Should You Bunker Down For You, Me And The Apocalypse?

What Is This Thing?

Various people in various locations around the world are going about their banal business -- applying for a job as a researcher for the Vatican; trying to get bailed out of prison; recording Message #2610 for a mysteriously missing spouse -- when the President of the United States goes on TV to announce that there's a comet on a direct path to Earth. When it strikes, thirty-four days hence, it will be an Extinction Level Event.

When Is It On?

Thursdays at 8 PM ET on NBC.

Why Was It Made Now?

It was made a little earlier than "now": as you see above, this is an import from the U.K., where its first season aired from September to December of 2015. But in the broader sense, it was made because we're all (rightly, apparently) so paranoid that the world is about to end for real that media can't stop offering us apocalyptic entertainment, from The Walking Dead to The Last Man On Earth to The 100 to 12 Monkeys to Colony to The Last Ship to Wayward Pines to lots and lots of movies and novels and comic books...I mean, you get it. It's a topic that's kind of in the zeitgeist right now.

What's Its Pedigree?

Iain Hollands, who created it, only has one prior credit on IMDb: a British sitcom called Beaver Falls. But that doesn't seem to have stopped some comedy heavyweights from signing on. His lead (if it can be said that there is one; for the pilot, at least, the action's spread among an ensemble), English bank manager Jamie, is played by Matthew Baynton, formerly of Spy and The Wrong Mans; Pauline Quirke, who's been on every British show you've ever seen in your life, plays Paula, Jamie's mother. In an American prison, we find Rhonda (The Office's Jenna Fischer), a librarian awaiting trial for treason, and Leanne (Will & Grace's Megan Mullally), a white supremacist with a swastika in her forehead. In Rome, Father Jude Sutton, the Vatican's Devil's Advocate, is charged with rigorously examining applications for sainthood; he smokes and swears and is played by Rob Lowe. (The scenes from Episode 2 promise the arrival of Paterson Joseph, Peep Show's Alan Johnson and The Leftovers's Holy Wayne, as a U.S. general.)

...And?

The series premiere, impressively, sets up not one but three stories TV hasn't already run into the ground, and that's entirely aside from the "end of the world" thread. Jamie's lost his wife, Layla, under mysterious circumstances -- she just disappeared, and he doesn't know what happened to her -- but instead of joining him for the paroxysms of panic or grief directly following her departure, we're meeting him on his seventh birthday since she's been gone; for him to be settled into his resignation and loneliness, though still pining for her (he records a video message for her every day), is less showy or dramatic than the immediate aftermath of Layla's disappearance, but the challenge makes it, to me, a more interesting choice on Hollands's part.

Rhonda's story is also twistier than a mere Orange Is The New Black gloss: she's claimed responsibility for having hacked an NSA database -- which her teenaged son actually did -- and is being charged with treason even though nothing was stolen or leaked.

But by far the most compelling character is Gaia Scodellaro's Sister Celine. She became a nun straight out of school, but that was years ago and now it's apparently clear to everyone around her that it's not her jam.

Celine is frustrated that her fellow sisters' piety isn't accompanied by action that might actually help solve the problems that plague the world, and her disaffection has her questioning her faith. The abbess, in consideration both of Celine's bristling at the convent's strictures and that she's taught herself five languages during her time there, sends her to the Vatican to interview for a job assisting the Devil's Advocate in his research, only to be disappointed by his cynicism about her. The show portrays Celine as a highly intelligent, thoughtful person, and takes her spiritual crisis and search for purpose seriously; in the whole first hour, not once is her vocation as a nun made the punchline of any jokes.

Also?

Pam from the office flips off some fellow prison inmates, which is fun.

...But?

You'll notice that there's nothing above about how hilarious it is, and that's because it isn't. Don't misunderstand: there certainly are comedic elements. But they are broad and terrible. I mean, look: we all love Megan Mullally. It's literally impossible not to.

But look at her "funny" hillbilly teeth! The swastika wasn't enough to communicate to us that she's a hillbilly? Mullally's saddled with explaining to Rhonda how gangs are racially segregated in prison, which if we all didn't already know from reading news magazines or using common sense was already taught to us on Oz about a thousand years ago and then again in Orange Is The New Black in this millennium. Rhonda, hopefully, asks whether that means Leanne's not really a white supremacist at all. "No, I am!" says Leanne. "I just ain't dumb enough to think this is a good look." har?

Even before Lowe says or does anything, it's clear his casting itself is the joke: he walks into his office in his cassock with his Dean Sanderson hair, but he's a priest! Can you even?! One of his first lines of dialogue is to ask Celine if she thinks "Christ on a bike" is offensive: "Because I just used it in a meeting and you would have thought that I'd performed an abortion on the table or something." OUTRAGEOUS! This is, to be fair, the kind of joke a U.K. actor could sell; imagine Peter Capaldi delivering it and you'll probably agree. But then, whoops, now you're imagining Peter Capaldi playing this character and how much better the show would be if he had.

After the subtle mournfulness of Jamie's introduction, he gets thrown into a clichéd crime story: his DNA has turned up at a crime scene in Moscow, and the cops have photos of someone there who looks exactly like him. Jamie turns out to have an airtight alibi, so he's released, and then everyone hears that the world's about to end so no one cares what Jamie's double's doing anymore anyway. This whole thing is also how he learns he's adopted, and very well might have an identical twin (which, of course, turns out to be the case, and we meet that guy at the end of the episode). And in the course of his questioning, he's also shown a photo of his doppelgänger...with Layla. Which turns his story into a "GIVE ME BACK MY WIFE" quest after all. So much for that quiet longing I admired so much.

Finally: Pam's double-bird might not even make it to the version of the episode NBC ends up airing.

...So?

This show? Is weird. I can already tell that the elements I like aren't the ones the show regards as strengths, and the corniness isn't going to LESSEN as the characters get closer and closer to the titular apocalypse. All things considered, it's not something I feel I need to find an hour in my week to keep up with.