“Space Force,” on Netflix, created by Steve Carell and Greg Daniels, takes the founding of the actual U.S. Space Force—a long-simmering concept made real by President Trump in 2019—to its absurd extremes, many of which are insufficiently absurd enough to stand up against contemporary reality. By turns winningly silly, curiously flat, and hauntingly off-key, the series presents a case study in the artistic perils of trying simultaneously to present a fresh satire of the military-industrial complex and a comfort-food buffet of workplace-sitcom commonplaces. It seems stranded between the caustic and the cutesy.
“Space Force” is perhaps best appreciated as a gallery of cherished stars and character actors who will kindle warmth in the hearts of an indulgent audience. Carell is Mark Naird, an Air Force officer promoted by his Commander-in-Chief to lead an extraterrestrial adventure in manifest destiny. The series does not invoke Trump’s name, but it conjures the spectre of a moody executive with a twitchy Twitter finger; this POTUS tweets, of the Space Force, that he wants “boots on the moon by 2024,” while mistyping “boots” as “boobs.” This is too small a joke for a world so tragic as our own.
Naird’s situation is of a man with ramrod-straight posture prostrated and disarrayed at many odd angles. This is a person who, waking with dread in the dead of night, remakes his bed upon rising. This is also a person who, to compose himself at a difficult moment, sings the Beach Boys’ “Kokomo” alone in his office, as if it were a meditative mantra. The scene plays, despite Carell’s talents for squareness and stiff bumbling, like a baby-boomer joke without a punch line.
Naird’s family—a desperately grinning wife (Lisa Kudrow); an averagely sulky teen-age daughter (Diana Silvers)—fitfully settles into the Colorado cowtown where the Space Force is headquartered. There, Naird’s close colleague and regular foil is Dr. Adrian Mallory, a civilian scientist played by John Malkovich, whose delicate superciliousness is among the show’s primary pleasures. Their office is staffed by chipper blunderers, earnest eye-rollers, sleazy climbers, greasy attachés, and dutiful underlings, and the series hesitates to follow the lead of, say, the U.S. version of “The Office,” also created by Daniels and starring Carell, in arranging for this group to somehow form a family. There’s too much sprawl to the ensemble to allow for that, and the sensibility of “Space Force” is such that it navigates an odd path between the sweet tropes of a calming network sitcom (as when Naird returns from a harried night of international intrigue to help his daughter with her trigonometry homework) and its spasms of rage at governmental power (as when, defending the existence of the Space Force, he compares its record of atrocities to that of the other service branches, saying, “We haven’t had a My Lai yet”).
Though “Space Force” often assumes the shape of a topical comedy, it’s squishy about its purposes. In the third episode, Naird and Mallory venture to Capitol Hill, where a hearing before the Armed Services Committee will determine the fate of their project. At the witness table, Naird fields a pointed question about government waste from a young New York legislator named Anabela Ysidro-Campos, who bears a resemblance to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that is both impressive and pointless. The general rises to the challenge of her reasonable query with a heart-stirring speech, and the score swells beneath his words, in a way that is not totally in earnest but not quite mocking, either. The show wants to satirize an extraterrestrial adventure in manifest destiny and to have its all-American apple pie, too. The light-hearted dystopia of “Space Force” is too close to home to serve as an entertaining escape—the show cannot escape the gravity of its own premise.
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In Netflix’s “Space Force,” Steve Carell Is Stranded Between the Caustic and the Cutesy - The New Yorker
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