You’d think a show about space exploration would be at least somewhat thrilling and wondrous, but Hulu’s astronaut drama The First (premiering September 14), from House of Cards creator Beau Willimon, makes going into space seem like a grim, depressing prospect. The astronauts preparing for the first manned mission to Mars are all depressed and miserable, and the show is similarly downbeat, spending its time on emotional anguish and recriminations—when it’s not getting bogged down in technical jargon and tedious political negotiations.

The first episode features the accidental deaths of the entire initial mission’s crew just after takeoff, and things don’t get much more hopeful from there, as former mission commander Tom Hagerty (Sean Penn) returns to lead a new crew in a second attempt to make it to Mars. Tom left the crew to take care of his drug-addict daughter Denise (Anna Jacoby-Heron), and their tense relationship dominates Tom’s storylines, including an entire episode devoted to maudlin, almost impressionistic flashbacks about Tom’s past with Denise and with his late wife Diane (Melissa George).

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Although Tom is the central character, his crewmates all have their own overwrought emotional arcs to deal with, including marital troubles, family obligations and crises of confidence, but the storytelling is so choppy that the character development only comes in fits and starts. Each of the eight episodes takes place months after the previous one, keeping the narrative disjointed and uneven. Some developments get quickly disregarded in the time jumps, while others drag out endlessly, seemingly stuck in place over months at a time. The storytelling can be maddeningly slow, even as it often feels like the show is ignoring important plot points. There’s an entire multi-episode plot about the efforts to, essentially, turn off a key piece of equipment and turn it back on again.

The procedural aspects of space travel can be fascinating, as Ridley Scott’s film version of The Martian demonstrated, and the stakes are always high for anyone leaving Earth, as The First makes very clear in its opening episode. The characters are constantly bemoaning how difficult it is for them to leave their families behind and prepare themselves mentally for a potentially life-threatening mission, but unlike The Martian, which made its stakes obvious and immediate, The First almost completely avoids suspense and excitement, dialing down any potential for heightened action or races against time.

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Aside from a few brief flashbacks to previous missions, no one actually goes into space during the majority of this show about space travel, and the creators seem to have little interest in exploring sci-fi ideas. Although it takes place in the future, The First depicts a world that mostly just looks like the present, but with slightly sleeker cars and a lot more voice-activated technology. There are occasional references to climate change as one of the motivating factors for the Mars mission, but they’re barely explored afterthoughts that never have any sense of urgency or meaning.

Instead, the show focuses on the personal drive of entrepreneur Laz Ingram (Natasha McElhone), whose company initiated the Mars mission and is pursuing it with financing and support from NASA and the U.S. government (which is in jeopardy following the failure of the first crew’s launch). McElhone demonstrates steely focus as the sometimes ruthless Laz, who’s the closest the show has to a House of Cards character (Jeannie Berlin, as the equivocating U.S. president, doesn’t make much of an impression). But her business acumen is not particularly compelling in contrast to the prospect of actually traveling to Mars, so watching her spar with a New York Times reporter for an entire episode feels like a waste of time, especially in a season with only eight episodes.

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At least McElhone brings a bit of sparkle to her performance; as Tom, Penn is all angst, all the time, with a perpetual grimace on his face. The scenes between Tom and Denise are especially painful, with stock parent-child conflicts familiar from dozens of mediocre indie movies about rebellious teenagers on drugs. Willimon and the rest of the writers seem to view Tom and Denise’s relationship as the heart of the show, considering how much screen time it gets, but their dynamic wears out before the first episode has even ended. The cast is full of talented performers (including LisaGay Hamilton, Keiko Agena and James Ransone), who are either underused or stuck with loud, empty emoting.

With its artsy nature shots, droning score, and periodic weirdly poetic voiceover that sounds like something from an old radio broadcast (and is never explained), The First is like a second-rate Terrence Malick astronaut movie, without Malick’s talent for making cosmic grandeur feel intimate. When they’re actually put to use, the special effects are impressive, and there’s plenty of natural beauty in the New Orleans-area locations. It’s all subsumed under the show’s art-movie pretensions, though, which get in the way of the narrative and the characters, crashing them painfully to Earth when they should be allowed to soar.