It looks like luxury space tourism is getting the Veep treatment. HBO has released the first teaser for its new sci-fi comedy, Avenue 5, and it’s exactly the sort of sweary, dysfunctional-w0rkplace fun we’ve come to expect from Armando Ianucci.
In this case, the incompetent officials are the top brass of a luxury space cruise: an “outwardly confident” captain (Hugh Laurie), his cutthroat fixer (Suzy Nakamura), the nihilistic head of customer relations (Zach Woods), a second engineer who’s “terrified of dying in space” (Lenora Crichlow), and the spoiled billionaire who owns the whole thing (Josh Gad). When the cruise takes off, they’re already mildly shit-talking the passengers, and when something goes horribly wrong, they dial the misanthropy up to eleven.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Emu0I2hNfUk&feature=youtu.be
Here’s the official synopsis from HBO:
Avenue 5 is a space tourism comedy set 40 years in the future when the solar system is everyone’s oyster. Hugh Laurie will star as the Captain, and with him in charge, nothing can go wrong.
(We’re also quite partial to the one from IMDb, which reads, simply, “Space captain Ryan Clark of the Avenue 5 tries to get along with others in the space tourism industry.”
The full list of character descriptions can be found here. Avenue 5 arrives on HBO in January, 2020.
