“Tea, earl grey.” Oh, how I’ve waited so long to hear those words once again. If you asked me about 5-10 years ago, I’d have told you that Sci-fi wasn’t my thing. Ask me again now I’m all up in that Star Trek, The Orville, and Doctor Who orgy. I mean, we’re back to proper Star Trek now for the first time since 2005, it is a good time for Star Trek fans. I might not like Enterprise or Nemesis, but J.J. Trek isn’t even close to what the series is meant to be.

Now, I know we’re not just going to talk about Star Trek today, but I want to set up for Picard a little more before I move on to set up for what else you should be watching. You see, I’ve had trepidation over Picard for a few months now, the announcement was worrying. I’d rather insert hot knives between my fingernail and pop them off like one cracking the legs of a crab than watch Discovery ever again. That is why I said of the trailer: “Either Star Trek: Picard is going to be known as a nostalgia act to wrangle fans back into the franchise, or it will blow Discovery out of the water like a game of Battleship.”

Something else I’ve been waiting for (to a lesser extent) was Armondo Iannucci’s Avenue 5. Iannucci might not be a name you’ve heard of, but he’s surely a writer I’ve seen the labor of work from. The Scottish-Italian worked on several things including Chris Morris’ radio show On The Hour and TV show The Day Today, where he helped as co-creator of (Warning: mature content) Alan Partridge. Following his work with Morris, he went on to create The Tick of It, a very sweary political comedy that was not too far from BBC’s previous shows Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister. Following that and its movie set in America, he created HBO’s Veep.

After his work on The Death of Stalin, a spoof of the rather tyrannical leader that fought alongside Britain, America, and Germany, Iannucci began work on a Sci-fi show for HBO. So with that Avenue 5 is here and it is something worth talking about given its behind the scenes lineage and setting. You see, Iannucci and others all work/worked in comedy shows or movies, and sci-fi with hard balls-to-the-wall comedy. The most notable case of sci-fi and comedy mixing is the cult-classic Galaxy Quest. A more familiar case would be The Orville though that is very sci-fi with only bits of comedy.

I think both shows are more than worth watching right now. I’ll bounce between the two, but one is capturing something that was once gone and the other doing something with a proper budget and backing. I can’t say for sure with only one episode and two episodes released respectively of both shows, but they are doing something right. I’ll start with Avenue 5 first, as that’s the one with problems.

America has too much money, this is loosely what Iannucci said about all problems in America, money is thrown at everything to fix it. Lots of problems? Lots of money! The issue with that and a TV show that’s not just a display of money is how little that money does. You could hire Tom Hanks, The Rock, Adam Sandler, a porn actor/actress, Sigourney Weaver, and Whoopi Goldberg. Chances are that while the script and a large number of the actors are perfect, it is one broken link that breaks the chain. The money that is thrown at Avenue 5 is one of the broken links.

You Americans don’t know how to swear. Swearing or insults for Americans seem to always be a punch, a period, or something to end what’s being said. Armando Iannucci knows how to swear, but Josh Gad, Zach Woods, and Ethan Phillips don’t know the first thing about swearing, and it puts the rhythm of the script off. In The Thick of It, you have an angry Scottish man yelling with a rhythm to the swearing, using insults and expletives as something to enhance what is said, not just to end it. With a lot of American accents, it feels like the rhythm of a heart is doing something wrong.

I’ll kick the cast a little more, and then we’ll move onto the good bits. Hugh Laurie plays this angry Malcolm Tucker-esque man who swears under his breath, he’s great. If House was allowed to swear, and he was written by someone with that ability, this is what he’d have been. Rebecca Front is great as the angry white woman that asks for the manager, and I like where Phillips’ Spike Williams is in the story. The issue is just about everyone else, they don’t fit in an Iannucci script. He writes about small people, in small jobs they hate, and gives us everyone we’ve ever known; I don’t know a billionaire, so I can’t say I know one I’d fire out an airlock.

