Space Force doesn't work because it's dependent on a single joke: American idiocy

The Atlantic

The Netflix comedy from Greg Daniels and Steve Carell "was supposedly dreamed up a few years ago when President Donald Trump announced the founding of a sixth, extraterrestrial branch of the armed forces, a project so absurd that most people just carried on living their lives without really processing that it was real—barring occasional reminders in the form of Star Trek badges and Scientology-vague recruiting ads," says Sophie Gilbert. "A grandiose, totally unnecessary, obscenely expensive militaristic monument to one man’s porcelain-dainty ego! What could be funnier? Right? Two years later, though, amid the wreckage of a bungled pandemic response that in three months has cost America 100,000 lives and 40 million jobs, it’s harder to laugh at what Space Force is offering: baffling tonal dissonance, flimsy characters, and an unresolved subplot that, by the end of the 10th episode, was the only thing I still had half an interest in. Daniels is famous for creating TV shows with dubious first seasons that get better significantly over time; watch The Office or Parks and Recreation on Netflix to see series consciously tweak themselves and their protagonists to make them more appealing. But with Space Force, there’s not much imaginable that could make the show pleasurable to watch (excepting maybe an election). The joke isn’t on us; it is us. Pointless wars, corporate grift, the sassiness of fast-food brands on Twitter—the awful and rotten aspects of modern life are served up here as soggy punch lines, not caustic enough to really burn as black humor, and not winsome enough to simply enjoy."

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• It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what went wrong with Space Force because everything about it goes so terribly wrong
• Space Force's production design team's inspiration was The Right Stuff meets Dr. Strangelove
• Greg Daniels discusses Space Force's Season 1 finale and a potential Season 2: "Steve (Carell) and I and three other writers have been plotting out season 2 for a while. And, yeah, we know where it's going."