The Astronaut Wives Club

The early episodes lack depth because there are so many characters and so many stories to tell.

The divide between the public face of American perfection and what really goes on when the doors are closed won’t earn The Astronaut Wives Club any points for originality, but it wouldn’t be the last time a summer show on network TV won viewers over with modest ambitions and likeable characters. And to appreciate it, we don’t even have to pretend it’s anything like Mad Men at all.

For anyone familiar with the history--or who even just saw the movie--a lot of this will feel familiar.... Yet even those interludes are played well enough to work in this context, and will certainly come as revelations. And there are several lump-in-the-throat moments in seeing loved ones have to endure watching a husband or father blast into the unknown.

The Astronauts Wives Club orbits thisclose to camp--yet never plunges into a black hole of idiocy.

Of the week’s new dramas, the only one with abundant blue skies is the lively Astronaut Wives Club.

ABC’s new series, The Astronaut Wives Club, can’t make up its mind if it wants to be a serious, nuanced fact-based drama about the wives of the Mercury Seven astronauts, or “The Real Housewives of Cape Canaveral.” Fortunately, there’s enough legitimate drama in the show, premiering Thursday, to counterbalance its cheaper moments.

It's a solid effort, but after three episodes, I'm not convinced that puncturing a carefully crafted image brings us closer to knowing the actual women behind the men.

For all that it strives at times to push a big theme, it remains best taken as colorful light entertainment. There are some nice performances and moments (especially among the Carpenters and the Shepards and the Coopers), increasingly as the show goes on, when the marriages seem complicatedly real.

With the exception of Annable's Trudy, a pilot with high-flying aspirations of her own, it's hard to pinpoint the individual dreams or goals for any of these women and the show doesn't get deeply into the sense of what it's like to have your dreams so totally consumed by both societal gender restrictions and also the added pressure of living in the spotlight.

Astronaut Wives moves as fast as a beach novel, covers more territory than a history book. But it’s history channeled through a distinct lens. The first episode was slow to launch, but the series could take off once we figure out who’s McSteamy and who’s McDreamy.

With cheating rock-star husbands, secrets and reporters everywhere, there’s no way we won’t see some soap splashing on this clean-cut, All-American story.

There’s a lack of early hooks, even in moments that stood out in Lily Koppel’s source biography.... That’s too bad, since whenever The Astronaut Wives Club does manage to bring its veteran cast, summer-pastel aesthetics, and its historical context together, there are glimpses of a very interesting show.

The Astronaut Wives Club frequently doesn’t seem to know what it wants to do.

The wives never feel like fully drawn people. Instead, they feel like takeoffs on what the press latched onto about them in the first place.

At best, the show is an average prime-time soap rooted in history that improves somewhat in successive episodes.

[A] lovely-but-musty escapist drama.

The characters are likable but surprisingly flimsy.

Of necessity, the story is so rushed, the characters so carelessly brush-stroked, that what should be climactic--the first manned spaceflight--feels incidental, almost blase.

Unfortunately, the result is surprisingly grounded and muted, leaving its likelihood of finding an audience rather up in the air.

The show fails to engage on any level, striving at best for a vague earnestness.

Alas, there's not much to this long-delayed adapted drama. [19 Jun 2015, p.57]

Memorable performances are delivered by Dominique McElligott as Louise Shepard, Azure Parsons as Annie Glenn and Odette Annable as Trudy Cooper.... Lacking any semblance of compelling structure, the series is a jumble of scenes artlessly arranged in a by-the-numbers chronological order.