Avenue 5, HBO’s new Sunday evening comedy of space tourism gone wrong, owes a debt to three previous series. The first is Gilligan’s Island, from which showrunner Armando Iannucci has taken both his basic plot and the theory that even predictable incompetence can be funny. The second, The Office, pioneered for U.S. audiences the kind of absurdist-misbehavior comedy that has dominated the prestige time slots for more than a decade. The third, Iannucci’s previous effort, Veep, stripped The Office of its sweetness and dedicated itself to the giving and receiving of what youths these days call “sick burns” (e.g., “Right now, you’re about as toxic as a urinal cake in Chernobyl”). Through the four episodes screened for critics, Avenue 5 isn’t quite as mean as Veep or as awkward-hilarious as The Office, but it’s floating somewhere in their galaxy. The more important distinction is that it isn’t nearly as funny.
Set in a blandly imagined near-future (Google has collapsed; not much else is different), Avenue 5 stars Hugh Laurie (House) as Captain Ryan Clark, whose vessel is knocked off course when an artificial-gravity malfunction sends passengers thudding into its walls. Joining Laurie onscreen are such familiar performers as Lenora Crichlow (Being Human), Zach Woods (Silicon Valley), and Josh Gad (the voice of Olaf in Frozen), who play the ship’s engineer, customer relations officer, and owner, respectively. While the show’s tone is largely set by the misanthropy and blame-shifting of its lead quartet, Nikki Amuka-Bird (Luther) gets in a few good lines as the head of mission control back on Earth. So does Rebecca Front (Poldark) as an amusingly high-handed passenger who overhears that the disaster has increased the ship’s voyage time by an estimated three years.
As one might expect, the technological and emotional consequences of the ship’s disaster provide Avenue 5 with a number of its gags. In one episode, an open-mic night is interrupted by the sight of a dead passenger’s coffin orbiting the ship. In another, a man responds to inquiries about his well-being by lamenting that he’s “stuck in space with [his] current wife.” Though the jokes arising from Avenue 5’s “situation” are perhaps best described as uneven, they are far more successful than the surrealist humor attempted at other moments, as when Zach Woods’s deranged customer service representative observes that a dead crewman “had very few loved ones.” Or when Josh Gad’s hapless ship owner follows the boast that a sales tactic is “science, probably” with the demand that someone “check that it’s science.”
Despite the fact that Avenue 5’s tone owes much to the U.S. version of The Office, fans of that program will almost instantly recognize what this one is missing. The Office was filled with preposterous social misconduct, but it held a secret weapon in the character of Jim Halpert, whose can-you-believe-these-guys glances at the camera reassured viewers that they remained in a sane universe. Avenue 5, on the other hand, lacks a straight man. And without anyone to show us how human beings are supposed to behave in the absurd situations Iannucci serves up, the series quickly begins to feel sad, tiresome, and bereft of any real stakes. In a world of regular people, a jackass can be gut-bustingly funny. In a world of jackasses, nothing much matters.
If the often-brilliant Laurie was meant to remedy this problem through sheer magnetism, Avenue 5’s creators significantly erred when they designed his part. Far from being a Gregory House in space, Laurie’s Captain Clark is an ineffectual bumbler who slips in and out of accents, whines a good deal, and delivers exactly zero memorable lines through the show’s first two hours. Having been sarcastic in a hospital (House), acerbic in the president’s office (Veep), droll in the Regency era (Sense and Sensibility), and haughty in the world of international arms-dealing (The Night Manager), Laurie visibly strains to be pleasant, if overwhelmed, in space. This is not an indictment of his skills as an actor but a complaint about the program’s casting. There’s a reason Joe Pesci never played Hamlet.
Crichlow, Woods, et al. fare little better as Captain Clark’s antagonistic shipmates, not because they’re unfit for their roles but because their lines are not particularly funny. An occasional quip is worth a modest chuckle (“That pregnant pause was in its third trimester”), but other jokes fail so spectacularly that the actors themselves seem embarrassed. When one character asserts that the crew “kill[s] problems like they’re babies,” I thought I saw Laurie looking around the set for an escape hatch.
Avenue 5 is not without its small merits, chief among them that the series is almost entirely free of politics. Though Captain Clark belongs to a three-person marriage and cattle are revealed to have gone extinct, such details are garnishes rather than main courses, and the show is ultimately too silly to maintain an ideological perspective. That Iannucci thus avoids one of the central pitfalls of contemporary “comedy” may come as a relief to viewers who are sick of being lectured. Alas, he and his fellow writers have replaced the lectures with … not much at all. Their zingers, in the end, just don’t zing.
Like most HBO comedies, Avenue 5 is stylish, slick, and pleasant enough to sit through. Audiences who stick with it will probably smile from time to time. Yet as any comedy aficionado can tell you, a smile is different than a laugh, and smiles won’t cut it if the laughs are few.
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
