Night Sky
Created by Holden Miller, Daniel C. Connolly
Directed by Juan José Campanella
Starring Sissy Spacek, J. K. Simmons, Chai Hansen, Adam Bartley, Julieta Zylberberg, Sonya Walger, Rocío Hernández, Kiah McKirnan, Beth Lacke, Stephen Louis Grush, Cass Buggé
Executive producers Daniel C. Connolly, Holden Miller, Jimmy Miller, Sam Hansen, Juan José Campanella
Production companies Sunshine Park Productions, Mosaic, Legendary Television, Amazon Studios
By the time you get to the end of the first episode of this eight part series, you’ll have about a dozen questions. Who are these two old farts, and why do they have a portal to a different planet under their tool shed? She’s got some unspecified medical issues that suggest she isn’t going to be functional for very much longer, and he’s showing early signs of dementia. Just a regular tool shed would seem a rather large risk for this pair to be entering on a regular basis.
In fact, they discovered this portal some twenty years ago, and have visited it fairly often, despite the fact that the process of zapping them to a far distant planet makes them sea sick. Over 850 such visits, in fact.
They wind up in a chamber with two seats (and I suspect they schlepped the seats in themselves) that face a large clear port, that looks out on a barren, rock-strewn world with a strange sun and several large planets or moons floating unconcernedly in the sky. There’s an air lock to one side if they feel like stepping out, but at one point the couple got a couple of mice and stuck them in the air lock and cycled it. Things did not go well for the mice. So they stay in Illinois, which has air.
So questions: what is this thing, how did this pair find it, and why do they keep it a secret?
Then you cut to Argentina, a really remote dry valley, where a woman and her 15 year old daughter raise llamas and have a pet church in the back yard. Yes, they have a church in the back yard. No particular reason given, and the llamas don’t seem to mind. It’s all good.
At first you think the old farts in Illinois are gazing out the window at this particular chunk of Argentina. Granted, the air is probably pretty thin at that altitude, but there’s still enough to sustain mice. And Argentina does have bits of vegetation around, something conspicuously missing under the tool shed. And Argentina adheres to the international “one-sun-and-one-moon” agreement.
By the time you get to the end of this eight-part Amazon series, several of the original questions are answered, at least partially, and a few dozen new questions are hanging in the air like one of those spare moons, hopefully to be addressed in future seasons. By the time you get to the end, you have encountered a young man who just sort of appears in the underground chamber one night, a strange and sinister cult, a complex and tragic family history, a weird neighbor with hidden talents, and Latin karaoke. Yes, Latin karaoke. But don’t worry; there’s a reason for it.
Franklin and Irene York (the aforementioned old farts) are played by J.K. Simmons and Sissy Spacek, two of America’s greatest character actors, and they have career roles in this series. The intensity and depth of their acting here is breathtaking. From seeming end-of-life issues, they reinvigorate, without it seeming forced or unnatural.
The young man in the chamber is played by Chai Hansen, known to me as the Monkey King from The New Legends of Monkey, an Australian / Netflix effort. He played the feckless, egotistical and somewhat dim deity well, and I realized that role would be a poor mix here. J.K. Simmons doesn’t monkey around, right? Turns out Hansen has considerably more range and versatility than that, and he plays the disoriented but rapidly improving young man as a perfect complement to the Yorks. Solid acting performances from the rest of the main players make this an ensemble piece, but those three are stellar.
The story takes its own sweet time in unfolding, but that works well in this series. Simmons and Spacek give it a contemplative and caring aura that take might be a routine sort of X-files story and make it much more sublime.
Now on Amazon Prime.