Right On?

So, most of my audience probably has Disney+ right now to watch The Mandalorian, right? (I'm beginning to grow tired of that show, actually... but that's a topic for another time.) As long as that subscription is active, you might as well be watching other things, right? For me, one of those "other things" was clearly going to be The Right Stuff.

Loosely based on Tom Wolfe's book and the 1983 movie it inspired, The Right Stuff transforms the tale of the early space race into an eight-episode series (with a clear path for future seasons). The focus is still on the first group of U.S. astronauts, the Mercury program, and the drive to be "the first."

This material, this bit of history, is always going to be endlessly fascinating to me. Any take on the early space program, factual or fictionalized, is going to catch my attention. And it isn't really necessary that you "tell me something I don't know" about it, because at this point that would be fairly hard to do. But my hope is that at least the elements are being mixed in some kind of slightly new chemistry. This new incarnation of The Right Stuff doesn't really do that very much.

It does certainly remix The Right Stuff movie -- excising all the Chuck Yeager material and focusing the whole "first season" (assuming it's renewed) on the run-up to Alan Shepard's first space flight. It also heaps on the cliches. Every movie and TV show you've ever seen about egomaniacal flyboys, their college fraternity behavior, their macho posturing, and the suffering-in-silence loved ones in their orbits -- every one of these story beats you've ever seen is stuffed into these eight episodes.

Admittedly, it feels a little odd to call that out as something weak in the show. After all, this is a story about the first astronauts, the very origin of many of these cliches. The title, The Right Stuff, promises an exploration of this very material. and the show at least, more so than the movie (with its more limited overall run time) does get into the character flaws of these men without simply lionizing them.

But the thing is, I feel like you could have it both ways, touching on the cliches while putting a bit of a new spin on them. I feel this because I just saw it happen in the series For All Mankind, which I absolutely loved (and whose second season was just announced to start in February). I suppose For All Mankind is explicitly not constrained by a need to respect history, given its alternative history premise. Yet I feel like that show utilized a lot of the actual, real-world story elements of the Mercury astronauts to better dramatic effect than The Right Stuff.

And yet, I remain a sucker for anything about the early years of the space program. So even as I acknowledge the show's faults, I'm going to find plenty to like about it. The production values are great, perfectly evoking the 50s and 60s in fine detail (and making great use of visual effects, when called for). The cast is pretty good, with the standouts being Patrick J. Adams as John Glenn, James Lafferty as Scott Carpenter, and Jake McDorman as Alan Shepard. If a second season were announced, I'd probably be back to see these guys take on later missions in the Mercury program.

But I also wouldn't be surprised if another season isn't announced. This show can't be cheap to make, and watching it, I'm not sure there's enough here to hook a more general audience that's not inclined to give it a pass as I was. The series is perhaps a B overall, with both better moments and worse throughout its eight episodes. If you've already got Disney+ (for The Mandalorian? to have Disney animated movies at your fingertips?) then you might not be losing much to sample the first episode to see if it's for you.