Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Strange Planet’ On Apple TV+, About Life On A Planet That’s Like Earth, Only Slightly Better

The new Apple TV+ animated series Strange Planet is based on Nathan W. Pyle’s comic and books; you’ve likely seen them on your social media feeds, with its light-bulb-headed beings speaking very honestly about very human concepts, and also calling things by their literal descriptions. The people of this “strange planet” are just called “beings” and refer to each other by they/them pronouns and by what they do. It’s a fun thing to see in a four-panel webcomic, but how does it translate to an animated series?

STRANGE PLANET: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: As we zoom in on an unusual-looking planet, a narrator (Tunde Adebimpe) says, “Long ago, our species decided there could be comfort in the air.”

The Gist: An example of what people call their fellow beings is a flight attendant called an Air Comfort Supervisor (D’Arcy Carden), and their job is to anticipate passengers’ discomfort and alleviate it before they’re even aware of it. They gets called to corporate and is promoted to “Air Comfort Supervisor Supervisor,” which is a reflection of how good they are at her job, but that also means that they can’t decompress after a flight with her fellow Air Comfort Supervisors, because now they’re the ones that they’ll be talking about when they “express their work frustrations.”

They see fans for her favorite band, The 4 Sensations, who are going to a Mediocre Music Festival. After the Sensations’ angsty performance, the lead singer (Riki Lindhome) decides they’re now too happy with their new love to accurately be angsty on stage. This causes such a rift with their fans that the two superfans on the plane decide that without the Sensations, they have nothing else in common. In the meantime, the remaining 3 Sensations are having trouble expressing themselves in song.

When the remaining bandmembers get on the Supervisor Supervisor’s plane, they notice how bummed out the bandmembers are. But a lot of turbulence leads them to kick their comfort-providing skills into overdrive, helping their fellow Supervisors as well as the passengers, ironically by taking the advice of a Group Roll Machine Operator (Nate Torrence) who told them that they feel what the passengers feel.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Perhaps Adventure Time, but with bulb-headed beings.

Our Take: Pyle co-created and co-wrote the series with Dan Harmon (Community, Rick & Morty); if there’s anyone who can bring Pyle’s webcomic to life, it’s Harmon. What the two of them decided to do is emphasize the “human” aspect of the characters on this planet instead of going for guffaws. That was a wise choice, though we do hope that some of the quirkier aspects of the webcomic will give way to exploring these beings’ stories.

The format is anthology-esque, but with recurring characters, like we see in the second episode with a restaurant Regular (Danny Pudi) “compressing” hard on the Manager (Hannah Einbinder) and volunteering to take care of their “vibrating creature”, and give it its asthma inhaler. In the process they and their sibling (Jackie Kashian) manage to color the vibrating creature pink. In the meantime, a cape-wearing kid (Jessica McKenna) decides to adopt a “Greyscale Finger Bandit” as their pet.

The Manager and Regular will recur on the show, but we’ll see a lot of other beings, as well, and it might be better that none of them have names. But the gag of the beings talking in honest terms and naming things by their descriptions has the potential to wear the viewer down after a while. What we hope for is the stories to take precedence, or we get so used to how the beings interact with each other that the conventions of how they speak won’t start grating on us.

What Pyle and Harmon are trying to communicate with this show is how this remote planet is like Earth, but just a little bit better, mainly because everyone is polite but honest with each other. That’s what we hope to see with these stories, and the first two episodes show some promise in that direction.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: The superfans get back together, the Supervisor Supervisor hangs with their fellow Supervisors, we see some three-eyed pigeons, and then we zoom back away from the planet.

Sleeper Star: Everyone on the show does multiple voices, but Fortune Feimster is pretty versatile, as an older being on the plane as well as playing one of the superfans of the 4 Sensations.

Most Pilot-y Line: A sign on the Group Roll Machine says, “TIRED? TRY… SLEEPING! Terms and Conditions May Apply.”

Our Call: STREAM IT. Strange Planet has the potential to be one of the most human animated series we’ve seen this year, despite the fact that none of the characters are actually human.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.