Space Force: Season 1

The United States military has inaugurated its latest service arm: Space Force. Newly-promoted four-star General Mark Naird is appointed as Space Force's first commanding officer, operating out of a base in Colorado. Disappointed at not getting command of the Air Force, Naird nevertheless throws himself into his new role with gusto, determined to fulfil the US mandate to "put boots on the Moon" in the next four years.

Space Force comes with impeccable credentials and impeccable timing. It's the latest creation from American producer/writer Greg Daniels, a long-term writer from Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons who is also the co-creator of King of the Hill, The Office (USA) and Parks & Recreation. Daniels is teamed with his old collaborator Steve Carell, the star of The Office (and numerous films). The show also launches on the exact same weekend that, for the first time in a decade, American astronauts are launched back into space by an American spacecraft, a fortuitous bit of timing.

Space Force is, of course, rooted in the widely-derided decision to create a new branch of the US military dedicated to space supremacy. Once the slightly amusing name and Star Trek-esque insignia are out of the way, though, the idea has some merit, not least because other nations are pressing ahead with their own plans to militarise orbital space. The show gets the mockery of the basic concept out of the way in the first few minutes and then plays the job itself mostly straight, with the comedy arising from the characters and their workplace misadventures, not helped by increasingly impossible demands from the Twitter-obsessed POTUS (whose identity is pretty clear, but never formally identified in a clear case of hedging the writers' bets against the results of the November 2020 election).

Carell stars at General Naird, a competent US military office put in charge of a service about which he knows pretty much nothing. Naird is likeable, mostly efficient and a firm believer in the American Dream, and fortunately nowhere near as hyper-incompetent as Michael Scott. Carell plays him as a gruff, no-nonsense type with moments of humanity (such as a tendency to sing 1980s pop hits to relieve stress). The show is rooted in his dynamic with chief scientist Dr. Adrian Mallory, who is played with formidable skill by the legendary John Malkovich. Mallory is a typical scientist, with some comedy mined from his commitment to the use of space for peace until he is insulted by a Chinese rival, at which point he becomes unexpectedly more belligerent.

The rest of the ensemble is made up of Ben Schwartz (Parks & Rec's monstrous Jean-Ralphio) as "social media director" Tony, Tawny Newsome (Bajillion Dollar Propertie$) as astronaut Angela Ali, Jimmy O. Yang (Silicon Valley) as Dr. Chan  Kaifang (Mallory's number two) and Diana Silvers (Booksmart) as Naird's teenage daughter, Erin. It's a fine cast who rise to the occasion admirably, although viewers may be confused by what happened to Lisa Kudrow as Naird's wife Maggie, who is set up as a regular member of the cast and is immediately demoted to an occasional recurring character instead (in a subplot that is never really fleshed out). There's also a larger recurring cast who come and go through the episodes, led by Noah Emmerich (The Americans) as Naird's arch-rival General Grabaston, normally a Very Serious Actor who clearly relishes the chance to do something fun and runs with it with aplomb. Fans of comic legends Diedrich Bader and Patrick Warburton will also be happy to see them back on the screen, but perhaps bemused that they have so little to do. There is also a note of sadness in the cast, as the late Fred Willard makes his final screen appearance as Naird's father, playing an ailing old man but one whose comic timing and delivery are as sharp as ever.

The cast is top-notch, but not always best-served by the scripts. The show lurches from outstanding, genuinely amusing gags (a whole sequence with a space "chimpstronaut" in the second episode gets ever more preposterous and ever more funny) to moments that fall much flatter, such as the ongoing gag about the blatantly obvious Russian spy (which the show gives up on halfway through and abruptly vanishes). The tone is also variable, with Veep-style political lunacy mixed in with much broader toilet gags, and Office-like observational work humour. At one point the show goes quite dark when Naird's daughter is put in a genuinely sketchy situation, and at another the show has a surprisingly nuanced and progressive take on relationships which is interesting but feels a bit out of keeping with the rest of the series.

