The Right Stuff (2020)

The Right Stuff doesn’t reach for the stars, but looks back to the Earth from which the phenomenon of astronauts and space travel, the glamour and the myths grew, along with the appetites they fed, and is all the more interesting for that.

A surprisingly compelling workplace drama once it dives into the strained interpersonal relationships between the American men competing to be the first in space.

Expanded into an eight-hour series, The Right Stuff doesn't feel the need for speed. What it loses in momentum, however, this Disney+ series gains in its characterizations, offering a satisfying voyage back into the stories of the men at the center of the Mercury 7 space program, as well as the women that loved and/or endured them.

While it would be next to impossible to duplicate the shining brilliance of Philip Kaufman’s 1983 theatrical adaptation of the same material (IMHO the best astronaut movie ever made), show creator Mark Lafferty has delivered a visually striking, well-acted period piece that plays like “Mad Men: The Flyboys Edition.”

While Adams and McDorman dominate, they’re not the only ones to watch. The other five get their moments; their families do, too.

It’s a glossy, traditionally presented piece of entertainment that tries to chip away at some of our traditional notions about the space program. It may not fully take off right away, but there’s enough potential here to suggest that a commitment to this dramatized version of a well-known saga will result in some rewards.

We’ve seen the story of The Right Stuff before, but even if we hadn’t, it’s 2020 and Google plus a quick trip to Wikipedia will tell you everything you need to know. But despite these obstacles, the eight-episode series—seeped in its era much the same way Mad Men was—is more often than not a compelling, inspirational drama that does its best to command our attention. ... I’m just not sure it’s a story that needed to be told again.

The setting and performances make for a solid period drama, but after the premieres of The First and For All Mankind, as well as the releases of First Man and Ad Astra, The Right Stuff looks more like an imitator than the originator, despite its groundbreaking source material.

The first two episodes of "The Right Stuff" offer a lot of promise, but the characters other than John Glenn need to be more fully developed.

This “Right Stuff” does a fine job painting by numbers, but without deviating from a script we’ve seen onscreen a thousand times before, it’s unlikely to make an impression all its own.

[The actors are] all perfectly fine, and Adams and McDorman are at times, better than fine. The rest of the cast is solid, with good work from actresses who play the all-too-often long-suffering wives of the Mercury Seven. ... “The Right Stuff” feels like a band playing the hits we’ve already heard way too many times already.

This Right Stuff is disappointingly...fine. ... Forgive me, then, if it takes some adjustment of expectations to settle for a treatment of their life that's simply "OK."

“The Right Stuff,” much like the space program whose story it aims to tell, stumbles out of the gate to a slow and uneven start, but there are moments where, against all odds, you can see Lafferty and co. putting it together.

Though it rarely achieves electrifying liftoff in the five episodes available for review, what resonated most is a character study of straitlaced den father John Glenn (a solid Patrick J. Adams). [12 - 25 Oct 2020, p.9]

Solely on its own merits, the series, a presentation of National Geographic (airing on Disney+), is a perfectly serviceable drama about a rococo period of American history and the complicated, high-flying, surprisingly unlikable people who flew the Mercury space missions of the 1960s.

When it comes to digging into the specific characters embedded in this vividly created world, something “Mad Men” did with such nuance, “The Right Stuff” doesn’t go far enough. It isn’t until the fourth episode (critics were given five to preview) that the show offers at least a semi-intimate look into the men behind the images, as Wolfe did.

The actors do their best to overcome the flat writing, and the show does find its stride by the fifth episode (which is all that Disney Plus made available for this review). What the new “Right Stuff” is missing are the qualities it can probably never have: currency and context.

This series plays like a quickly-written nostalgia trip and nothing more.

This Right Stuff doesn’t have much to say beyond observing the basic dichotomy between the astronauts’ superhuman images and their extremely fallible behavior. The story crawls along incrementally without using all that time to let us know its characters as anything but the broadest of archetypes. Outside of one strong scene where the guys share stories of near-fatal test flights, there’s barely any sense of how they function as a group.

The series takes five hours to cover what the film does in about 70 minutes—and somehow leaves the viewer with even less insight into this world. The show is desperately lacking in grit; everything is washed with prestige-TV gloss and creeps forward with anticlimactic inevitability.