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These days, it seems that everyone wants to get in on the original streaming content game. Big kids on the block Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu have already proven that there’s an audience, and now a range of smaller content providers are adding short-run original series to their varied offerings. Search engine and email giant Yahoo! earned some major good will with this reviewer earlier in the year when they saved former NBC sitcom Community for its self-prophesied sixth season. Under the heading Yahoo! Screen, they’ve launched a couple of small series—the most recent being Paul Feig’s Other Space, a sci-fi sitcom that starts out a little wobbly but rights the ship in short order.
Sending up Star Trek by way of The Office, Other Space follows the maiden voyage of the Universal Mapping Project ship Cruiser under the command of new captain Stewart Lapinski (Karan Soni) and his crew of hopelessly inept misfits, including his overly aggressive sister and first officer, Karen (Bess Rous), and his unrequited crush, Tina (Milana Vayntrub). Almost immediately, the Cruiser finds itself on the other side of a tear in space, leaving the crew stranded with no idea how to do their own jobs, much less find a way back to Earth.
Now Paul Feig’s a pretty funny guy, as he’s proven on TV series like the underappreciated Freaks and Geeks and hit movies like Bridesmaids. That said, there’s a reason why you can’t bring to mind many sci-fi sitcoms outside of the very British Red Dwarf. The jokes don’t always play broadly enough outside the genre, while the cheaper sets and lack of budget for special effects blunt the appeal for a regular science fiction audience.
Feig steers into the challenge by clearly defining Other Space as a workplace comedy with some sci-fi influence and window dressing. Each crew member starts off as a collection of loosely defined quirks—from a sycophantic junior officer (Eugene Cordero) to a perpetually burnt-out engineer (Joel Hodgson). Early jokes are standard fare, relying on these traits in ways that we’ve all seen plenty of times before. As things go along and the small crew begins to play off each other in new ways, the ensemble becomes much more satisfying.
Other Space takes opportunities along the way to run its gang of idiots through a number of familiar sci-fi tropes. There are shape-shifting aliens, robot uprisings, and time travel shenanigans aplenty, each serving less as an imperative plot and more as a playground for the characters to interact. In only eight episodes, Other Space manages to cram in a fairly hefty amount of material without getting dragged down by much of it. It’s still got a number of small issues to work on, but after watching the entire season, I’m on board enough to be looking forward to a second season.
It’s not going to work that way for everyone—whether that’s because it’s still tough to convincingly sell science fiction on a miniscule budget or because the cast still needs to sand some of the rougher edges off their characters. The great thing about an online series like this is that it can settle into its own niche without worrying about weekly ratings or time-slot competition. With a little work and a little luck, Other Space can help Yahoo! Screen explore this strange new streaming world for some time to come.
Ed. Note: You can view the entire first season of Other Space on Yahoo! Screen.
