Away: Season 1

It’s the smaller-scale issues that hit the balance between exoticism and relatability that the rest of the series has so much trouble locating. But as the season chugs along, the team-building takes the form of crew members giving each other nonstop inspirational speeches.

“Away” isn’t illustrative of its top-flight cast and crew’s abilities. Perhaps it could find a better balance in Season 2, or perhaps this is the space show people want, even if it’s not what they deserve.

I remain, as always, a sucker for anything even vaguely NASA-themed, but also for the kind of nuanced, hyperemotional family drama that Goldberg and Katims did on a show like Parenthood. Away only gets the space half of things right, but it often gets that half very right.

Even if the script doesn’t always deliver, Away looks the part, and television really has come a long way, in terms of the scale of what we can see on the small screen.

It needs Will Bates’s strong, stirring score; it needs Joni Mitchell’s River, too, to give it a midway lift at Christmas, in a sappy-sweet montage with tinsel strewn across the living quarters. It’s a little less than binge-worthy on every level, but as space soap, it passes the time.

The sagas of the families left behind—largely, family life sociology with a touch of soap opera—are, at least, watchable and sometimes better than that.

Despite strong acting, convincing production design and propulsive storytelling, the weepy stuff often feels contrived. Emma’s “woman trying to have it all, astronaut edition” plot verges on insulting.

The series has all the markers of a prestige consideration of what it means for humanity to take flight, but leans so heavily on inspirational tropes of the genre that it never, itself, soars.

A self-important patchwork of space clichés and boilerplate family conflict that never manages to make it into orbit.

Everyone’s well-intentioned, fundamentally decent, and capable. There are no villains, only complicated situations. When someone suggests it’s better for an astronaut to die in space a hero than return home a coward, the argument feels profound, not diabolical. This makes the series dramatically frustrating at times, but given our current social and political climate, it’s also refreshing.