Avenue 5

🎨 Style and Atmosphere

The ship itself is a gorgeous bit of production design. Think big glass atriums, a recurring indoor grass lawn with koi pond, muzak. It looks like a Holland America liner if Apple built one. The joke is that all of the expense has gone on the bits of the ship the passengers can see and none on the bits that keep them alive.

The comedy is classic Iannucci. Rapid overlapping dialogue. Half-finished insults being beaten out by the next insult. Cast members clearly allowed to riff. Casual swearing used as punctuation rather than shock. A willingness to let a joke die on screen if the next one is funny enough. If you liked the cadence of The Thick of It and Veep, the cadence here is the same, just with more anti-gravity pratfalls.

Some hallmarks of the house style on display:

• Actors allowed to talk over each other to the edge of legibility
• Villains who are more petty than evil
• A writer's room visibly unwilling to respect "important" characters
• Long exchanges where nobody is listening to anyone else
• The funniest line in a scene often muttered, not shouted

📈 Reception and What Happened

Here is the honest bit. Season one premiered on HBO in January 2020. The reviews were mixed-to-warm. People liked the cast and the dialogue, but felt the satire did not quite land with the confidence of Veep. About four weeks after the premiere, COVID hit. A comedy about rich passengers trapped on a dysfunctional cruise ship suddenly read very differently to audiences watching from their own locked-down living rooms with a real cruise ship off the California coast on the news. The show's core metaphor had been overtaken by reality in the ugliest way.

Season two arrived in October 2022, two and a half years later. The world had moved on. The show had not quite figured out how to move with it. The jokes were still funny but the novelty was gone and the viewing figures were modest. HBO cancelled it in February 2023.

It should probably have been a much bigger hit than it was. With better timing it would have been the obvious follow-up to Veep and a genuinely beloved show.

Instead it sits in a slightly awkward middle tier of HBO comedy. Not a cult thing, not really. More a "have you seen this? oh, you should, it is actually quite good" word of mouth kind of show that a lot of people never got around to.

🏆 Why It Is Still Worth Watching

Hugh Laurie. Every day of the week. I came back to rewatch season one after the COVID dust had settled and was surprised at how well the comedy holds up once the baggage of the timing lifts. He spends seventeen episodes finding new ways to smile through panic while technically not lying to anyone, and it is the most fun he has looked on screen in a decade. Zach Woods doing corporate sociopathy with the politest voice in television is worth a look on its own. The ensemble is deep enough that you can pick a favourite and stay for them.

And the writing is still from the sharpest comedy brain working in English-language telly. Iannucci has other things on his CV that hit harder. The Thick of It is tighter. Veep is funnier. In the Loop is the best film any of them made. But Avenue 5 is the one where he got to play with the toys of a proper sci-fi setting and the result is a genre show that is funnier than most comedies and sharper than most sci-fi.

Watch it, keep your expectations at "smart weekend comedy" rather than "modern classic", and enjoy it for what it is. A casualty of catastrophic timing, but a very good cast in a very funny show.

Ethan Phillips

Spike Martin