'Avenue 5' and Overplaying Your Hand
Comedy is a fragile balance.
I may be the only person in the universe who watched the first season of HBO’s Avenue 5 and found it to be terrific, at least based on the ratings. That’s okay, it just makes me feel special the same way knowing that I’m the only person in the universe who owns the album Guilty of Innocence by a band called Law and Order, who played my college auditorium when I was 18 and approximately 15 people showed up1.
Avenue 5 is a dark comedy about a luxury space cruiser on an 8-week tour of the solar system that gets knocked off course after a malfunction, extending its trip back to Earth to three years2. A series of hilariously horrifying secondary disasters makes things worse and worse—dead bodies and a literal ring of human feces3 wind up orbiting the ship, people willingly eject themselves into space for a quick death after a rumor that the disaster is all reality-TV fakery spreads4—and life on board slowly descends into squalor and potential violence.
It’s actually quite funny, and I’m a sucker for stories that pivot off of slowly encroaching disaster—plus, Hugh Laurie gets to show off his impeccable Standard American Midwestern Accent in this role, which is always a delight5. Unfortunately, Laurie is also the biggest flaw in the show—not his performance, lord no, Hugh Laurie is a treasure—but his character, Captain Ryan Clark. Because it’s just one comedy layer too many.
A Little Restraint
Laurie’s character, Captain Ryan Clark, is introduced as the competent, heroic professional who is exasperated by the antics of his boss, the billionaire owner of the cruise starship, Herman Judd (Josh Gad). But when disaster strikes it’s quickly revealed that Clark is actually an actor hired to play the role of a competent, heroic captain in order to project confidence and comfort to the cruise guests. In fact, it’s revealed that the entire bridge crew are actors, and the actual crew and captain—much less attractive and less camera-ready—exist in a cramped underdeck, actually running things6.
On paper, you can see how this seemed like a hilarious idea. The sheer absurdity of spending the money to assemble an entire fake crew and go through the theater of having them pretend to run the ship should be hilarious—especially when coupled with the double reveal that Clark himself is unaware that the crew is also fake7. And yet that’s the giveaway as to why this doesn’t work so well: It’s too many layers, and it’s unnecessary. It’s a classic plot addition when writers don’t have faith in their premise.
Look, we’ve all done it: You have a story, it’s a good story, but you worry it isn’t quite there, so you keep drizzling on more stuff hoping to catch something terrific8. Terrific never comes, but you do eventually have so many layers of bullshit on top that it looks substantial—and all those layers look load-bearing, so you feel like you can’t remove them. But in essence they’re all unnecessary and add nothing to the overall success of the story. In the case of Avenue 5 we already have several layers of absurdity, from the ridiculous way the passengers respond to the crisis to the steady deterioration of the ship via various unlikely disasters (for example, the halo of shit that begins orbiting the ship because the “wetsuit” of human waste protecting everyone from space radiation [a real thing, actually9!] springs a leak, or the vision of Pope John Paul II glimpsed by one of the passengers in said halo). Revealing the captain and the entire crew are actors shifts it from plausibly absurd to untenably weird. And trust me: I know untenably weird (‘The Lonely Man’ plays in the background10).
The Test
How can you really tell that this is an unnecessary addition to the story? A simple test is to remove it and see what happens11. If you made Captain Clark a real captain, for example, but kept the incompetence and cowardice, the character still works. In fact, you wouldn’t have to change anything else, and it still works like gangbusters. You could keep most of the jokes, and the character arguably becomes more interesting as a result. The fact that you can remove an entire aspect of the character without doing much damage to the overall story demonstrates how superfluous this layer of humor is12.
Does it do any harm? Not really, because the show doesn’t take itself very seriously. But it does bring a lot of unnecessary complexity to the story, as the writers now have to think about when this information leaks to the passengers and the consequences of that happening, how to handle the actor characters once their function of fooling the people is exposed and no longer required, and a host of other ripple effects13. These scenarios might yield some great humor, sure, but they will always be awkward and artificial, because your audience will always be wondering on some level why in the world it was necessary to include this bit.
The most amazing thing about Avenue 5? The fact that it got a second season. This kind of sci-fi humor usually doesn’t fare too well, and the show made exactly zero cultural penetration as far as I can tell. Unless appearing in this newsletter counts as cultural penetration, which seems exceedingly unlikely.
Next week: Velvet Was the Night and the difficulty of hiding twists.
I also saw Masters of Reality play there when they had Ginger Baker drumming for them and about 15 people showed up for that as well, proving I went to school with classless morons.
First of all, we need more cruise ship-based horror. The setting is inherently terrifying. Not just because of the conspicuous consumption, late-stage capitalism horrors it represents but because of the people I imagine actually enjoy the cruise experience (shudder).
Any show that acknowledges the engineering challenge of managing all the shit several thousand people produce gets an extra star from me, always.
This sequence was both hilarious and unsettling and I like to watch it over and over again whenever I’m feeling sad.
People who were surprised to discover Laurie is English after watching House all those years obviously have never heard of Blackadder or A Bit of Fry and Laurie and I feel sad for them.
I always wonder what it’s like to be an actor and you keep getting cast in roles that are specifically predicated on being unattractive people. And then I think, based on that, *I* could be an actor, because no one can method act unattractive like me.
Although this is highly improbable, as the actors at theme parks and restaurants and such always form into tight anti-customer cliques instinctively.
Writing humor is especially hard. Any writer who has attempted humor knows the horror of sitting there while someone reads your story and you’re getting, like, zero laughs.
We must always remember that for every moment science makes the universe slightly more amazing and magical, there is always a moment where it makes it slightly less amazing and magical. Most of those times will involve death and feces.
When I was a child I often dreamed of putting on my Canadian Tuxedo and packing my things into a rucksack and wandering the Earth with that song playing in my head. Hulking out was optional, but preferable, in this fantasy.
I’m still working on a riff off of It’s a Wonderful Life wherein my entire existence is erased and … nothing changes, good or bad.
As a counter-demonstration, if I was a fictional character and you removed the whiskey obsession, sarcasm, and incompetence, there would be no personality left. They’re all I’ve got.
Plus, every time a joke pulls on the thread of Captain Clark being fake it just reminds the audience of this weird, unnecessary detail.
I just returned from my first, and last, cruise. Cruise-based horror is a genre I can definitely wrap my head around.