Behold! We are entering a new age. Apple TV+ is upon us. Depending on when you last bought an Apple product, there’s a new streaming service in town that’s either free for a year or £4.99/month – and it’s got four new TV shows for you already. Or at least the first three episodes of four new TV shows for you – how quaint and not boxsetty.
It’s an equally quaint initial line-up:
The star-studded The Morning Show, which is a sort of Aaron Sorkin take on morning TV
See, a post-apocalyptic fantasy show, in which everyone (more or less) is blind, that hopes desperately to be better than every other TV show in which Jason Momoa has starred (cf Frontier, Stargate: Atlantis, Baywatch Hawaii)
Dickinson, a sort of A Knight’s Tale biopic of Emily Dickinson
And For All Mankind – the most appealing of the bunch. It’s billed as coming from the mind of Battlestar Galactica creator Ronald D Moore and depicting an alternative reality in which the space race never ended and “astronauts were seen as rock stars”.
That is not what For All Mankind is like. At all.
Red Peril
For starters, Ronald D Moore doesn’t have much to do with it, as far as can be seen, beyond co-writing the first episode. Equally, over the first three episodes, it’s considerably more depressing than you might think. Okay, that’s quite Ronald D Moore, I’ll admit it.
The first episode sets up this alternative universe in which “the space race doesn’t end” by having the USSR pip the US to the post. First man on the Moon? Alexei Leonov who doesn’t say anything about it being “one giant step for mankind” but dedicates his landing to the Marxist-Lenist way of life.
The US is miserable. The whole world is miserable. All the US astronauts are miserable. It doesn’t help when NASA loses touch with Apollo 11, just a few weeks later, when the LEM crashes into the moon’s surface. Poor old Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin; hell, Michael Collins is going to kill himself while he’s still orbiting the moon.
Depressing, huh?
Yet it’s from that thoroughly miserable start that the show does at least manage to course-correct and become something a bit more interesting. And less depressing.
When pretentious people talk about adaptations, the stock phrase ‘going back to the source material’ usually pops up at some point. But what if, to be slightly euphemistic, your source material is ‘a couple of rounds short of a full clip’? How authentic to your source material do you want to be then?
It was a dilemma that faced pretty much everyone who’s adapted Tom Clancy’s books, including the producers of season one of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, Amazon’s best show up to that point – all things being relative. Clancy’s books can be exciting but are also mockably bad, jingoistic nonsense at times. So if you want to do a Tom Clancy adaptation, do you ‘go back to the source material’ and do something that’s risible, or do you do something that’s better?
Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan was actually decent enough TV. True, it was often pretty stupid and its Clancy-esque view of the world gave us Muslim terrorists able to smuggle not just one but two WMDs into France. But you didn’t feel like you were watching a Trump Tweet come to life and it did at least aim for a certain air of verisimilitude.
John Krasinski and Noomi Rapace in Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan
Stupider
Season two, however, seems to have decided to go back to the source material – and be stupider and crasser. After only moderately insulting Muslims, France and the Middle East in season one, this time round, it’s the turn of South America to get told it’s really rubbish and nowhere near as good as the US.
It sees our former buddies – Jack Ryan (John Krasinski) and James Greer (Wendell Pierce) – working on different continents. Greer is in Russia, trying to work out who’s firing missiles from the South Seas. He’d probably stand a better chance if he didn’t keep falling over and nearly dying from a heart condition.
Meanwhile, Ryan is back in the US. He has suspicions that Russia is shipping arms to Venezuela and before you know it, he’s in-country, trying to find proof. And before he knows it, so’s Greer – as their respective missions start to dovetail.
But not everything is so clear cut. Except for the fact Venezuela is shit and corrupt and nowhere near as good as the US – or one All-American guy with a big American gun.