For every minute that I sit and watch Josh Gad in the role of Judd, I know that the role was written or rewritten for Jack Black. The entire show has a lot of potential, and I love the subtlety brought to the table with Laurie’s work on accents, but that’s all that’s pulling me through. Half a fantastic cast, great writing, and a bit of sci-fi fun. Here’s the kicker, someone at HBO is producing this, that someone is an American, and that person likes Will Ferrell movies. Like them all you want, but they aren’t the peak of comedy because they have one joke that’s done to death.

The “joke” repeated several times that is straight out of anything Will Ferrell ruins is “there’s a 20-second delay.” Did you know there was a 20-second delay? Because I’ve heard there was a 20-second delay. That is how obnoxious and out of place this 20-second delay is and you probably don’t know or care what it is, you just want to kill whoever put it in and kept it every time. Learn how to rhythmically swear and insult with my response to the third time 20-seconds is brought up (fill in the blanks): “You were just [blank] told you [blank] [blank], pay some [blank] attention to what has just been [blank] said you [blank] [blank].”

I’ll wrap up and say, I want to like Avenue 5 and I want it to be an Armando Iannucci masterpiece, but with two episodes that hope is dwindling. Between Woods and Gad, I want to eject them into the eye of the sun. I do hope there’s something that pulls that around, but Jesus is it hard to enjoy something with so little good about it. It just goes to show, one used sex toy can spoil the stew.

Now that I’ve been crass, let’s talk about something that’s only good so far. Star Trek: Picard, is a proper return to the TNG goodness that I love in my Star Trek. You see, that’s the issue with Discovery and Avenue 5, both are about angry people angrily shouting over small things that could be done better if they were just working together, at least Avenue 5 should in some small part be about angry people. However, when Picard is about it is like having a lovely space dad back after a long time away, he’s just so good. I’m going to gush over the first episode, but I was so wrong (so far), and I’m happy about that.

My whole theory on Dahj and her background, I was mostly wrong. I was correct to think “You don’t know your past,” meant a bit of funny business with robotics, but it was not about who I thought at the time of the trailer. Not to mention, I love Isa Briones’ chemistry with the cast as she and Stewart make a scene feel like it has life when they are just sitting on a bench. Brent Spiner’s moments in that are flashbacks with Picard, not a beat is dropped in those moments. Honestly, it feels like you could watch (TNG series and movies) Nemesis, the first of the J.J. Abrams Trek films where Romulus is spread from here to Dagenham, and then jump straight into Picard.

It has beautiful writing, a camera that isn’t on the inside of a front loading washing machine and used to film Discovery, and characters. It might sound stupid, but the characters feel human, for lack of a better term, and I like them. I don’t know what happened around the mid-2000s, but likable characters just disappeared for a good while. Game of Thrones was a good example, as I don’t like anyone in that show and that includes the only one I do like because “Oh, she’s pretty, blonde, and a bit mad, I like that.” The only characters I do like because they feel a little human are from The Good Place and Brooklyn Nine-Nine.

Can we also just point out the setting, because that’s something Discovery missed as well. The tech jump between J.J. Trek and Discovery has levels of a universe between them, J.J. Trek and Picard has a time jump which is only 20 years, it feels natural. There are LCARS (Library Computer Access/Retrieval System) used and it all feels like future tech, but not magic space fungi tech, or proper crap sci-fi future tech that in 30-40 years we’ll look back at and laugh. I don’t mind crap when it functions well enough and has a purpose other than “oh look! We’re sci-fi with magic mushrooms.”

Really, that’s it. Two shows, a proper Star Trek return and a show that’s got some potential if it stops being overproduced by people who don’t understand comedy. Both shows have great lineage behind them, either from the actors (yes, I mean those of both sexes) or behind the scenes crew. Avenue 5 has Simon Blackwell who worked on Four Lions, one of the best British satire movies of all time. Picard has Patrick [blank] Stewart doing something only Patrick Stewart can do. Also, as one last point, Dahj can hit one mean looking suplex and I love it! Go watch both and then we can have a chat about this on Twitter.

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