It’s Mad Men in Space, almost. Disney+ marks its first anniversary with The Right Stuff, an eight-part drama based on Tom Wolfe’s non-fiction book of the same name (and the 1983 film that was based on that) about the astronauts of Nasa’s Project Mercury, the Mercury Seven.
Like Mad Men, it is set in the late 1950s and early 60s and everything – especially the suited and booted, would-be conquering heroes at its core – looks slick and gorgeous. That much you might expect from a Disney-made tale of real life derring-do, but what is unexpected is that the show concentrates on what a mess everything was, including the astronauts (apart from John Glenn, apparently), behind the scenes. It’s a particularly bold departure from the more tempting and traditional template at a time when commissioners, makers and viewers alike could all be forgiven for wanting to wallow in nostalgia and revisit what still count, however gilded the narrative has become, as past glories.
After a brief scene establishing established hostilities between Glenn (Patrick J Adams) and fellow Mercurial Sevener Alan Shepard (Jake McDorman) over breakfast on the day of the first Mercury launch in May 1961, we flash back to 1959. We are two years into the space race sparked by the Soviet successes with Sputniks 1 and 2, the US president has promised to put a man in space before the end of the decade and Nasa is freaking out at its chances.
We meet the head of the Space Task Group, Bob Gilruth (played by Patrick Fischler, the actor for all your buttoned-up-but-charismatic-leaders-of-a-certain-age-who-still-need-to-look-good-in-uniform needs, who is searching down the backs of sofas for funding at Edwards Air Force Base and hoping that the Russians won’t colonise Mars before the US has a chance to put a cardboard rocket or two in the air. He takes delivery of a list of 110 of the best of the best of the best, most manly of manly men from the armed forces, from which he will choose the seven to be trained as – and who will come to define the image of – astronauts for Project Mercury. One of them will become the first American in space.
We first meet them as individuals who have no idea how their destinies are being shaped by a couple of guys poring over eight sheets of potential candidates for an era-defining job. Gordon Cooper is waking up with a busted hand amid the shards of a whisky tumbler after the funeral of a friend, with whom he was Topgunning. As Gilruth doesn’t quite put it, test pilots are childish idiots so they get killed a lot. Glenn is quietly raging that his distinguished career seems to be over at 38. And Shepard is zipping up his pants after his latest extra-marital fling and on his way to berate his superiors for giving him a desk job when he is cleverer than God and a lot better at flying (I paraphrase, but not much). We meet the remaining four a little later on, though one of the flaws of the series is that they remain relatively underdeveloped characters, virtually indistinguishable from each other.
The main focus is on Cooper’s guilt-laden grief and the domestic problems that threaten his fitness for the mission, and the rivalry between Shepard and Glenn. At first, it is merely professional, then expanding as they become celebrities, front men and effective fundraisers for the space programme entire – a second job, at which Glenn excels and the volatile Shepard does not. Into this loose triumvirate’s story is interwoven an impressive amount of detail about the politics of the space programme, the media construction of a modern archetype, and the technical difficulties that beset Project Mercury. But it doesn’t leave much room for any of the characters who aren’t the top three of the top seven of the top 110.
Unexpectedly – again – it does slightly better than one has learned to hope for with the wives in tales of Men Doing Manly Things, Especially in the Past. I wonder if some deliberate punching up went on to head off accusations of letting more pale male staleness fill our screens. If so, it worked, within the limits set by a story ineluctably about seven men and the men who put them into space. Annie Glenn (Norah Zehetner) is a devoted housewife with, nevertheless, a perspicacious take on their life, its circumscriptions and the stresses to come. Trudy Cooper (Eloise Mumford) was a pilot herself when they met and is shown wrestling with Gordon’s need for her and her own desire to return to flying, which his success might make possible, and Louise Shepard (Shannon Lucio) is not left simply to absorb her husband’s hound-dogging with a saintly smile.
The Right Stuff doesn’t reach for the stars, but looks back to the Earth from which the phenomenon of astronauts and space travel, the glamour and the myths grew, along with the appetites they fed, and is all the more interesting for that.
