Utopias are rarely for everyone, and that certainly seems to be the case in Moonhaven, a new AMC+ show set in a tiny moon colony 100 years in the future. There’s murder! There’s strife! There’s Joe Manganiello (True Blood) and Dominic Monaghan (beloved hobbit bro)! And there are, of course, the monochromatic robes that are de rigueur in so many u- and dystopias. How would we know to distrust the system if people were wearing more than one color at a time?
Moonhaven, for all that the trailer seems made of of bits of other future stories and also our Earth procedurals, has a promising pedigree: It comes from writer-producer Peter Ocko, a producer and writer on Black Sails, Dead Like Me, Pushing Daisies, and Elementary. That last one seems especially relevant here, as Moonhaven involves cops and conspiracies that a space Sherlock Holmes might’ve had a field day with.
Buy the Book
A Half-Built Garden
Instead, we have Earth pilot Bella Sway (Emma McDonald), who finds herself in all kinds of trouble on Moonhaven. Here’s the summary:
Moonhaven focuses on Bella Sway, a lunar cargo pilot and smuggler 100 years in the future who finds herself accused of a crime and marooned on Moonhaven, a utopian community set on a 500 square mile Garden of Eden built on the Moon to find solutions to the problems that will soon end civilization on Mother Earth. A skeptic in Paradise, Bella is sucked into a conspiracy to gain control of the artificial intelligence responsible for Moonhaven’s miracles and teams with a local detective to stop the forces that want to destroy Earth’s last hope before they are destroyed themselves.
Along with McDonald, Manganiello (as a diplomat’s aide), and Monaghan (playing said local detective), the cast includes Ayelet Zurer (Daredevil’s Vanessa), Kadeem Hardison (Black Monday), and Yazzmin Newell (The Irregulars).
The dialogue in this trailer is distressingly heavy-handed (“It’s about solving us”? What does that even mean?). But if you put a bunch of people on the moon and ruffle up their utopian visions, I will, inevitably, want to see what happens. Moonhaven has a double-episode premiere July 7th on AMC+.
