7 day print subscribers enjoy unlimited access to yakimaherald.com Enter the LAST NAME and the 7 DIGIT phone number on your print subscription account to connect your print subscription to your yakimaherald.com account.<doc-sep>Hulu’s eight-part drama “The First” begins as a space exploration drama on its way to Mars, but the show, like the mission it depicts, never quite lifts off the ground. The British-American production by “House of Cards” Beau Willimon and starring Sean Penn has all the right ingredients of another breakthrough drama series from the streaming service that gave us “The Handmaid’s Tale.” But it becomes so entangled in the human drama of its troubled characters here on Earth that it loses momentum soon after blast off. “The First” is more about the cost of scientific exploration rather than the exploration itself, and the currency is both monetary and emotional. The series, available in its entirety Friday, follows Dr. Thomas Hagerty (Penn), a veteran astronaut who’s been to the moon and back. He, like the series, lives in a not-so-distant future where VR glasses are the norm, cars drive by voice command and homes are semi-automated. Advertisement We meet the widower and single father at what appears to be another low period in his life. He was chosen to command the first mission to colonize Mars only to be relieved of his duty by the head of the project, Laz Ingram (Natascha McElhone). She’s an Elon Musk-type whose scientific exploration operation Vista relies partly on government funding. We don’t learn in the first three episodes reviewed here why she pulled Hagerty from the mission, but it is clear that he’s a rebel who moonwalks to his own tune. Hagerty watches from his home in New Orleans as the astronaut team he assembled for the operation are killed when the rocket explodes shortly after liftoff. It’s a riveting series start, and it all happens inside of episode one. It’s clear from the outset, however, that “The First” isn’t the next action-packed step in film and TV’s reach for the stars, or ratings. Unlike “Apollo 13” or Netflix’s “Mission to Mars,” the cerebral Hulu series is more interested in the emotional and monetary price of space travel rather than the interstellar drama of incoming asteroids, oxygen leaks, alien stowaways, etc. The impact of the failed mission has scarred the families of the astronauts and the public who watched the rocket explode in real time, but it’s also called into question the validity of such risky ventures. Are they vanity projects of Musk types or sacrifices for the greater good? There are several scenes in which the embattled Vista corporation argues its case before Congress. They explain why space exploration is critical to human advancement while senators argue that funding and energy is better spent here on Earth for things such as education. Set our sights on a new planet, or fix the planet we’re on? That is the question. The problem with “The First,” however, is not the divisive debate. It’s the slow-paced examination of all the personal dramas attached to the Mars program. Hagerty is a brooding, conflicted figure who lost his wife and is trying not to lose his daughter, recovering addict Denise (Anna Jacoby-Heron). She is still grappling with her mother’s death while her internalizing father avoids the subject at all costs. Meanwhile, Ingram has forfeited her emotions and relationships with her kids in pursuit of bigger, better technological advancements. She and Hagerty clash — it’s her corporate drive and capitalistic instincts versus his love affair with space and humanity. Advertisement That dynamic underpins their search for a new team to man another launch, and now she wants Hagerty back in as commander. For viewers, it means that the final frontier of space will have to wait. This series is a journey through every other character’s personal sub-plot and back story, and it’s no trip to the stars. Astronaut Aiko Hakari (Keiko Agena) will leave behind her family and a mother with Alzheimer’s if that rocket ever leaves the launchpad. Kayla Price (LisaGay Hamilton) has conflicts with Hagerty and her own fraught past that keep her awake at night. Viewers will spend lots of time hearing about the characters’ problems over dinners, business meetings and on the sidelines of a karaoke get-together. If only they’d spent more time in the training module, or even those grueling exercises through the Louisiana swamps. “The First” is a beautiful and haunting sensory experience thanks to imagery by cinematography Adam Stone and music by Colin Stetson. But the meandering series can also feel navel-gazing and pretentious thanks to intermittent, spoken-word narration and weird interludes about the cicada’s lifespan, or something. There’s also the out-of-character bohemian lifestyle that disciplined astronaut Hagerty leads: He was married to a tattoo artist and lives in an arty loft space. His daughter listens to Perfume Genius … on vinyl. Advertisement As for the mission to Mars: What mission? The faraway planet never gets any closer as “The First” dives deeper and deeper into galaxies’ worth of human strife here on Earth. ‘The First’ Where: Hulu When: Any time, starting Friday Advertisement Rating: TV-MA (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 17) lorraine.ali@latimes.com @lorraineali<doc-sep>Giving a good review of Hulu’s new drama The First feels like a betrayal of everything I stand for as a critic. It’s a show about Sean Penn going to Mars that never actually has him set foot on Mars. Hell, he doesn’t leave Earth until halfway through the season one finale. (There are eight episodes in said season, and I’ve seen them all.) It’s weird, slow-moving, pretentious, and more stretched-out than taffy that’s been left in a car on a hot summer day. It feels like creator Beau Willimon (of House of Cards fame) took the