The looks and lines exaggerate the contours of contemporary life and inform the show’s shape as a social satire and an existential gripe. Flight Center, and the infantilizing floating Xanadu of “ WALL-E,” not to mention the Pacific Princess of Aaron Spelling’s “The Love Boat.” The visual style, like the deadpan absurdism of the performances, achieves a tone that is somehow dry and campy at once. Its curvilinear interiors ooze with consumerist neo-futurism, gilded and streamlined, spaces to associate with the Starship Enterprise, the Apple Store, the T.W.A. The vessel itself is like a ship of state inanely navigating a pitiless vacuum. “Avenue 5,” the series, is the tale of a fateful trip that was supposed to be a fun thing. Initial projections determine that the trip home will take three years. About eight minutes into the pilot, as the ship prepares to round a Saturnal moon, a ghostly malfunction forces the vessel off course. Forty years hence-sometime after “the Pacific went toxic,” in the show’s imagining of our collective destiny-five thousand earthlings board this luxury liner for an eight-week sightseeing cruise to the outer solar system. The show, “Avenue 5,” on HBO, is christened after a spacecraft captained by one Ryan Clark (Hugh Laurie). Some aficionados of Armando Iannucci-the creator of sturdy political farces including “Veep,” “The Thick of It,” and “ The Death of Stalin”-will interpret his new science-fiction comedy as another statement on lunacy in the practice of power and suasion.
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