The Right Stuff (2020)

[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.