Three hours into its 12-episode run, Defying Gravity is still an uneasy blend of Grey’s Anatomy and Solaris, combining the soapiness and annoying narration of the former with the “Bad things happen in space” dread of the latter.As you might expect, the results don’t make for riveting TV, despite the presence of the always-welcome Ron Livingston front and center as flight engineer Maddux Donner. The story of a six-year exploratory mission throughout the solar system in 2052, Defying follows eight astronauts on the Antares spaceship and the men and women they left behind—most of whom have the flat personalities that any semi-regular TV viewer could write themselves. There’s the audience surrogate (Livingston), the wounded, flirtatious blonde Zoe (Laura Harris), the tough-talking but golden-hearted biologist (Christina Cox), the sexed up German vamp (Florentine Lahme), a nave documentary maker (Paula Garces), a Judd Apaotow refugee (Dylan Taylor), a bearded psychiatrist (Eyall Podell), and Donner’s pal Ted (Malik Yoba), who is prone to communing with a vista of wide open, blistering hot landscape that appears in one of the ship’s pods. But since a trip through space seriously cuts back on the writer’s opportunities to pad their plots with boozy sex, we’re treated to flashbacks of how the gang all met and bonded and fell in and out of bed with one another.
Unfortunately, neither the space sex nor the secretive NASA machinations are fresh enough to prop up the lackluster writing. The most recent episode found Donner—who, someone reminds us every episode, is a “tragic American hero” after leaving two astronauts on Mars during a previous mission—setting the overarching theme of the hour with some clunky narration about doors, and how you usually don’t want to be on the other side of them, but you don’t realize it until it’s been shut behind you. His Carrie Bradshaw-lite musings (perhaps Livingston picked up some narrator pointers from Sarah Jessica Parker during his stint on Sex and the City?) are then literalized with annoying regularity by almost every major character in the show, not to mention one or two close-ups of actual doors. Little things like that deprive Defying Gravity of any real shot at gravitas or a legitimate sense of humor. The show was originally pitched as “Grey’s Anatomy in space.” But burdened by the memory of every space movie and high-stress workplace soap opera ever made, Defying Gravity sinks instead of soars.
Photo courtesy of ABC.com.
