Posted on 08/21/2015 10:01:10 AM PDT by Marcus
The Astronaut Wives Club, the summer series from ABC that depicted the race to the moon as a kind of “Desperate Housewives of NASA” ended its run Thursday with the episode dealing with the Apollo moon landing and the epic adventure of Apollo 13. What began with soap opera triteness ended in a dash of ugliness. The episode sought to remind the viewer that not everyone regarded the moon landings with awe and wonder. Some reacted to the greatest technological feat in the history of humankind with rage.
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I like the show. It had issues. The biggest one being that it just went too fast (going from the start of Mercury to the Moon Landing in 10 episodes really doesn’t give a lot of stuff a chance to sink in). But any fan of The Right Stuff knows the wives went through a lot, and have an interesting story in their own right.
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No.
I would be surprised if ABC didn’t depict the wives sleeping around or something
They did not. They did depict most of the astronauts sleeping around, but that is, sadly, historically accurate.
so. That’s not an excuse. ABC is scum.
Accuracy is not an excuse?! The story is about what it was like for the wives while their husbands were making history. And part of what it was like for the wives was dealing with Cape Cookies. Those are the facts, and they weren’t presented in a sleazy say, we got no sweaty heavy breathing scenes, just guys leaving the pool area with women not their wives, and some spousal confrontations. These things ACTUALLY happened (most of the Mercury 7 got divorced), there’s nothing wrong with actually presenting actual events.
Anyone who didn’t like “The Wives Club” is a big HACK!
Accuracy... right.
They could just porn all evening and claim its accurate.
I haven’t watched television in a long time. Nothing on TV is “accurate” not even the news.
There’s a lot of good complaints to be had on the writing and presentation side. They really did not make it as good a show as it could have been. It really is a fascinating story. Done right it could have been another Mad Men (same era, a lot of the same social commentary), and they really never elevated their game that high. It was a pretty darn good show that had the potential for greatness. But it was still pretty darn good. And watching it gave me an excuse to show The Right Stuff to the wife (one of my favorite movies ever), as she kept asking “how do you know this” and TRS was always the answer.
Ah yes, don’t actually know any of what you’re talking about but that won’t stop you from pounding the table. Never let the facts get in the way of a good rant.
Meanwhile, you’re full of crap. As I already explained to you.
The station IDs are accurate.
Some of the info in commercials is accurate. Like when they give the address of a store, or say "doors open at nine" for some public event.
Other than that, you're spot on.
‘The Right Stuff’ (the book) is one of the most interesting and *hilarious* books I’ve ever read.
-JT
Yes indeed I watch the Right stuff a couple times a year it was an amazing time to grow up during it TV in the classroom of launches and recovery Yes the wives were a big part of it they too sacrificed and had to worry big time and to think today we have no manned capability.... zero we should have been to Mars by now
I use a phrase from that book all the time at work:
“Please let me not (mess) up”.
Or something along those lines.
Oddly enough while that movie turned me onto Tom Wolfe it was the second to last of his books that I read. And only second to last because he released another book after I read it. For 20 years I wasn’t even interested in reading it, just didn’t occur to me to want to. Then one day I saw it at a used bookstore and wondered why I’d never read it. Great book too, glad I finally got around to it.
One of the greatest tragedies I’ve witnessed is how we keep chopping NASA in half. When I was growing up (the 70s, so it had already been cut in half once from your childhood) NASA had spacelab, and manned orbits, and was starting the probe program and was working on the shuttle. Now we’ve got probes. Makes me want to cry.
Went too fast and there were too many characters to cover so that it was hard to follow. Given a 10-episode series which was about 37 or so minutes of show each, so you were lucky to get 15-20 minutes of character development for each wife, excluding the interaction with the husbands (and not even counting the post-Mercury 7 wives, of whom probably got only 5 minutes or less each and some not even that). I was, like you, familiar with the material because of “The Right Stuff.”
It also was ridiculous in that for a decade-long arc, the wives looked as fresh (if not younger due to the more modern styles as it progressed) at the end when a decade should’ve worn them down (and the marriages that ended in divorce). You’d need a soap-opera saga to do it all justice.
The ugliness was most reflected in Walter Mondale, who led the fight to dismantle the moon program. He spouted the mantra that the money would be better spent here. This to short-changing the shuttle program, and ultimately our ending of the manned space program under the current administration.
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