Netflix blows up Space Force
The Steve Carell-starring sitcom aired its second season back in February, apparently
Aux News Netflix
Netflix has canceled Greg Daniels and Steve Carell’s Space Force, a TV show you definitely remembered was still on the air.
This is per Deadline, which reports that the series—which grew out of widespread mockery for Donald Trump’s whole “Space Force” ramblings and then, somehow, John Malkovich got involved—will not be picked up for a third season. The show ran for two seasons on the streaming service, with the latter set of episodes allegedly arriving in February of this year—although not even Netflix’s typically suspicious “Everyone in the world is watching our new show!” numbers reporting seemed to measure that second run as much more than a blip.
It’s just the latest data point, really, in our pet theory that Space Force was some sort of high-level experiment to see how little an impact several of the funniest people in the world could have on the comedy landscape if they really, truly tried. Look at this creative roster: Greg Daniels. Steve Carell. Malkovich. Ben Schwartz. Tawny Newsome. Lisa Kudrow. Jimmy O. Yang. And that’s, just, like, main and recurring cast! The list just keeps going, all amazing comic performers, all somehow adding up to a show that was fascinatingly, massively less than the sum of its parts.
Anyway: Space Force has now been decommissioned, like so many aimlessly floating and useless satellites; it will presumably crash back down to Earth once its orbit finally destabilizes, maybe wiping out a Datsun when it does.
Daniels, at least, remains a going concern at Netflix, despite the general belt-tightening that’s presumably been accompanying that disastrous earnings call earlier this month; he’s currently attempting to eke an animated TV show out of the Exploding Kittens card game franchise of all things, and also has that Bad Crimes show starring Nicole Byer and Lauren Lapkus in the works with his old King Of The Hill buddy Mike Judge.
64 Comments
“The Steve Carell-starring sitcom aired its second season back in February, apparently”If only there were some kind of pop culture-specializing web site around to do reviews of such things.
Reviews are so 2019; it’s all about dismissive snark in this modern ripped from other sites the headlines micro-blog era.
::high five::
That shit costs money. Who do you think owns this site, a bunch of millionaires?
No cause they clearly can’t afford a word processor with spellcheck
If only that site employed a reporter who had written a story about the show getting renewed for a second season:https://www.avclub.com/space-force-dubbed-good-enough-to-get-a-second-season-1845671611#replies
“Look, I just reported on when it got renewed. I never reported its release date.” – William Hughes, probably.
the person below this comment literally says they liked season 1 and netflix never told them it was available so clearly the line is correct yes
I’m all for well deserved “the av club is a miserable shadow of it’s former self” but with space force, was anywhere really covering this show? Is there anything to really write about the show with episode by episode recaps? “Episode 7, the cast is overqualified and the show has some chuckle moments but it’s not working”.
Well, OK, but what was nice about this site is that it covered stuff that might not get covered on other sites, in fact it focussed on stuff that was not covered on other sites. I realize that there is exponentially more to cover now than when AV Club started (and I have been with it since it started, even when it was still part of The Onion), but this was a site for pop culture obsessives. Pop culture obsessives find a way.
To be clear, I agree with you the site doesn’t cover nearly enough anymore. It’s a joke how little tv coverage there is now. I’m just saying with space force specifically, I don’t think there’s a whole lot to review with a well cast but deeply mediocre show like that.
The show’s not worth reviewing, but Hughes’ “oh this show had a second season and no one knew cuz Netflix sux LOL” was obnoxious, even for him, since he wrote the goddamn article about the show being renewed for a second season 18 months ago.
Oh, I’m not saying it merited episode by episode recaps; a full-season review would have been fine. Same goes for Picard S2.
Reviews? Never read a review on this websiteAll I ever see is play by play with no additional commentary
Forget about reviews. I miss the articles that started with several paragraphs about the writer’s childhood and personal life before getting to the actual coverage of what the article itself was supposed to be about. You never needed to wonder what livejournal would be like if it were still a thing.
