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Welcome to (Netflix’s) Space Force.
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Steve Carell as Ed McGovern during a NASA-themed skit on Saturday Night Live in 2018. This is currently our best estimate of what Carell might look like on Netflix’s Space Force.Getty/Will Heath/NBC/NBCU
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The teaser trailer, embedded below, is mostly made of text bursts like this one.
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This vague statement leaves the series’ comedic stylings open to interpretation. Reality-styled mockumentary seems likely, of course.
Netflix took the wraps off its latest comedy series on Wednesday, and while that may sound humdrum for a company with roughly 7,000 series in the works, this one has set its sights on something huge: the outer reaches of space. Er, sorry, we misread that. The Space Force.
Indeed, before President Trump’s proposal for a sixth military branch can become an official item in the United States’ 2020 budget, Netflix has jumped on the idea of making a show about this branch’s day-to-day ops—and it has three major vets of TV’s The Office on board, including Steve Carell as both a co-creator and a star.
The resulting TV series, currently named Space Force, was unveiled in the form of a teaser trailer on Wednesday morning. This mostly text trailer, set to Strauss’ “Zarathustra,” brings viewers up to speed about how the branch began life in a June 2018 speech. “The goal of the new branch is ‘to defend satellites from attack’ and ‘perform other space-related tasks’… or something,” it reads. “This is the story of the men and women who have to figure it out.”
Netflix’s own press release on the matter says little else beyond confirming that Space Force co-creator Greg Daniels and Executive Producer Howard Klein worked with Carell on the US adaptation of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s The Office. We don’t have a release date or any information about other stars, writers, or contributors. A report from THR, citing “sources,” suggests Carell’s overall per-episode salary “sets a new overall record for talent” compared to other popular TV series.
Those Office credentials loudly hint at a mockumentary take on Trump’s Space Force, though it remains to be seen how Netflix’s new series may set itself apart from the bumbling-government comedy of HBO’s Veep. Its deliberate ties to actual US policy suggest opportunities to openly mock existing elected officials, but we may come to find that Space Force is staged, say, 10 or 20 years in the future; again, details are terribly vague at this point. (We imagine Space Force will at least be funnier than what used to pass for president-mocking comedy in the early ’00s.)
Listing image by Getty/Will Heath/NBC/NBCU
https://arstechnica.com/?p=1442283