“I’m laughing because I’m terrified,” says Ryan Clark, ‘captain’ of a luxury space cruise ship. This is the approach taken by Avenue 5 — we’re all trapped in this mess together, most (if not all) of us are either incompetent and idiotic or largely powerless, and things are getting worse, so it’s best to just crack a joke. Clark is terrified, and captain is in quotations, because he’s not an actual captain; he and the other ‘crew’ are actors paid to look professional on a Carnival-style cruise line through the cosmos. When the ship is in actual danger, there’s hardly anyone capable of saving it.
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Set in the somewhat distant but extremely plausible future, the Sky Original series (streaming on HBO Max) is a sci-fi comedy that chronicles the extended journey of this literal ship of fools. What began as an interplanetary resort meant to last weeks is turned into a three-year nightmare when the spaceship is sent off course.
The aforementioned crew are moronic frauds playing Star Trek, hired by the corporate overlord Herman Judd, a kind of 22nd century, more successful version of Donald Trump who owns the ship. Alongside the nihilistic Head of Customer Relations Matt Spencer, the increasingly frustrated (but actually legitimate) engineer Billie, and a handful of others, the so-called leaders of Avenue 5 will attempt to save the ship from a force more deadly than the coldness of space — human stupidity.
Avenue 5 Holds a Midterm Election
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In its second and last season after Avenue 5 disappeared for nearly three years, the show (created by the people behind the equally hilariously profane The Thick of It and Veep) has only gotten more reflective of the current sociopolitical climate. Its crew members (played by a wonderful ensemble cast including Hugh Laurie, Josh Gad, Zach Woods, Rebecca Front, and more) grapple with their own failures as leaders while the passengers increasingly descend into a chaotic mob, embracing their own ignorance and idiocy.
The recent fifth episode of Avenue 5’s second season aired the night before the big midterm elections in America, where “democracy is on the ballot,” to quote a million media personalities. The episode, entitled Let’s Play with Matches, finds the passengers holding an impromptu election after they realize that their adjunct leaders (who have no right leading anything) have screwed up yet again. Leading the polls are a fictional television character (from a TV show in Avenue 5 that’s based on the misadventures of the Avenue 5 itself) and a literal cannibal. One ‘presidential nominee’ states, “I put the ‘i’ in benign dictator.”
Clearly, Avenue 5 has a dim view of humanity (in it, the American president is an artificial intelligence Alexa-style machine assisted by the spoiled, foolhardy grandchildren of Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk), but are we really deserving of a brighter gaze? The midterm elections in America have seen some extremely stupid (and actually mentally ill or neurologically impaired) candidates, along with hundreds of election-deniers oxymoronically seeking an election. A new circular logic has taken hold of Americans with a profound dumbness — if my party loses, then the election is rigged, but it wins, then it isn’t; people who have cast widespread doubt about voting are asking for our votes. The insane election of Avenue 5 (where a character is ultimately elected based on his resemblance to the beloved fictional TV character) is probably just as maddening as the real-life ones.
The Dumb Mass of Ordinary Stupid People
Sky OneHBO
This is hardly the only instance of Armando Iannucci’s hilarious show taking swipes at human stupidity, pettiness, and susceptibility toward groupthink. Avenue 5 often finds its passengers oscillating between wanting to hang their leaders and just wanting some strongman fascist to tell them that everything’s great again. They’re very happy when being pampered, but as soon as supplies begin to dwindle or bad news descends, they’re ready for a murderous riot.
Perhaps the most harrowing example was when a particularly dumb faction of passengers developed the conspiracy that everything was fake on the ship Avenue 5. After all, the whole crew were just staged actors hired by the incompetent corporate overlord to make everything look professional. However, when they rally to the air lock and force their way past common sense and dismayed crew members, passenger after passenger gets frozen and thrown out into the endless cold abyss of space. “It’s VFX, guys!” one incredibly ignorant, corn dog-eating passenger says, as more of them line up to escape what they think is a prank reality show, heading like proverbial lemmings to their icy deaths. “It stands for visual effects!” she reiterates.
“We just watched seven people stupid themselves to death,” the fake captain says.
Zach Woods as Matt and the Quotes of Avenue 5
“It’s like a nest of vipers developed a sense of entitlement,” one man says in disbelief at the complete brainlessness of his fellow passengers. The thing is, Avenue 5 makes it clear that these people haven’t just gone mad from being trapped in space; no, their entrapment has laid bare their inherent madness. These people are angry, brash, foolish, and completely petulant, and the leaders aren’t much better, though they often have enough sense to recognize their own dim-witted mistakes. The fraudulent captain and crew, the CEO and his stone-faced assistant, the beleaguered engineer, and more struggle to do what’s (kind of) right, but this is a dumb man’s world.
The best they can do, again, is crack jokes, and there are a ton of them. Avenue 5 is brimming with great one-liners. The king of them all, however, comes from the mouth of Matt, the inexplicable Head of Customer Relations. Matt, played to absolute perfection by Zach Woods (Silicon Valley), is simply one of the greatest TV characters of all time. He’s a radically honest nihilist who leans toward libertarianism, extremely dark humor, and surreal detachment from the world, and almost everything he says is golden. Here’s a sample:
Avenue 5 Predicted Covid, and Season 2 Predicts the Downfall of Democracy
Avenue 5 is not just eerily prescient and spot-on about the elections (obviously, the episode which aired the night before was written, filmed, and edited long before the midterm elections), but was extremely accurate when it came to the Covid-19 pandemic. When Avenue 5, a show about people trapped in an isolated space, aired in January 2020, no one could have guessed that mere months later, the same thing would happen to the world. The pandemic sent people into quarantine, but it also led to a lot of poor governmental decisions, a slew of idiotic conspiracies, and an angry mob of people who hate masks and vaccinations.
“This is a safe space, emotionally. Physically, we’re obviously in terrible danger.”
“I am trained to make sure your body wash gets replenished, not to rectify the catastrophe of human existence.”
“Poor octopus. Eight arms but no hands. F*** You, God!”
“Every year, we pass the pre-anniversary of our death, but we don’t even know it so we don’t get presents.”
Watching Avenue 5 now, as America prepares itself for another virus (election denial, the death of democracy, and sure, even more Covid), it’s hard to see any differences between its grim view of human stupidity and the actual dumbness of us in the real world. It’s even harder to disagree with the engineer when she looks upon the crowd of jeering, hateful, moronic faces and says:
Avenue 5, a Sky Original series, is accessible on Sky Comedy and NOW TV in the UK, and HBO and HBO Max in the US.
All of you morons deserve everything that’s coming to you.