Without being snarky, though, it would be really great if there were some website out there that actually did review things and keep its readers abreast of what was actually happening on TV.I know there’s a lot more TV now than there was, but the number of things being ‘reviewed’ here has steadily decreased, and the reviews are often more like recaps with occasional political tangents.Frankly it would be great if there were just some site that was willing to review things that had already finished their runs, so you’d have some idea what non-current thing was worth catching up on. [I remember reading through the reviews for Farscape here when I finally caught up on that show]Are there genuine AVClub-style sites still out there?
I thought it was pretty good. Seemed like most people wanted it to be a 100-jokes-per-minute show, or funny like the office or something. It’s not that.
The cast did great and it was cool seeing John Malkovich in a series.
Bummer, I liked this show a lot. Didn’t know about season 2 premiere though. Wonder why so little, if any notice was given about the release.Hey, at least we get the Pentaverate!
First season was great ,Second sucked and killed the thing anyway.
Wow. I watched season 1, didn’t hate it … and even I didn’t get notified that season 2 was available. Netflix fail.
Same, Netflix is doing a terrible job of making events out of new seasons.
What!!! They talk all about their upcoming shows on Tadum! The Netflix blog! Everyone knows to check their for all the latest… Hey… Where’d the website go….
Exactly. I remember -watching- the first season, liked it enough to follow it through to the end, and then never thought about it again. Apparently the algorithm at Netflix ain’t working so good for me, since I never even knew there was a second season out (since February???). TBH, I kinda miss the old days of Netflix where I used it simply to watch random obscure foreign films and do an occasional MCU marathon, both of which are dead in the water now. I justify having Prime simply for MCU (yeah, I have to buy them now, but I’m not doing Disney+), but I’ve had Netflix for over a decade now and it’s easier to just keep it rolling rather than quit.
I remember being surprised to suddenly see the new episodes banner.
Sometime over the next couple of weeks, I streamed them all on a second screen. I remember that like Parks & Rec, whomever wrote it had no idea of how the federal government worked — you can’t get a job because somebody liked your binder; the Park Service doesn’t just start a new region and make new national parks themselves, and one branch of military service doesn’t have to impress a general who is threatening to cut their funding out of spite. Also, there are a lot of bases in the Space Force, not just an office park in Colorado.The show wasn’t the worst thing I have ever watched because it was from some very talented people, but you could easily call it a waste of all that talent.
Well, they should have called it Spacefarce.
I could have called it. I didn’t think this one would get past the first season, much less get two in the can. I’m thinking Netflix basically buried the second season, since they put zero effort into letting anyone know it was available.
Sorry guys, that’s on me. I only watched the first episode of the second season.
I only watched the fifth episode of the first season. Never made sense to me.( Says the only person in the world who uses the Surprise Me button)
The second season was definitely a “gonna get around to that new batch of eps…soon…after this other thing” show around the merp home.That said, John Malkovich’s performance was goddam inspired.
(I think the whole thing suffered from being neither fish nor fowl, and was a little kneecapped bc Carrell played his character… against type? As if it were a slightly different show? )
Could this be correlated to the loss of Fred Willard from the second season?
I’m ok with this. I’ve watched both seasons. The show didn’t really know what it wanted to be. It focused WAY WAY too heavily on the daughter and by the second season was pushing an extremely unearned “we’re just one big dysfunctional family!” dynamic. (Complete with an awful forced Jim/Pam romance between the two off putting side characters. Off putting can be great in stories, but not generally romance ones.) Again, this was a show about the military and space travel. Family dynamics were a choice. When it stuck to the work place format, it was pretty good. But the second season was already just spinning its wheels for the most part after finishing season 1’s big storyline. They had no idea where to go next and a huge fear of doing really any even mildly critical social satire.It was a mess and a lot of wasted potential (Carell and Malkovich were playing great characters and had excellent chemistry) but it had no vision or direction. So this is fine.
