The prospect of seeing Sissy Spacek (Carrie) and JK Simmons (whiplash) playing a longtime couple had something to like. That the two veterans, each Oscar winner, co-starred in a sci-fi series only heightened expectations. However, after an effective and often moving first episode, night sky goes all over the place, stretches and then collapses, at least according to six of the eight episodes watched.
We follow Irene and Franklin York, a couple in their seventies. Seemingly uneventful, they live in the countryside, a good distance from a “typical small American town”. However, Irene and Franklin have a secret: under their shed is a kind of airlock capable of transporting them into space, to an unknown planet that the old lovers contemplate behind thick glass. Intriguing, this science fiction element seems at first to want to attach itself to a delicate and poignant end-of-life story. Unfortunately, from the second episode, a competing plot presents a mother and her daughter who, in the middle of the desert, also live near an intergalactic chamber.
To the gallery of underwritten secondary characters are added, among others, an overly curious neighbor, a well-meaning granddaughter, a kleptomaniac nurse and, above all, a young and mysterious stranger who emerges one evening from the York airlock. Ah, and there’s some sort of cult that’s mixed into this, not that you care once its existence is revealed, because as soon as you get away from Irene and Franklin, the interest dissipates. Infinitely nuanced and constantly accurate, Spacek and Simmons captivate. They are the stars of this overloaded “night sky”.
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