‘Avenue 5’ to build on Hugh Laurie’s American oeuvre with incompetent Captain Clark after ‘Veep’ and ‘House MD’
After puttering around the globe singing the blues, and going head to head with Julia Louis-Dreyfus in 'Veep' as Senator Tom James, Hugh Laurie is back with 'Avenue 5' premiering January 19 on HBO. For American audiences, Laurie is and always will be Dr. House.
Only a few, this side of the pond, have dug into Laurie's comedic oeuvre that made him a household name (along with Stephen Fry) in the U.K. While 'House M.D.' did have its moments of humor and 'Veep' gave us a taste of his comedic chops, 'Avenue 5' will see Laurie in a bonafide leading man role in a primetime comedy TV series.
The space comedy will have Laurie as Captain Ryan Clark. He will play the ship’s charming captain who is in charge of piloting the "self-driving" cruise spaceship but who is rather useless in a crisis when the ship's systems malfunction, stranding them in space.
Being affable and clueless is what best describes Laurie in his most memorable comic on-screen appearances to date -- from 'A Bit of Fry and Laurie' to 'Blackadder' to 'Jeeves and Wooster'. Veep's Armando Iannucci, the show creator for this space tourism comedy, is giving Laurie the chance to stretch those comedic muscles again.
Trailers for the new show see Laurie's Captain Clark Avenue chatting with the tourists aboard the dildo-shaped fancy cruise spaceship that is taking a short joy trip. A mishap onboard changes the ship’s trajectory, stretching the trip from a few weeks to three years.
Even as his own incompetence is revealed, he realizes the people he is surrounded with are even less qualified than him to handle the crisis. The billionaire owner of the cruise ship, Herman Judd (Josh Gad ) throws off all responsibility while Matt Spencer (Zach Woods) as the Head of the customer relations manager, makes the situation even worse when he is unable to manage the rioting tourists onboard.
The humor utilizes Laurie's ability to play the straight man foil to the increasingly bizarre environment onboard the ship, further complicated by his underlings, bosses and the ship's tourists.
While 'The Orville', the other ongoing space comedy, parodies Star Trek, 'Avenue 5' could just as easily been a comedy set on a cruise ship on Earth. But the space angle allows Iannucci to play out some of the more bizarre space lore and theories to a comedic end.
The ship uses its passengers’ own feces to create a shield against radiation in one episode while in another the space debris that starts orbiting the ship creates its own gravity field. As the ship lurches from one crisis to the next, Nikki Amuka-Bird as Rav Mulcair, head of Mission Control, tries to get NASA to help launch a rescue.
As a high concept sitcom, 'Avenue 5' will have competition with the other space-comedy 'Space Force', created by Greg Daniels and Steve Carell and starring Carell and John Malkovich to be released on Netflix in 2020. While 'Avenue 5' will derive its humor from pitting civilians against the vagaries of the universe, 'Space Force' is being pitched as 'The Office' in space. The Carell vs Laurie is one space comedy battle you don't want to miss.
'Avenue 5' premieres January 19 on HBO.