Comedy Chaos: Space Force & The Afterparty

Last week I binged the second season of Space Force and watched the season finale of The Afterparty. They are both broad and silly comedies with fantastic casts and showrunners with classic comedy pedigrees taking the helm. If you need a laugh, these shows might be destined to be your next binge. 

Space Force: I watched the first season last year when we would binge anything on Netflix to escape the pre-vaccine pandemic gloom. As a big fan of The Office, I was very excited to see a show created by Greg Daniels and Steve Carell, who also stars in and occasionally writes for the show. The show follows the establishment of the fledgling Space Force, that glorious agency created by our former President Who Must Not Be Named, and the ensuing inanity as General Naird (Steve Carell), who is a very straight-laced and conservative military man, tries to wrangle together a bunch of scientists, astronauts, and marketing folk to ensure that Space Force can actually do some good in the world and defy all the mockery that is coming its way. By and large, he is not successful.

The first season was ten episodes and of middling quality. But like most comedies, the second season is where the show finds its footing and leans into all these weird characters. Ben Schwartz as Tom, the marketing guru, is on peak form, suggesting all manner of brand endorsements and collaboration that give Naird a headache every time, but through it all, it's clear that he has a heart of gold. Jimmy O. Yang and John Malkovich make a great team as the genius scientists who are actually trying to do some rocket science while everyone mucks about, while Tawny Newsome is wonderful as Angela Ali, who is aiming to be the first Black woman to go to the moon. 

There's much family drama going on with Naird (Lisa Kudrow plays his wife, and gets into a ton of trouble) and his rebellious teenage daughter, Erin (Diana Silvers), but in the second season, Erin is interning at Space Force so she gets to be a part of all the workplace shenanigans. This show has a LOT going on and there are several elements it can mine for comedy. Not every joke is successful, but this is a winning cast and showrunner and these actors are being their comic best. There's nothing quite so satisfying as watching John Malkovich swear up a storm and mock NASA or seeing Steve Carell's stoic face crack into abject panic when all the disasters bubbling up in this agency culminate into one god-awful snafu. So give Space Force a try, and let's see if they ever make that mission to Mars a reality.

The Afterparty: Created and directed by Christopher Miller, be prepared to enjoy a raucous and funny murder mystery over the course of eight delightful episodes. The show follows a group of thirtysomethings at the afterparty of their high school reunion. When one of their classmates plummets to his death, it's up to Detective Danner (the glorious Tiffany Haddish) to interrogate everyone at this party one by one and determine who is the murderer.

The cast includes TV comedy stalwarts like Sam Richardson, Ben Schwartz, Ilana Glazer, and Ike Barinholtz. And the show's conceit is that each week we get the story of what happened at the reunion and the afterparty from a different character's perspective, so it's a Rashomon-style Agatha Christie mystery, where you have to look out for inconsistencies in people's stories and sort through all their many motives and alibis to find the killer. What makes it even funnier is that each episode consists of a different cinematic genre - for example, we get Aniq's (Sam Richardson) story in the style of a bubby romantic comedy, while Chelsea's (Ilana Glazer) tale is a psychological thriller filled with eerie twists and turns.

The Afterparty is a marvelous feat of storytelling and will satisfy both comedy nerds and mystery nerds. The narrative is also short and sweet, amply contained in its eight action-packed episodes, and it never overstays its welcome or gets too cute. It has already been renewed for a second season, so binge your way through this one and get ready for more murder and mayhem next year. And if you need a little teaser about the many ways in which this show goes into extraordinarily silly and wonderful tangents, let me just say that there's a cinematic adaptation of Hungry Hungry Hippos that you didn't know your life was missing until this show came around.