The writing and performances remain as sharp as ever.
Catherine O'Hara frequently steals the show in Schitt's Creek. Credit: AP
White Lines
Netflix
Daniel Mays isn't household name, but the British actor has a gravity that anchors anything he's in, as well as a gift for sutble comedy, and an inherent ambiguity that keeps the viewer guessing about whatever character he's playing.
So he's perfect for this British-Spanish drama in which British woman Zoe (Laura Haddock) heads to the party island of Ibiza to investigate the murder of her brother 20 years ago, and to find that expat Marcus (Mays) is the link between her brother and local organised crime. Tense, droll, scenic and bingeable.
Bridget & Eamon
Amazon Prime Video
The Ireland of the mid 1980s was a far cry from the groovy, go-ahead "Celtic tiger" the country would soon become. But it's there that we meet the unhappily married Bridget and Eamon (Jennifer Maguire and Bernard O'Shea), at a time when divorce is still banned, contraception – even condoms – is illegal without a doctor's prescription, and women's fashion is all about slippery synthetics and lots of hairspray.
Bridget and Eamon: unhappily married but great fun at a safe distance.Credit: Amazon Prime Video
Still, there were consolations. A woman could still chain-smoke in her own kitchen while cooking a giant fry-up for a camp priest, and you could tell when you'd crossed the border back into the Republic after a trip to the North by how shite the roads suddenly became.
Bridget & Eamon merrily ladles even more surreality on to its setting. Most impressive, perhaps, is its ability to distil predominant attitudes and traditions down into a single, telling line – when Eamon thinks he's found Bridget dead on the kitchen floor he tells their kids to say their goodbyes quickly because "you'll all be off to live with your mental aunt in the morning." Great fun at a safe distance.
Honeyland
iWonder
Some viewers have chosen to see an ecological fable in this Oscar-nominated documentary portrait of a beekeper in North Macedonia. Others will find it tough to see far beyond Honeyland's heartbreaking portrayal of the grinding, primitive poverty that still exists in Europe.
In any case it introduces us a middle-aged woman named Hatidze, who ekes out a subsistence living making honey on a windswept mountainside while caring for her dying mother. New nomadic neighbours, almost as poor, threaten what little security she has.