If you’re unfamiliar with Nathan W. Pyle’s Strange Planet comics, they usually go something like this: Two unnamed balloon-headed aliens engage in a brief chat about whatever they’re doing. The activities themselves are usually mundane — hiking, snacking, petting a cat. What’s odd is the way they talk about them, with a frankness that so much of human language and culture has been designed to avoid.
“We have things but we have hidden them,” a couple announce to guests entering their just-cleaned home. “Now feel completely helpless,” a dentist tells a reclining patient. Suntans are “star damage,” a kiss is a “mouthpush,” tea is “hot leaf liquid.” The cleverest strips turn the banal alien, and occasionally tap into the bigger fears undergirding all these deceptions and distractions: “Life will be full of unpleasant sensations,” a parent gently reprimands a child refusing to eat their “leaves” (i.e., salad).
Strange Planet
The Bottom Line Sweet but slight.
Whatever they accomplish, they typically do so within the confines of a four-panel layout ideal for delivering a chuckle to someone scrolling past on social media, or flipping through a giftable book. The new Apple TV+ adaptation stretches those bite-sized jokes into half-hour episodes — and while little is lost in translation, not much is gained either.
The animated series, created by Pyle and Dan Harmon, is very much in the spirit of the source material, with its good-natured tone and ain’t-life-weird punchlines. Each installment opens with Tunde Adebimpe riffing on ordinary experiences in voiceover, to set up storylines that largely unfold along paths familiar from other human entertainments — coworker drama, a spat between teenage BFFs. A few venture into the specific quirks of this specific world, like one that sends two characters venturing into a vast, mysterious, gem-studded void at the edge of town; these are less relatable, but also less predictable.
The world is cast in shades of pastel, with baby blue beings, strawberry pink shadows and backdrops rendered in soft shades of lavender and teal. The aesthetic echoes the mood: warm, gentle, touched by existential anxiety but fundamentally hopeful. Strange Planet is mild enough for kids, but what it really feels like is a children’s show for grownups, in the way that Millennial slang like “adulting” and “feels” are baby talk for grownups. This can be a very nice thing, depending on your taste, your mood and your tolerance for twee terminology. (Personally, by the time we were boarding a groupfloat across the big wet with a lifegiver and their offspring to get to the learn-stitution, I found myself wondering how much any of that jargon was adding to an otherwise mundane tale about a parent and a kid taking a boat across the sea to enroll in college.) It just also means Strange Planet is not the destination for thornier and more complex conversations.
To the extent that Strange Planet has a core cast, it’s a group of beings orbiting Careful Now, a proudly mediocre restaurant perched precariously at the edge of a cliff. Running the show is a type-A manager (a tender Hannah Einbinder) who’s nursing a reciprocated crush on a shy regular (Danny Pudi). The manager has help, if you can call it that, from the eccentric owner (Lori Tan Chinn) dreaming up elaborate new schemes to attract customers and the new hire (Demi Adejuyigbe), who’s more enthusiastic than experienced. But Strange Planet is just as happy to venture off into corners of Beingsburg we’ve never seen before, or spotlight unrelated one-off characters, like a 25-year-old (Charlotte Nicdao) undergoing a quarter-life crisis in one of the season’s most poignant chapters.
It’s a smart choice to keep the series focused on the source material’s central concern — the universal absurdities and joys and pains of being human, not the quirks of specific individuals. And indeed, what works about the show is often what worked about the comics. “Instead of dealing with feelings directly, you are avoiding them while placing blame on the shifting positions of the moons,” a skeptic tells a date who cites the impending eclipse as the reason they can’t commit to a serious relationship. Whether you believe in astrology or not, it’s precisely the sort of pithy, witty insight into human psychology that made Strange Planet so beloved to begin with.
But the drive-by philosophizing that suits a comic you might read in seconds feels thin in a full-length show. Strange Planet is preoccupied with mortality, such that even an “adolescent limb quake” (school dance) culminates in a speech about how “all of us are going to perish one day, so it’s time to live.” At the same time, however, it spends very little time grappling with the truly ugly or unwieldy feelings that might come with the realization that death could loom around any corner, or the fear that life is only meaningful to the extent that we’re able to find meaning in it. Where shows like Bojack Horseman or Harmon’s own Rick and Morty found depth through a willingness to dive into the muck episode after episode and season after season, Strange Planet keeps to tidy conflicts easily resolved within half an hour with a heartfelt hug or a word of wisdom.
Though its feather-lightness makes the series an easy binge, I don’t recommend trying to watch it all at once for the same reason I wouldn’t recommend trying to eat an entire birthday cake in one go: it’s simply too much sugar to be digested all at once.
At the same time, what would life be without a sweet treat to dig into from time to time? Strange Planet might be too one-note to fully engage with the existential despair it so readily invokes — and yet, in one of those quirks of our species that the show enjoys ribbing, its very simplicity can be a comfort. The comic took off because it combined adorable drawings, acute observations and a playful sense of humor to make our world feel at once cozier and more wondrous, one bite-sized segment at a time. If the show doesn’t offer much more than that, sometimes that can still feel like enough.
Source: Hollywood
