It doesn’t help that the entire premise of the show is based around the idea that its main cast of female characters are only important because of what their husbands do. It’s a sign of the times the show takes place in, but it doesn’t feel self-aware of its modern audience the way dramas like Mad Men did when tackling taboo topics like feminism and homophobia.
Still, easily the show’s most sinful act is in its utter lack of tension and drama, especially when surrounding such momentous points in history. When the Life writer promises to dig into each family and weed out every skeleton, the women meet his gaze with steely smiles. “We’ve got nothing to hide,” one of them says. The show wants to build scandals around the hidden secrets of each woman but since we barely have time to know them, especially in the pilot, nothing teased about any of them makes you care to learn more.
It shows occasional promise in individual character moments, especially during a quiet moment after Rene Carpenter (Yvonne Strahovski) confronts a nosy reporter hassling Annie Glenn (Azure Parsons), but the big picture of the show is distressingly out of focus. In fact, maybe the strongest aspect of the pilot is Azure Parsons’ Annie, a character who isn’t bound by the writers’ lame dialogue due to an interesting character-defining twist, and who subsequently comes out on top as both the show’s most intriguing character and its most likeable. A false compliment, perhaps, to tout a show’s lone mute as its shining star, but in this gaggle of overwrought exposition, Annie’s silence speaks volumes.
But she isn’t enough to save an entire series. The whole first few hours fall so flat: its dialogue too tepid, its score too earnest, and its characters with no interesting or believable edge. It’s easy to want to back a show with such a boldfaced message of our need to look to the stars – there have been two tent-pole films in the past year about just that – but that’s the only modern emotional connection the show makes, and even then it’s tenuous.
For such grand, universally important consequences, the first three hours of The Astronaut Wives Club feel like disconcertingly low stakes television. It’s got high hopes in its era-relevant setting, but all of the problems swirling around the opening hours drastically rob it of any Mad Men comparisons that the show so obviously wants plastered on the back of a DVD cover. The occasional reminder that all of this really happened will cause a slight uptick in appreciation of both the men and women the show is based on, but it’s only occasional. The rest of the time you’ll be wondering how something so cosmically awesome as the real-life events the show was inspired by could be translated into something as unimaginative as this.
