Avenue 5

Avenue 5. Armando Iannucci, creator. USA: HBO, premiered 19 January 2020. UK: Sky One. Ran two seasons, 17 episodes; season 1: 19 January 2020 - 15 March 2020; season 2: 10 October 2020 - 28 November 2020.[1]

Near-future, spaceship/cruise ship variation on The Ship of Fools motif.[2] Significant here broadly for a large number of human beings totally in a high-tech environment (the spaceship).

Of specific interest in Season 1:

Episode 3, "I'm a Hand Model": Ian Martin and Peter Fellows, script; story by Armando Iannucci & script writers (2 Feb. 2020).[3] Wikipedia summary has Captain Ryan Clark (played by Hugh Laurie) as an actor playing captain of Avenue 5 discovering "the [flight] crew are as false as he is; they are actors and models, and the bridge is no more than a stage." Billie McEvoy, second engineer on Avenue 5, and an actual crew member "reveals the existence of two crews, one for show matching [ultra-rich owner] Judd's wish for his ship to be crewed by the most attractive, and another to actually pilot the ship 'backstage'."[4] Or at least pilot the ship as much as needed, given a high degree of automation. The real crew area is under the bridge, with the bridge in modernist/futurist "smooth" and the underground (so to speak) actual work area funky in the manner of the space-tug Nostromo in ALIEN (film). The actual crew and the division of labor/pretty-people is developed in the Episodes 4 and 5. 

Episode 5, "He's Only There to Stop His Skeleton From Falling Over": Peter Baynham, script, story by Baynham and Armando Iannucci (16 February 2020). The "wetsuit" compartment that surrounds the ship and protects the occupants from radiation has sprung a leak (Episode 4), which has been repaired, but not until a significant quantity of its contents has spurted out. The contents are the urine, feces, and other bodily products of the people on the ship, which continues — along with coffins of a few of the dead so far (Episode 2) — to be carried along by the huge ship's gravitational field. We get the image of the ship with its human passengers surrounded by an excrement ring, which adds up to people within a mechanism within a ring of human waste. And some coffins with dead people, "Inter urinas et faeces nascimur," in the Latin "sentence" — in different word orders and attributions ("We are born between urine and feces"), with the passengers living for a while encircled by urine and feces and some dead people in coffins, and, for a modern addition, contained within a giant, mostly automated, largely false, damaged, and possibly doomed mechanism.

Episode 6, "Was It Your Ears?": Jon Brown, script, story by Brown and Armando Iannucci (23 February 2020). A woman gives birth to a baby, and ("spoiler") this addition to the ship's complement we finally learn gets the ship to beeping. Meanwhile, there is the maddening automatic periodic beep that the people in charge interpret to indicate a hull breach and loss of air. On Earth, the representative of the Judd Corporation gets rescue money from the President of future America, and then has to ask again for an appropriation from the Second President, who turns out — after a wait in a very downscale waiting area — to be something like a smart phone, giving the voice of an AI. The automated mechanism confirms the grant of money, but with the demand of reducing air demand by 500 NEP's (Non-Essential Personnel, presumable mostly passengers). When the Judd representative objects on ethical grounds, she's referred to an ethics menu. Meanwhile on the Avenue 5, Judd tries to solve the problem of the surrounding cylinder of, well, mostly, shit, by making it a thing of beauty with a laser-light show; surprisingly, given that Judd is a really stupid plutocratic with wretched taste even by plutocrat standards — the idea works, and he has turned shit into art. 

Episode 8, "This Is Physically Hurting Me": George Pritchett & Will Smith, script, story by Pritchett & Smith and Armando Iannucci (8 March 2020). Episode 9 (finale of season), "Eight Arms But No Hands": Ian Martin & Peter Fellows, with Sean Gray, script, story by Armando Iannucci & Sean Gray, Martin and Fallows.[5] 

 We see more of the actual control room below decks, including a flight simulator for Captain Ryan Clark to practice docking with the rescue vessel. It turns out that the actual controls of Avenue 5 are imprinted to his hands and those of the actual captain, now dead and floating in space in orbit around Avenue 5 (along with a fair amount of now beautifully-lighted excrement, with an apparent image of Pope John Paul II — and a small but increasing number of dead and fast-freeze-dried passengers). Getting back the actual captain's hands is finally accomplished near the end of this season. Note image of fake-captain Ryan Clark at controls of the simulator, consistently, in the simulation, destroying the ship, for a simulated human/machine interface in episodes leading toward grotesquely comic action on the possibility that the ship is a simulation and the passengers and crew part of a reality show, or, perhaps that the ship is a simulation, as are the people, in a universe that is a simulation but where deaths of simulacra (our use of the term) in a simulated universe would be for them actual death. Given that we have here really a TV series with actors, some of whom play actors playing ship's crew, and sets — etc. — we have a postmodernized, high-tech form of the sort of subtext joke in a Shakespearean comedy where a young male actor plays a young woman who, in the world of the play, disguises herself and plays a "boy" ("youth" in the useful Elizabethan/Jacobean term).

RDE, finishing, 15Dec22 f.