Away: Let's Escape to Mars

Netflix is back to their old tricks and had me hunkered down on my couch this weekend, bingeing my way through their latest drama, Away. Starring Hilary Swank, and set partly in space, this show is the kind of expensive, cinematic thrill we've come to expect from a Netflix original. Is it actually prestige television? Not quite. But it is a compelling drama that sucks you in and reminds you of the comfortable family network dramas we used to watch before the advent of streaming meant that our dramas had to be more edgy and gratuitous.

The show follows the Atlas mission led by American astronaut, Emma Green (Hilary Swank), which will be the first (wo)manned mission to Mars. She is leading a crew that looks like the UN Security Council (except France has been replaced by India, because Netflix needs those billion brown viewers y'all!): there's the grumpy, vodka-swilling, Russian cosmonaut Misha Popov (Mark Ivanir); the taciturn Chinese taikonaut Lu Wang (Vivan Wu); India's Ram Arya (Ray Panthanki), Emma's second-in-command, and the medical officer (let's face it, if you're an Indian man in science, you're a doctor); and from the UK, Kwesi Weisberg-Abban (Ato Essandoh), who is the crew's botanist and the only one who didn't start out as a trained astronaut. He is originally from Ghana, but was adopted by Jewish parents in the UK so is a man of deep faith and might be the most uniquely non-stereotypical character in all of television. And yes, while the rest of the characters seem like your typical stereotypes of the Chinese, Russian, and Indians, don't worry. Things only start out that way, but as we flesh out these characters and get flashbacks to learn more about them, we quickly piece together much more complicated and nuanced backstories. Their cultures do inform their lives, of course, but the writers eventually give them streaks of individuality that make them much more human.

That's what's happening in space. But back in Houston, we have an almost completely different show playing out with Emma's family. Her husband, Matt (Josh Charles) has some major health issues right when she sets off for Mars, and her teenage daughter Alexis (Talitha Bateman) is having to go through a LOT, what with one parent being in the hospital while the other one is literally in space. The show does a wonderful job of exploring their family dynamic as well as the choices Emma and her husband have had to make along the way so she can pursue her dreams and "have it all." While the show was created by Andrew Hinderaker, Jason Katims is an executive producer (and wrote one of the episodes) and you can see his influence when Away starts to resemble something like Friday Night Lights or Parenthood. Yes, this is a very high-concept show with a great deal of space drama and technical mumbo-jumbo about how to fix solar panels and fix the water pump, and it can get very tense and exciting when you're watching a space walk and marveling at the zero-gravity special effects. But at its core, this is a show about ordinary human beings thrust into extraordinary circumstances. Every actor on this show is wonderful, so by the end, you're just rooting for everybody. A lot of the human drama can be very cliched, and there were "revelations" in Episode 9 that I predicted right when I watched Episode 1, but that's what's so comforting about this show. Humans are predictable, even in space. But some of the plot points were also a genuine surprise, because guess what. Humans sometimes seem predictable and then throw you a massive curveball. 

Away is extraordinarily well-paced and I was never bored for a second. Every episode has the exact right mix of space and scientific logic and then messy human drama. It does clever things in terms of imagining how the astronauts would communicate back to their families on Earth, and delves into the toll this journey takes on them after months go by and they increasingly have to rely on each other instead of the people they left behind. It provides a fascinating psychological study and while people get into major fights and face life-or-death decisions constantly, this is also a remarkably hopeful and optimistic show. The first episode has some odd moments where it's trying to be more edgy and "cable"-esque, but all of that feels very forced. Eventually it accepts what it is. This show isn't interested in trafficking in cynicism; instead, it promotes a story of global and individual cooperation, about how people can get past their differences and successfully pull together for the greater good. At a time when society feels more fractured than ever, that's the kind of message my weary soul needed. If your soul is thirsting for that too, settle down on your couch with Away. There's a whole plotline about dehydration, but I promise, your thirst will be quenched.