The Right Stuff

This should have been two seasons or a 10 episode limited run. Big fan of this era. The book explores the test pilots like Yeager and the journey to the space program and then the Mercury program. So much missing it needed to explore.

First off, I can barely tell any of the Mercury 7 apart. They cast a bunch of absolutely generic 2020s White Hollywood Guys and that's not what real people are like, what the actual astronauts were like or even the cast of the 1983 film.

The women were better, and the NASA administrators were more interestingly cast and better acted if extremely dumbed down and simplified.

So, so, so dumbed down and simplified. Just as you think they will hit on some great topic around the technology, of building an agency all but from scratch (NACA existed and became NASA but... ignored also) of the choices in boosters, in ground vs pilot controls... they just move on and barely mention it again.

We even have a model for this in The 1983 Movie. Sure, there are other ways to do it, and me, I'd love a more boffin-oriented (nerds, engineers...) show, like parts of From The Earth To The Moon, but even sticking to astronauts I guess its been 40 years, sure let's do a remake.

Why such an absolutely lifeless remake? Why are the stakes presented in a way to make them so absolutely uninteresting, why is the drama amped up to the point that these top-of-their-game professionals are embarrassing children who cannot do their jobs?

Seriously, it gets a point because nice VFX (not gaudy, believable) and spaceships and airplanes but without that, about some other industry or if I was not an aerospace nerd, I'd have dropped somewhere in the middle of the second episode.

How is it that writers & directors continue to try to pass off alternative/revisionist crap as historically accurate? While the events themselves may be accurate, the portrayals of the astronauts, NASA employees, their combined families, etc., is severely myopic and filtered through today's politically correct & fragile viewpoints. None of them were perfect, none of their families were...but they did what had to be done at a time when death could be all but guaranteed. I give it a D for this very narrow and shallow take on a classic novel & reality.

This version by Disney doesn't come close to Feelings in the book

Tom Wolfe's focus in his book The Right Stuff (as it was in Phillip Kaufman's 1983 film) was on the status structure of the test pilot fraternity, with Chuck Yeager at the top, as well as the nature of celebrity in America. With more time available than in a film, it's surprising that this series cuts out that backstory of the 40s and 50s, which would have told us where these men came from - and what they put their wives through - before they became astronauts. While the rivalry between the prim-and-proper John Glenn and the fighter jock Alan Shepard is well known, a particular surprise is that we've so far only seen the 'Ice Commander' side of Shepard, and not his other 'Smilin' Al' side, both of which Scott Glenn portrayed so well in the film. Far from capturing the excitement that everyone must have felt at the time, it all seems pretty grim.