I have no definitive proof, but I’d bet Netflix’s “creativity” consists solely of the most left-brained analysts rigidly adhering to whatever the viewership metrics tell them. It feels like they just pick the most common traits that surfaced in the dark cauldron of their analytics, and then mandate that’s what the writers must put in the show…even if it doesn’t work.I tried watching the first ep of the show, and it had the exact same problem War Machine did. Tonal whiplash.On one hand it was trying to do aw-shucks goofiness – and on the other hand it was trying to doIanucci-style super-meanness. And it sucked at both. I guess that’s how Netflix does political/military satire – AND THE NUMBERS SAY YOU SHALL NOT DEVIATE FROM THAT.Can’t speak of the second season, or even the rest of the first.
I like tonal whiplash, but I agree. Good tonal whiplash has lots of both tones, whereas Space Force was kind of… empty. It wasn’t so much whiplash as tonal gentle meander. It also sometimes went strangely deep into serious introspective drama territory – like the storyline about the astronaut whose experiences disconnected her from those around her who couldn’t share those experiences, while also suffering imposter syndrome – and frankly I thought it actually did that side quite well. I thought it did the daughter stuff quite well. It just wasn’t clear how all that sincere stuff was really meant to fit in to the rest of the show. [Except in Malkovich’s performance, of course, because he can move seemlessly between absurd and totally sincere]The other problem… well, there were two. Firstly the writing wasn’t funny. And secondly the actors weren’t remotely funny. Carrell was OK at times but seemed to be in a different show from everyone else, and Malkovich was honestly brilliant, but everyone else just did a combination of reading lines flatly and vacantly into the camera and just… gurning.
To me, it seemed like the show was hacked to death. Season 2 was terribly edited. There were clearly missing scenes and other things that made no sense. Knowing Greg Daniels, they probably filmed at least 45 min of content for each episode. It’s a mystery to me why a streaming service would insist on keeping these episodes to 30 minutes when the editing/continuity/quality clearly suffered as a result.
45 minutes is a long-ass time to watch a comedy that doesn’t make you laugh more than maybe three times.
Like a live-action Disenchanted
ugh, thanks for reminding me, i have to finish watch that.i’ve fallen asleep on ten separate occasions trying to watch the last few episodes.
I’ve tried multiple times to finish the new episodes, but they’re so full of padding and narrative references to things nobody cared about the first time that it’s actually uncomfortable to watch.
That’s true, but I kind of felt that if they’d let it run a little longer we could have had more of the non-comedy. The comedy that was there was probably enough to cover the comedy side of a comedy drama, and they did hint at wanting to go in more dramatic directions. But the drama was kneecapped by time restrictions.
It sort of felt like a 45-minute comedy drama that had been brutally edited to only include the punchlines and skip most of the drama. Like if you took The West Wing, kept all the jokes and just cut out 90% of the plot (only keeping enough to explain the setup for the punchlines) and 90% of the character arcs (leaving in the occasional weird introspective scene that doesn’t seem to tie in to the plot or the jokes because the linking material is gone).
God, this show despite the people involved was deeply unfunny and incredibly boring.
Man, if the razor sharp wit in these articles was able to be translated into a series for streaming, it might last…maybe two seasons, apparently.
William Hughes, I think you should choose a line of work other than writing. For real, you’re bad at it.
Now that does it! This is an outrage! When will Netflix realize it’s shooting itself in the foot by cutting down shows like…[what show are we talking about this time?]…Space Force in their prime. [Space Force? the one Steve Carell] It’s quality programming like, uh, Space Force [yeah, I watched it—the joke was already pretty dated by then] that attracted so many users to the platform in the first place. It’s, ahem, a shame that Space Force, which clearly had so much potential, so much [I don’t know, “adequate” is how I’d describe it…a whelming way to spend a Saturday afternoon] room to grow would be so unceremoniously axed. When will these [oh, they made a second season? why?] vultures ever learn!
Let them finish the story! (Did S2 end in a cliffhanger? Sorry didn’t watch)
I’ve held off on the second season cause the first was just not good. I think they rushed into the show to capitalize on the real Space Force stuff happening, and made a pretty messy show as a result. They made a show solely to make the whole thing out to be a joke, but then also wanted us to root for Carell’s character and what they were trying to do at the same time. And that just doesn’t really work.
