TAGGED AS: Comedy, HBO Max, streaming, television, TV
After a two-year wait, HBO’s Avenue 5 is back with season 2, and, in case you’re wondering, the situation on the commercial space flight is still as precarious as ever. Created by Veep’s Armando Iannucci, the future-leaning sci-fi satire posits the notion that in just 40 years, hopping on a luxury cruise ship in space will totally be a thing.
But what happens when the 5,000 people on board find themselves stranded? And how will the crew handle the emergency situation to get everyone home safely? These are two of the main questions guiding the series that finds the space cruise’s dysfunctional leadership team ineptly doing their best to fix every problem that arises, while trying not to tear each other apart in the process.
Hugh Laurie leads the cast as Captain Ryan, who isn’t a captain at all, but actually an actor hired to exude an air of knowledge and gravitas (though the actor playing captain really has no leadership qualities). This voyage really needs competence at the helm, though; as the season 1 finale revealed, the ship is off course and will be stuck up there for about eight years — a small detail known only to the captain and his crew.
(Photo by Nick Wall/HBO)
Rounding out the crew are Josh Gad’s narcissistic billionaire Herman Judd, Jach Woods’ unhinged spiritual head of customer relations Matt Spencer, Judd’s head of mission control Rav Mulcair (Nikki Amuka-Bird), second engineer Billie McAvoy (played by Lenora Crichlow), Judd’s right-hand woman Iris Kimura (Suzy Nakamura), and Ethan Phillips’ space enthusiast, and former astronaut, Spike Martin.
The stakes are raised considerably this time around, with threats ranging from driving everyone straight into the fiery sun, to being potentially murdered by a gang of space criminals only cracking the tip of the iceberg.
Rotten Tomatoes spoke with Hugh Laurie and Armando Iannucci ahead of the season’s premiere to dig into the changed dynamic of the new episodes, the struggle to maintain a leadership team amid all the space chaos, and if more seasons are in the cards.
(Photo by Nick Wall/HBO)
Aaron Pruner for Rotten Tomatoes: Armando, during the season 1 press tour for Avenue 5 way back in 2019 when the world was different, you compared the show to Fyre Festival in space. Does that comparison still track?
Armando Iannucci: I think Lord of the Flies is closer now, given what we’ve all been through.
Hugh Laurie: I think in a funny way, though, that it’s actually got more optimism in, as much as, we haven’t died yet.
Wait, we’re still talking about the show, right?
Laurie: [Laughs] It’s remarkable enough. Even though the predicament we’re in is getting steadily worse, the fact that human society can cling on and function, even if it’s in a pretty ragged fashion, I think that she gives me hope. I hope people will find it a bit cheering even though they’re watching the disintegration of everything they hold dear.
That’s one way of putting it. Going into these new episodes, it was tough to figure just how things could get worse for the Avenue 5 crew and its passengers. Well, wait, you’re not just off course, but now everyone is heading towards the sun. Is the goal this season to see how many fiery levels of hell you could throw everyone through in order to see if people can overcome conflict, come together as a team and make it out alive?
Iannucci: It’s Dante’s Inferno in space; that’s what it is.
Put it on the marquee.
Iannucci: I don’t know. I suppose in season 1, there were lots of things happening outside the ship. Season 2, it’s all about the dynamic inside the ship, now. It’s about people that actually learn to work with each other to try and save themselves; to try and get the best out of each other.
And what better way to save themselves than to follow a worthy leader. How’s Captain Ryan dealing with yet another unfortunate calamity? Is he filling the role of captain better now that he’s been on the ship for a while?
Laurie: It’s an interesting trajectory for every human life, you could argue, that what you want begins as a kind of adolescent fakery of adulthood. Particularly with me, maybe it’s true of girls as well as boys, but, we strut around trying to be versions of our fathers and trying to think, Well, what makes me sound more grown up? How can I persuade people that I belong here? Or that, I can do this!, or, I’m equal to that! And then gradually, the faking becomes the reality, and you forget that it was ever faked.
(Photo by Nick Wall/HBO)
So we are all, in some way, faking it till we make it, then?
Laurie: Well, it’s like when you decide when you’re going to sign your name. As a teenager, you start messing around with signatures, autographs, and then at some point, it’s not conscious or calculated anymore. The fake conscious effort has become the real you. And I think that’s sort of what Ryan’s life really is: He has become, as it were, a real fake. They’ve sort of melded into each other. And maybe, just maybe, that’s what most human beings are really like. We’re all slightly feeling like we’re kind of faking it a bit, or some of us, quite a lot. And we’re all half expecting to get called out; to have someone blow a whistle.
This sounds like, basically, any leader in the news currently.
Laurie: How many of the world’s most successful leaders, when you read about them, actually, were conscious of the fact that they were performing the role of being a leader?
But to be a leader, accountability and responsibility do end up eventually coming into play. Will we ever get to a point in season 2 where one person clearly steps up and accepts the blame for whatever catastrophe they’re all currently facing?
Laurie: The people making the decisions, whether they’re entitled to make them or not, they are at least in the same circumstances that people are making decisions for. These are people making decisions about a world that they themselves do not exist on Avenue 5. For all the terrible blundering of Ryan and John and everybody else, they are in all in the same boat. We’re all trying to survive one thing and bring this spacecraft to give it a happy ending, so to speak. And that’s a very different form of accountability. That’s the very unavoidable kind.
(Photo by Nick Wall/HBO)
Considering the fact that everyone is stranded in space for eight years, is there the potential for the program to last that long?
Iannucci: I can see an endpoint in my head as to what might happen at the end. But how long it takes to get there is entirely in the lap of Rotten Tomatoes and in the audience. But you know, certainly we’d love to do more, and I’d love to see the ship reach its end.
There was a considerable gap between seasons, so it’s nice to reconnect with all this nuttiness in space and get some distance from all this nuttiness on Earth.
Iannucci: It’s been a long gap, though it’s been nearly all because of COVID. Well, wait — we had a set go on fire. And we’re still in a pandemic. So? Yeah.
From fiery spaceship chaos to fiery real-life mishaps. What’s next?
Iannucci: Right. I guess we’re inspiring reality, and vice versa.
89%
Avenue 5: Season 2
(2022)
premieres Monday, October 10 on HBO