first 10 pages of a novel, or the first five minutes of the Christopher Nolan movie Interstellar, and expanded them into eight episodes of television. Rating: 4 out of 5 vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark These are all qualities I hate in modern TV drama, which never met an interesting premise — the first humans to visit Mars — that it couldn’t slow way the fuck down. I call it “when are they gonna get to the fireworks factory?” television, after the 1997 Simpsons episode “The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show” (still one of the best TV episodes about the TV industry ever made). Milhouse, frustrated by an episode of Itchy & Scratchy that never brings the titular cat and mouse to a fireworks factory promised by road signs, wails the line, and it’s a stand-in for every time a story just keeps withholding the interesting stuff in favor of something else entirely. You’d better believe that The First is “when are they gonna get to the fireworks factory?” television. You’d also better believe that it’s leaden and self-serious and features, like footage of the life cycle of a cicada intercut with young people hooking up and a man with a vaguely Cajun accent drawling about nothing in particular over stock footage of the planet. But oh boy did I find The First emotionally overwhelming and hard to shake. It got under my skin in a way I never would have predicted. What The First is: a surprisingly affecting drama about several families and a planet in crisis. What it’s not: a show about going to Mars. The First is perhaps best understood by watching its strongest hour, a nearly standalone episode that steps out of the season to tell a story about one family slowly but surely falling apart. Dubbed “Two Portraits,” the season’s fifth episode focuses on Denise, the daughter of Penn’s character, Tom. Played by Anna Jacoby-Heron (whom I had never heard of before The First, and who is simply remarkable), Denise embarks on painting a portrait of her late mother (Melissa George) and in the process of filling in the blank canvas slowly comes to better understand the woman who gave birth to her. I’m treading very carefully here to avoid spoilers, because even though viewers will have figured out most of the reveals in “Two Portraits” before they’re directly depicted, the episode feels like a steady excavation of scar tissue. Knowing the wound is there doesn’t stop the arrival of the part where you uncover it and wince at the red, open gash. Directed by the brilliant French-Turkish director Deniz Gamze Ergüven (whose 2015 film Mustang was one of my favorites of that year), “Two Portraits” is often filmed as though it’s a stage play, with pools of light isolating the actors and key pieces of set decoration in massive blank dark spaces. It’s a canny depiction of how someone like Denise might come to better understand her parents and their failings as she grew up, and the older she gets, the less blinkered her perspective becomes. And all three actors involved bring their absolute best. (Penn seems a little disinterested at other points in the series — which is his first regular TV series role — but he’s as good as he’s ever been in “Two Portraits.”) And despite that it works as a standalone episode, “Two Portraits” also helped me better understand what The First is doing. This is not a show about the people going to Mars. It’s a show about the people going to Mars. That might seem like a subtle distinction, but it explains why, say, the show will butt up against what seems like a major conflict — we see Tom squabble with Laz (the woman funding the expedition, played by Natascha McElhone as a woman with immense money and power who never feels comfortable with herself) over which of two people to bring on the expedition to another planet — only to cut forward by a matter of weeks or months, the conflict long since resolved. (In this case, the person chosen is just suddenly on the team, and The First trusts us to figure out how it happened.) It can all be a little bit much. When you sit down and think about it, everything that happens in season one of The First could have probably been condensed into three or four episodes. But that would have left less room for “Two Portraits,” or for the episodes that build up the lives of the other astronauts who will join Tom on his mission, or for a long series of interviews between Laz and a hostile journalist (the great Bill Camp). I viscerally understand just how much this show is going to turn off some viewers. It is slow-moving and ponderous, and the occasional monologues from the Cajun voiceover guy are really ridiculous. I have a feeling that for every viewer who really cottons to The First, there will be three or four who spend their entire viewing howling at its self-seriousness. All I can say in my defense is that when the space explorers finally set off toward Mars — which, again, doesn’t happen until the middle of the season one finale — I teared up. It got me. I don’t know how else to explain myself.