I Watch TV: Avenue 5

 

Avenue 5

Avenue 5 is a luxury space liner which got knocked off course in season one. As we enter season two the passengers expect the voyage to end in four weeks, rather than the actual eight months. When they find out things get rapidly out of hand, especially as the eel tanks, which supply most of the food, are going wrong. Predictions of mass starvation are discussed.

It's a comedy.

If it has a single theme then it’s that people don’t, won’t and can’t face hard truths, and react poorly when they are forced to. If it has another its that people in groups are dumb and the people in charge are even dumber. This may be the same theme.

For example: with the eel tank on the blink they arrive* at a space station that eventually is revealed to be a prison. An engineer who can fix the eels is located, but he’s a paedophile. They bring him aboard but clear the decks and confine him in a hamster ball and see-through plastic tube because… they don’t want him coming into contact with anything. They do get rid of him but accidentally allow a cannibal on board.

There are popularity contests and algorithms, and billionaires having stupid ideas but also vetoes over everything. There’s some fun stuff back on Earth where a show based on Avenue 5 is very popular. It also becomes popular on the actual Avenue 5 which leads to some weird and funny self-fulfilling prophecies. And various people attempt to do things that may or may not make sense, and may or may not improve themselves, their relationships or their position. When the satire is sharp it’s uncomfortably so, and when it isn’t there’s Hugh Laurie getting exasperated at how out of control everything is getting.

Watch This: For a dark and funny space comedy that sometimes turns its cynicism on interesting targets
Don’t Watch This: If farce piled on stupidity piled on black humour goes out the far side into not funny
This Is The Last TV Show I Finished A Run Of In 2023: Alas there are still several films I have not caught up with from last year so it's not done with yet.

 

* The ambiguously-not-entirely-implausible celestial mechanics of the first season have been jettisoned in favour of just whatever makes this episode's plot work