Space Force: Season 1

The humor is hit-and-miss, the big-budget slapstick set pieces are mildly funny when they should be Mel Brooks funny, and the shifts in tone from farce to sincere drama are often sudden and jarring.

It all looks like “Dr. Strangelove: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” and for its first two episodes, right up through a very funny, high-stakes mission with a chimp-astronaut, it seems like just the satire we need.

Despite such credentials, Houston doesn’t have a problem as much as a mild disappointment.

Space Force (premiering May 29) started as a two-word pitch from Netflix, and it often plays like a show that was reverse-engineered around a title. Everything about it, from the character names to the plotting, feels decidedly first-draft.

For all the heft behind it, “Space Force” should be an easy win. Ten episodes later, however, it’s safer to say that “Space Force” is really just okay.

[Carell's] too good for the material, which never takes off. The loony parts aren’t sharp enough, despite the efforts of Carell and crack performers like Noah Emmerich, Jane Lynch and Diedrich Bader.

Space Force just isn't close to consistent — especially in the first half of the season, the misses outweigh the hits — and even as it settles into itself a little more, it's hard to buy all the eventual smoothing out of characters and plot lines from that choppy beginning.

How did so much talent and money go to such waste?

Space Force is inexplicably unfunny, a black hole for laughter, with stretches of bombs lasting minutes, not just because the gags rarely work, but because there aren't that many jokes in the first place.