Space Force

Even in the most tumultuous times, my commitment to watching the stupidest shit remains unshaken. That’s right, reader—while you were out marching in the street, I was watching Netflix. Specifically, Netflix’s Space Force. I may have done other things as well, but I’m sure that the most important thing I did for America was suffer through exactly two episodes of this show.

The premise of Space Force, as stated in the title, is that United States has created a space force, and Steve Carell is the dopey, soft-racist, bomb-happy general who runs it. This seems like a setup for satire at bureaucracy’s expense a la Armando Ianucci. Since it’s made by Greg Daniels and Steve Carell, though, the general is played as a pathetic, good-intentioned clown with family problems, and the episodes (at least the two that I could sit through) end with a humanizing moment in which his worldview is validated. The effect is nauseating, as if Kubrick’s Jack D. Ripper had the lead role on a family sitcom from the 1990s. Maybe there’s a straight-up emotional plot about Carell learning to let go of his daughter and his precious bodily fluids later on, I don’t know; I’m not brave enough to find out.

There’s not a character here that rises above the cardboard; there’s the rebellious teenage daughter, the scary foreigners, the put-upon coworkers, the status-obsessed wife. (For some reason, the wife is in prison; I think it’s so that Carell can get cucked by one of the lady prison guards for a laugh, thus freeing him to have a pathos-laden flirtation with a coworker—like I said, I’m not finding out whether I’m right on this one.) A lot of the put-upon coworkers are Asian or black, which makes for an uncomfortable dynamic in which nonwhite people constantly have to cater to a white idiot’s whims. This happens often enough in real life, of course, but since Carell is supposed to ultimately be a sympathetic sweetheart, it’s obnoxious. I couldn’t blame these people if they rose up and strapped him to a rocket.

Carell is the main problem here, since he created the thing and is by far the main performer. He tends to do best when he’s part of a comedic ensemble; whatever you think about The Office, Carell had a bunch of other talented performers to bounce off of on that show, so it wasn’t just him gurning all the time. Space Force assumes you love Carell’s schtick enough that you’d watch an entire half-hour of it straight, with no chaser except the lamest jokes about social media, Trump, and foreigners. There’s nobody else here except John Malkovich, picking up a paycheck, and Fred Willard in his last role, and if you remember Willard for any of his many delightful roles I implore you not to watch this, in which he plays a senile old man who attempts to tend to his wandering, farting wife. I hope Willard’s family enjoys the money, but none of the rest of us had to see this shit!

And, well, why do we have to see this shit? Is it really meant to be viewed at all? The obviousness of the jokes and the clunkiness of the plots makes me suspect that Space Force was put together as a make-work project for a few big names to collect a streaming service handout, which was guaranteed regardless of the quality of the eventual output. Since all the episodes are put onto the platform at once, a bad show can just disappear into the ether, instead of attracting the shame of low Nielsen ratings as in the broadcast past. There are a bunch of these makework shows out there, as various corporations compete to build streaming media libraries, but they’re like the fake books on the bookshelves at a furniture store—there’s form there, but no meaningful content. Netflix is the perpetrator in this particular case, but the other streaming services are guilty, too.

Aside from Netflix, the Pentagon publicity office can’t avoid blame for Space Force, as they were probably involved in order to get people used to the idea of being fried up by space lasers (or, more likely, suffering through mass-casualty war on earth for an insult suffered in space). In the end, that’s what takes Space Force over the border from merely stale and awful to actively offensive—the idea that the heavens, which have been a source of inspiration, awe, and curiosity throughout the entirety of human history, have been reduced to a garbage heap presided over by a bunch of squabbling, murderous bureaucrats should make you want to scream in rage, not chuckle. The addition of a full minute’s worth of Steve Carell singing “Kokomo” is merely the icing on the cake.