The other problem the show has - and this is a rare one these days - is that it is too short. At just ten 25-30 minute episodes, the pacing feels shot to hell, with the team going from barely being able to get into orbit to landing a lunar base on the surface of the Moon in just a few weeks. There are character interrelationships which feel promising from a characterisation and comedy perspective (particularly the odd-couple pairing of Chan and Angela, or the semi-romance between Erin and a base security guard, or the awkward opposites turning into a bromance arc of Naird and Mallory) which are simply not given time to breathe or develop naturally, and sometimes feel like they lurch forwards between episodes. With 20 or even 14 episodes, it feels like these storylines could have been advanced a bit more naturally.

Still, although the first season of Space Force (***½) is rarely outstanding, it's also rarely awful. It has tremendous production values, a surprisingly committed attitude to the science (the chimpstronaut sequences even briefly recall Gravity's discussion of orbital mechanics and space physics), an absolutely excellent cast and a steady, if not constant, stream of low-level laughs. It's certainly not disgracing itself when compared to the also-patchy first seasons of The Office and Parks & Recreation, and the foundation is in place for a stronger run later on. Space Force is available worldwide on Netflix now.

The Office (USA): The Complete Series

Scranton, Pennsylvania, 2005. A local PBS documentary crew start capturing the everyday lives of the workers at the local branch of Dunder Mifflin Paper Company as part of a series looking at ordinary working Americans. However, the office they choose is under the management of Michael Scott, a small man with big dreams, and increasingly befuddling behaviour of the employees leads to a documentary project that lasts much, much longer than anticipated.

If there is an immutable rule of reality, just as inarguable as the speed of light or that every other Star Trek film is tripe, it is that British sitcoms cannot be transferred to the American market. Fawlty Towers, Red Dwarf and Men Behaving Badly were all remade for a US audience and bombed, heavily. When NBC announced in 2005 that they were remaking Ricky Gervais's breakthrough vehicle, the mockumentary The Office, for the USA, the full (and perhaps slightly smug) expectation was that it would fall flat on its face.

Of course it didn't. Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's sitcom was well-suited to the transition, since sitting in a boring office working hard for poor pay is probably the most relatable and universal experience of human existence for the past seventy-five years, as true in Scranton, Pennsylvania as it was in Slough, Berkshire. Furthermore, Gervais and Merchant's work was itself heavily inspired by the pioneering mockumentary work of Christopher Guest, particularly This is Spinal Tap and Best in Show. The final piece of the puzzle was that veteran American scriptwriter and producer Greg Daniels (The Simpsons) was a good fit for taking their vision to a US market, assembling a talented group of mostly young writers and producers to help him out (chief among them Michael Schur, who would go on to create or co-create three of the greatest comedies of the 2010s: Parks & Recreation, Brooklyn Nine-Nine and The Good Place).

The US version of The Office gets off to an awkward start, with a first season that feels far too close to the British version for comfort (even down to the pilot using the same script, just slightly tweaked). The dynamics of the office are also extremely familiar, with Steve Carell's Michael Scott being well-meaning but self-unaware and prone to gaffs, Rainn Wilson's Dwight Schrute being officious, pedantic and somewhat tedious, Jim (John Krasinski) being the perennial unlucky-in-love straight man and receptionist Pam Beesly (Jenna Fischer) feel unable to escape her underachieving relationship and disappointing career path. These are pretty much 1:1 matches for the British cast of characters.

Fortunately, the American writers show increased confidence over the short first season run and things quickly improve. A big difference to the British version is that the secondary and tertiary cast of the American show is much larger and the expanded episode count gives many of them multiple episodes to shine, which makes the feeling of everyone being in an office a lot more realistic, with even the only-intermittently-seen warehouse workers receiving some development (and, in the case of Crag Robinson's Darryl, eventual promotion to the main cast).

The show is anchored in Steve Carell's performance as Scott. At first glance Scott and Ricky Gervais's David Brent are clones, but a key difference soon emerges: Brent seemed to know, albeit deeply buried underneath his bluster, that he was a small and underachieving man. Scott is much more oblivious of his failings. However, whilst Brent was also not a particularly good manager or businessman (basically coasting on his subordinate salesmen's reasonably competent performance), Scott is shown to actually be a really good salesman when push comes to shove, and although his humour is often inappropriate for the workplace, he is generally good at helping (or rather, letting through inaction) his staff deal with their various problems. Keeping this tightrope performance going is difficult, but it's impressive how Scott keeps it up for seven whole seasons (that's what she said™).

