Ascension

In these times of doom-laden environmental headlines, a drama about a group of humans looking for a new planet to call home makes a zeitgeist-y sort of sense. And Ascension has its period-ish setting going for it: Since the group of people aboard the spaceship blasted off in the 1960s and, as one character says, never lived through the Summer of Love, they're trapped in a kind of Mad Men time capsule, with seamed stockings and strapless cocktail dresses. Touches such as vintage hairstyles and a torch singer warbling "Fly Me to the Moon" in a spaceship are arresting, even if many of the details of the show require quite a bit of disbelief-suspending. In the portions of the show set in the present day, the son of the man who pioneered the Ascension program explains away the giant conspiracy that took place to kick the ambitious mission off: "We had the technology. JFK was a fan!" Um, OK.

The murder mystery at the heart of the action is ho-hum, and the characters seem trope-ish, but Ascension does carry with it some interesting ideas. What would life be like, drifting aimlessly aboard a capsule in space? How could you live, work, and love under such conditions? And is it better to be the generation that spends its entire existence in space or the one that has to land on the new Earth ("Proxima," in Ascension-speak) and make a new life there somehow? The fact that Ascension bothers to consider such questions is interesting, and class wars between the upper- and lower-deckers on the ship are another point in the show's favor. It may not be interesting enough to rivet a non-sci-fi fan, but geeks may find the proceedings interesting enough for a look.