The First

This is not a space show, or at least it won’t be till the end of the season. But it does what it does with a high degree of intelligence. ... There’s nothing pedestrian about The First, though. It orbits high above the cable traffic.

This eight-episode series created by Beau Willimon has all the right stuff. Sean Penn, in his first TV series regular role, delivers a tremendously affecting performance. ... Some genre fans may gripe it takes the show too long to achieve liftoff, but that's the point. [17-30 Sep 2018, p.24]

This is an ambitious, bold, beautiful, occasionally trippy, big-picture sci-fi drama.

What The First is: a surprisingly affecting drama about several families and a planet in crisis.

Not all of the series’ risks pay off, and the overall approach is so counterintuitive that it’s bound to frustrate audiences who expected more of a problem-solving space mission story along the lines of Apollo 13 or The Martian. ... But once you get used to The First’s peculiar rhythms, it weaves a spell that’s somewhere between a ’90s John Wells drama (think ER or The West Wing) and a slowed-down TV answer to Terrence Malick (The Tree of Life especially).

For now, you’re advised to ride out The First, sluggishness and all. There are enough bright spots to bring it all home, with Mars very gradually getting closer to becoming more than just a talking point.

Hagerty and Ingram do, at times, veer toward predictability but it doesn’t impede the series overall feel (and, let’s face it, this is a series that needs viewers to be emotionally invested in its characters.) Willimon’s writing, pacing and sense of place, so evident in “House of Cards” (particularly in Seasons 1 and 2) resonates here.

Enamored with its characters to a possible fault, The First is cut and paced like the roughly 368-minute director’s cut; you can imagine a two-hour film, probably with the same budget, that hits the same emotional beats and divides audiences like previous high-concept sci-fi stories like "Contact" did. As is, The First is a noble, ambitious series, but one that demands equally ambitious viewers.

Some viewers may find “The First” too slow, especially in the first two episodes, but “The First” becomes more engrossing as it unfurls, especially when the show’s scope broadens out from Tom and explores the other characters.

Downbeat but uplifting, the series is less a sci-fi thriller than a character study. Like its star--Sean Penn, who here does a lot of muscular brooding--the show promises solemn rumination, and more often achieves an earnest heaviosity.

The series builds well after its stop-and-start beginning. It reminds you that before House of Cards went off the rails with soap opera high jinks and Kevin Spacey hamminess, it was a promising show about the personal cost of power. Think of The First similarly, rather than as Mars Trek, and you could be intrigued.

Episodes 1, 2, and 5 are a stunning triptych of a family in crisis--and the disparate parts of the story have potential. ... The threads, however, never fully entwine, and in the end The First feels much like Mars itself: cold, bumpy, and too far away to touch.

The scenes with Hagerty and Denise dominate the show to a disproportionate extent, and to the detriment of lots of other things The First wants to do. Penn is solid and stolid as Hagerty, conveying more depth in the scenes with his family than he does with his crew. What’s missing is a sense of why he wants so badly to be the first man on Mars. ... That said, when Hagerty and his crew finally make it into orbit, the series clicks into place.

The First is a glossy, often-inert tale of devotion and spaceflight. Its first two episodes treat inevitabilities as questions, and unfold with the zip of a DVR-ed sporting event for which you already read the box score. ... But The First does get better after its first two episodes (before getting worse again) by jettisoning inevitability. ... As flawed as I found the first season, I’ll admit, it hooked me enough that I’m interested to see how they live life on Mars.

It’s that feeling of endlessness, of shapelessness, that makes this collection of mostly interesting parts uninspiring.

[The First] has all the right ingredients of another breakthrough drama series from the streaming service that gave us “The Handmaid’s Tale.” But it becomes so entangled in the human drama of its troubled characters here on Earth that it loses momentum soon after blast off.

The First does a credible job of contemplating the costs of space travel, where, to quote an old line, no one can hear you scream. But wading through season one of this stiff but earnest series, it's possible someone will hear you snore.

The First is under no burden to be as quippy or feel-good as The Martian, as awestruck as The Right Stuff, as gee-whiz as Apollo 13 or From the Earth to the Moon. But it needs to have some compelling reason to tell this story, in this way, and it never really finds one.

In a season spent almost entirely on the preparations for an interplanetary voyage (the two-and-a-half-year round trip will be covered in future seasons, if they come), science, engineering, politics and adventure are rationed to make room for soap opera.

The show isn’t a disaster by any means, and it features a few strong performances. But it lacks forward momentum as it lingers indulgently in some of its least interesting conflicts.

Visually compelling with a nicely pensive music score--courtesy of Colin Stetson of Arcade Fire and Bon Iver--The First is otherwise plodding and padded.

It’s shot beautifully, is occasionally engagingly weird, and is well-acted by Penn and McElhone, especially. The issue is that it’s just fine. It’s the kind of show you could quickly watch every episode of--Hulu will release all eight episodes at once--and then completely forget you ever saw. It makes that little of an emotional impression, and does nothing particularly remarkable, revolutionary, or resonant with its storytelling.

For now, centering The First around a family story that hits painful but often-predictable beats and that siphons away what is, elsewhere, a friskily passionate geekiness is a choice that keeps the worthy show from soaring.

The First takes its sweet time, moving at a glacial pace and staying frustratingly earthbound.

Hulu’s slow-going and disappointingly dreary astronaut drama. ... Far too much narrative flourish. It’s easy to see what Willimon is going for--to give shape and heart to what is essentially a story of science and bureaucracy. It’s also easy to see the mistake in the formula: Empathy does not equal velocity.

Long-winded, tedious and full of metaphors, allusions and symbols piled on top of each other in a literary garbage pile, The First is an unintentional parody of the expensive, self-important shows that somehow get the label "prestige TV."

By the time the astronauts do get into space it doesn't feel like a triumph for mankind at all. It feels like what should have happened six episodes ago.