The other cornerstone of the show is the slow-burning romance between Jim and Pam, which like Tim and Dawn's relationship in the British original, is centred in their friendship and mutual desire to play pranks on Dwight but gradually becomes more serious when Pam realises her current relationship is unsatisfying. The romance was so key to the British original that it wasn't really resolved until the series finale (and several attempts to revisit the show have foundered because of the dubious decision to focus on David Brent alone, not the rest of the cast), but fortunately (since it would have gotten maddening otherwise) the US version of The Office pushes the button on it by the end of Season 3 and then spends a six further seasons exploring the development of the romance, with marriage and kids following. This risks being twee, so it's a welcome surprise when the writers show the relationship has its ups and downs, with a realistic complication introduced in the final season when Jim gets the opportunity to follow the job of his dreams in Philadelphia but Pam is less willing to uproot their family. This ends up being one of the best explorations of a long-term romance in television history, avoiding the problems that a lot of shows have when the "will they/won't they" tension is resolved.

The other castmembers all get their time in the sun, but the show does have one major fly in its character roster: Andy Bernard, played by Ed Helms. Andy joins the cast in Season 3 as one of a "new intake" of workers from another branch which is absorbed into Scranton and is initially presented as hyper-competitive and unpleasant with an anger management problem. This appears to have been down to the original plan being to keep the character around in a short-term recurring role and then get rid of him, but Ed Helms' huge success in the Hangover movies caused a rethink. Andy went off to anger management therapy and came back a changed man, a relatively nice (if low-key) guy with a sideline in singing and playing banjo. In fact, he's a bit of a sap, and in a supporting character role that's vaguely amusing and sometimes sympathetic (even if his on-off again romance with receptionist Erin - Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt's excellent Ellie Kemper - is astonishingly dull) that's absolutely fine. Unfortunately, in Season 8 it appears that Helms (or his agent) leveraged his movie profile to get him promoted to replace Steve Carell as the show's star, which is when the wheels of the series not so much come off as are ejected with terrifying explosive force and the directionless remnants are allowed to crash into the ground and explode. Fortunately, Helms was called in to make The Hangover 3 and is missing from more than half of the final season, allowing the show to regain most of its former quality.

The Office (USA) is an inconsistent show, sometimes maddeningly so. Its initially rocky first season, when it is too much in the shadow of the British original, soon expands into an "imperial period" of quality in Seasons 2-4 that can withstand comparison to the best seasons of any other show. There's then a three-season slow decline to the end of Season 7, during which time the show is still certainly watchable with some absolutely outstanding moments and individual episodes but also a lot of wheel-spinning, and then Season 8 is dreadful, despite the heroic efforts of recurring guest stars James Spader (who can be hilarious but his character has been teleported in from a completely different universe) and Catherine Tate, but there's a marked return to form in Season 9, culminating in a genuinely effecting final run of episodes and one of the best TV sitcom finales of all time.

The US version of The Office (***½) is, at 201 episodes, a daunting prospect to watch, especially compared to the UK version's slim and breezy 14 instalments. But it's mostly worth it, with genuinely funny (if often cringe-inducing) moments and strong characterisation helping the show transition from its early, more realistic feel to the decidedly implausible plot developments of its later seasons. The cast is exemplary and, at its best, this is a show that can withstand comparisons to the greatest of all sitcoms (especially episodes like Dinner Party, which comfortably outshines anything in the British original). However, it is also inconsistent in quality over the long run, and the disappointing run of episodes late in the show's life means that it will likely be outshone in history by the shorter, funnier and much more consistent Parks & Recreation and the conceptually much bolder The Good Place. The complete series is available to watch in the UK on Amazon Prime Video. In the US it is currently available on Netflix, but will leave the service imminently in favour of NBC's new streaming platform, Peacock.