<doc-sep>Who knew space travel could be this boring? Set in the near future, Hulu's "The First" stars Sean Penn as an astronaut on the first manned mission to Mars, in theory a daring feat of human invention and optimism that hasn't been seen since man first walked on the moon in 1969. Yet it's portrayed here as a lame slog of politics and marital squabbles. It's hard to make something as naturally captivating and ethereal as space travel dull, but "The First" (streaming Friday, ★½ out of four) has done just that. Long-winded, tedious and full of metaphors, allusions and symbols piled on top of each other in a literary garbage pile, "The First" is an unintentional parody of the expensive, self-important shows that somehow get the label "prestige TV." Creator Beau Willimon ("House of Cards") bypasses most of the the science fiction and adventure tropes that often make space drama captivating and opts instead to make a workplace and family drama that can't be rescued by Penn. Instead of elevating the material, he simply scowls his way through overwritten lines and poor facial hair choices for eight interminable episodes. More:Fall TV preview: 10 shows you need to watch The series begins with a tragedy that sets the Mars mission back years and forces Tom Hagerty (Penn), who was pushed out of the initial mission after personal problems, to come back to the fold and create a new team. The episodes follow the team's training and personal drama under the watchful eye of Laz Ingram (Natascha McElhone), a tech CEO who nabbed the multibillion-dollar government contract for the Mars expedition. There are plenty of opportunities for good storytelling in "The First," and nearly every one of them is wasted. Scenes, especially after the initial catastrophe kicks it off, lack propulsion, and an entire episode is set in congressional hearings in which Laz and Tom try to regain funding for the mission. It's all even less entertaining than the real-life hearings on cable or CSPAN. More:You won't believe Sean Penn and Harry Dean Stanton's Cannes connection The writers struggle to create well-drawn and interesting characters to populate the mission. Sadie (Hannah Ware), a scientist shunted from the Mars team on Tom's order, is a blank slate with no emotional resonance. The troubles facing Tom's daughter, Denise (Anna Jacoby-Heron), and his late wife, Diane (Melissa George), who's seen in flashbacks, remain shrouded in secrecy for half the season. The show has a bland, sanitized feel, no matter how hard its cheesy score tries to heighten the inspiration at every turn. The best sci-fi stories, underneath the robots and space flights, are great human stories. But "The First" writers have somehow made their show both too human and not human enough. Boring and poorly drawn characters get too much screen time, and its adventure story is a lame afterthought. Neither the story nor the characters are enough to draw viewers, and an unearned self-important style makes the series so grating its nearly unwatchable. "The First" is meant to take viewers to the stars, but this is one mission that never achieves liftoff.<doc-sep>
Oscar-winning actor Sean Penn has been in the movie business for decades, but he only just booked his "first" starring role in a TV show. Penn is leading The First, an original science-fiction drama series about traveling to Mars that just dropped on Hulu (and is scheduled to air on the United Kingdom's Channel 4 later this fall). Since this is such a new role for the actor, fans are likely wondering: Who does Sean Penn play on Hulu's The First? The First is a "near-future drama" taking place in New Orleans in the early 2030s. The show documents a group of five astronauts attempting to become the first (get it?) humans to colonize Mars, according to Hulu's website. Over the course of the eight-episode first season, the astronauts' quest forces them to make personal sacrifices (they are planning to move to another planet, after all) and risk their lives, the website explains. Beau Willimon, known for creating House of Cards, also created The First. Penn plays Dr. Tom Hagerty, one of the five astronauts selected for the mission to Mars. According to The Los Angeles Times, the pilot introduces viewers to Tom, a widower and a single father to a troubled teenage daughter. He's also an experienced astronaut (with trips to the moon on his resume!) and briefly the commander of the mission to colonize Mars. After he puts together a group of astronauts for the mission, a bigwig scientist named Laz Ingram (played by Natascha McElhone) swoops in and takes over his role as commander. The show's trailer features plenty of drama. There are tear-filled conversations between Tom and his daughter, between the other astronauts and their family members, and between the astronauts and their coworkers. As the astronauts' family lives are slipping through their fingers, it becomes apparent that they are all risking everything for the chance to be the first people to colonize Mars. "They're five people fulfilling the destiny of 8 billion," Laz confidently says in the trailer. In the midst of all the emotion, rockets, and 2030s seen technology in the trailer, Tom's internal struggle is palpable. His daughter needs him to stay on Earth, and he clearly wants to be there for her. However, he also desperately wants to be the one to discover life on Mars, which could mean he'll never see his daughter again. Oof. Tibrina Hobson/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images So, what drew Penn to take on this role? "I think we all recognize, whether it’s in ourselves or in others, this thing that is the explorer, the wanderer, the person who wants to take themselves out of either their own or society’s comfort zone,” Penn told The New York Times in an interview earlier this week. He also explained how he was able to get into character for the show — by talking to real astronauts. Penn got to meet with Chris Hadfield, who is known for being "the first Canadian to walk in space," according to his website. “To hear [Hadfield] talk about it, it’s universe-broadening,” Penn told The New York Times. Penn further opened up about The First on Jimmy Kimmel Live on Monday, where he highlighted the show's struggle on parenting vs. career. "He was born to be the father of his young troubled daughter, and he was born to be the commander of the first mission to Mars," Penn told Kimmel of Tom. "And do you go away for what is a two-and-a-half year mission, away from that daughter who is ... in need of a present parent?" Even if science-fiction dramas aren't usually your cup of tea, any parent who has faced that struggle is sure to relate to The First.