Like many I’m sure, I never got into this show. And I really WANTED to love it, because, that’s one hell of a cast and I love comedy NASA stuff. Right from the start, I could never click with it, and I think part of it was Carell’s character never feeling particularly funny or likeable. As with many Netflix comedies, the episodes were significantly longer than they had any reason to be, which is a death notice for a show straining to be as “wacky” as what this was aiming for.
I’m pretty dead sure Netflix only renewed it once due to some pre-existing deal and/or not wanting to anger Daniels and Carrel with an immediate cancellation. The long period it took to release the second season, as well as the near invisible marketing for it really felt like Netflix had already decided to kill the show long before season 2 was thrown out carelessly.
I watched the first season and thought it was alright, will get around to the second sometime now that I know of it’s existence. Maybe it was just a test..
I had a huge amount of goodwill for this, Greg Daniels and many Office alums on the crew, a great cast. But it was almost shockingly unfunny given the talent involved. The plots were all so pedestrian and lame, season 2 in particular had zero stakes, and a truly dire juvenile romantic subplots.
Would have been better as a series of films a la Police AcademyActually could probably edit Season 1 and 2 into two 2-hour movies
Did the Jewish Space Lasers blow this thing out of . . . space?
It was a show based on single premise. It had nowhere to go after it delivered the joke on Trump. “Don’t Look Up” has the same vibe. In a few years it will make no sense. Surfing around OTA channels recently and came across Murphy Brown. Another show that really was just a product of its time. Most of the humor falls absolutely flat. You can only do so many Dan Quail jokes and you need to Google a lot of people being “named dropped” into jokes. Its not surprising the reboot failed miserably.
Not fully comparable. Once the feds set up a new department, it just kinda stays around forever and we ultimately passively float into the idea that it was always there, e.g. the TSA.
I mean, Dan Quayle wasn’t name dropped until Season 5.
The worst part of “Don’t Look Up” was that part too. It felt very tacked on, when it could have just kept being a story of the government’s willingness to ignore problems to further corporate interests.
On the other hand, I grew up watching Drop the Dead Donkey years after its airing, and I actually still think it’s funny (S1 is just OK, but it gets better once they find their feet. And then obviously a lot worse at the end). Politics is very pro forma – even if you don’t know the names of Conservative ministers of the early 1990s, you know the types of people they’re talking about and can, as it were, mentally fill in the blanks with the characters of today…
Was it funny to make, or was it funny to say you should make it? This show always struck me as Snakes on a Plane.
When does Mindhunters start again?
Too bad, I actually liked the show, and would not have minded another season
The Steve Carell-starring sitcom aired its second season back in February, apparentlyDon’t you have a whole section of this website dedicated to reviewing tv series? Seems like a “you” problem, not a “me” problem…
So much wasted talent.
Whaaaaat?! They’re just going to leave us there with a meteor headed straight for us?! Come on!!
That’s probably for the best. I tried watching season 1 and only got about half way through because it just wasn’t very good. But my big worry was that it would eventually do the Parks and Recreation thing and would evolve after that ok season 1 into one of the funniest shows on TV. And if I didn’t keep watching I would miss that. But now I know that won’t be happening.Plus a show with that kind of cast and being created by Greg Daniels can’t be cheap to make, even before you get to the space stuff. So cancellation probably makes sense.
“The list just keeps going, all amazing comic performers, all somehow adding up to a show that was fascinatingly, massively less than the sum of its parts.”That’s a really good description.
I enjoyed it. The alien scene in the second season was great, I would have watched another season. Time to add this to the pile shows I love on Netflix that get cancelled in favor of more reality crap. I now feel justified for cancelling my subscription until the new season of Stranger Things. Netflix is quickly becoming the new basic cable, with loads of crap I don’t care about and just a few gems. Definitely not worth the price to stay continually subscribed anymore.