You may not be going outside, you may have lost track of what day it is, your diet and alcohol consumption may have gone to hell – have you considered adding some escapism to the mix? Yep, the TV industry still has stuff in the pipeline, although as time goes by you’ll likely be seeing an uptick in animated shows, which don’t require anyone being in the same room at the same time.
1. Upload | May 1
As the idea of transferring one’s consciousness into a computer steadily ticks along from Black Mirror-esque horror towards unremarkable reality, we have now officially hit the mid-point of it being light entertainment material. Like Black Mirror (and in all probability our own futures) here it’s done as an artificial substitute for the afterlife, a treatment of last resort for when people are dying.
Upload is billed as ‘satire’, but what this seems to mean in practice is grafting the venal, skeevy culture of the internet onto a simulated afterlife – with the trailer prominently displaying in-app purchases and annoying children, two things I think we can all agree drag the internet down for everyone. And those are bad enough without being part of a Hotel California-style purgatory which you can never leave.
So by the looks of things Upload will be more ‘isn’t it annoying when…’ rather than ‘what does it mean to be alive?’. Nonetheless, cyberspace is a better venue than most for that type of thing. Observational comedy only works when people understand the observation. Asking ‘what’s the deal with airline food?’ would raise few yuks for a toilet cleaner in Kuala Lumpur, or a shell-shocked teen in the ruins of Aleppo. But with the internet at the forefront of rendering the world a global village, a lot of the traditional barriers of culture and experience are stripped away from the outset.
2. Solar Opposites | May 8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hHoKWE4Vb4
Off the back of the immense success of Rick & Morty comes Justin Roiland’s latest offering, Solar Opposites, about a family of aliens who are forced to live in America. In other words, it’s sci-fi wonders muddled together with the dynamics of suburban Americana. You can’t say that it isn’t territory that Roiland knows well.
With the same art style, same sort of tone, and Roiland’s same three-and-a-half character voices, you could be forgiven for mistaking it for a spin-off, and expecting that at any moment Rick and/or Morty will turn up for a cameo and the studio audience will all cheer. So, spin-off or not, it can probably rely on attracting a good chunk of Rick & Morty’s devout core audience. Hulu seem particularly confident of this, having already commissioned a second season before this one’s even premiered.
3. The Great | May 15
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJGedvRfHYg
Everyone loved Game Of Thrones when it was just people in silly period costumes having a lot of sex. This description also functions as a neat summary of the reign of Russia’s Empress Catherine The Great, so you can take it as read it’s good TV material. Elle Fanning stars as Catherine herself, with Nicholas Hoult as her husband, whose name I do not remember offhand but suffice to say was not appended with ‘the Great’.
The show is created by Tony McNamara, screenwriter of The Favourite and as such no stranger to the intricacies of court life in the 1700s (in fact, he’s probably in danger of being typecast as ‘the 1700s guy’). The Great is, however, very different in tone from the claustrophobic, shifty-eyed style of The Favourite, instead being an irreverent ramble through all the silly things incredibly wealthy aristocrats do.
4. Central Park | May 29
As Solar Opposites spun off the recognisable art style of Rick & Morty to buoy up a new franchise, so Central Park does the same for Bob’s Burgers – which was always one of the stronger Simpsons successors, putting a sufficiently different spin on the animated sitcom while staying fairly good-natured.
Instead of a humble burger joint, this has the central family – as played by Kristen Bell, Josh Gad, Leslie Odom Jr., Kathryn Hahn, Tituss Burgess, Daveed Diggs, and Stanley Tucci – owning and operating Central Park itself. Like its parent programme, this will involve far more musical numbers than you might have cause to expect from the outside.
Although billed as a comedy (again, like Bob’s Burgers, and again having the vague feel of a spin-off because of the overwhelming similarities), the trailer comes off more like your standard heartwarming summer blockbuster, where relatable everyman protagonists come into conflict with rich jerks. And then eventually the rich jerks see the obvious error of their ways, and declare that from now on they’re only going to be good and kind to everyone, probably through song. Sorry, spoiler alert.
5. Space Force | May 29
Steve Carell, the image of the bad boss for a whole generation of people thanks to his role in The Office, returns as another bumbling management type IN SPACE. No, really.
The concept is the early days of America’s Space Force – which, if you’ll recall, is a thing now – as they try and work out just what it is they’re meant to be doing. Their brief is to protect the space-based interests of the United States, most notably satellites, although this would seem on the face of it to be fairly simple. Our planet is not under attack from extra-terrestrials, and the mixed American-Russian crew of the International Space Station live in an oasis of comparative harmony, considering what their respective countries are usually like.
Given this, and with the vagueness of the trailer inviting speculation, Space Force may well be a tale of of a mazelike government institution trying to maintain its huge budget (them rockets aren’t free) in the face of not much return. The Byzantine, overly-formal world of the bureaucracy may sound like death to comedy, but that’s only if you haven’t seen Yes Minister, Corporate (which starred Lance Reddick as an exemplary bad boss), or, to stay with the area of space, all the fun Futurama had with the Central Bureaucracy. Most people can identify with being trapped in that nightmare world of red tape, and it’s all too easy to laugh at it when it’s not happening to you.
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