Critic Reviews

The early episodes lack depth because there are so many characters and so many stories to tell.

It’s a character study first and foremost, with a sure-handed sense of time and place.

For anyone familiar with the history--or who even just saw the movie--a lot of this will feel familiar.... Yet even those interludes are played well enough to work in this context, and will certainly come as revelations. And there are several lump-in-the-throat moments in seeing loved ones have to endure watching a husband or father blast into the unknown.

The divide between the public face of American perfection and what really goes on when the doors are closed won’t earn The Astronaut Wives Club any points for originality, but it wouldn’t be the last time a summer show on network TV won viewers over with modest ambitions and likeable characters. And to appreciate it, we don’t even have to pretend it’s anything like Mad Men at all.

ABC’s new series, The Astronaut Wives Club, can’t make up its mind if it wants to be a serious, nuanced fact-based drama about the wives of the Mercury Seven astronauts, or “The Real Housewives of Cape Canaveral.” Fortunately, there’s enough legitimate drama in the show, premiering Thursday, to counterbalance its cheaper moments.

Of the week’s new dramas, the only one with abundant blue skies is the lively Astronaut Wives Club.

The Astronauts Wives Club orbits thisclose to camp--yet never plunges into a black hole of idiocy.

For all that it strives at times to push a big theme, it remains best taken as colorful light entertainment. There are some nice performances and moments (especially among the Carpenters and the Shepards and the Coopers), increasingly as the show goes on, when the marriages seem complicatedly real.

It's a solid effort, but after three episodes, I'm not convinced that puncturing a carefully crafted image brings us closer to knowing the actual women behind the men.

With the exception of Annable's Trudy, a pilot with high-flying aspirations of her own, it's hard to pinpoint the individual dreams or goals for any of these women and the show doesn't get deeply into the sense of what it's like to have your dreams so totally consumed by both societal gender restrictions and also the added pressure of living in the spotlight.