Apple TV+’s Constellation Is a Twisty, Sci-Fi Thriller Destined to be Mishandled

I worry about Apple TV+. Well, not about the trillion dollar-valued corporation, and not even for the executives at the five year old streaming service that, since launch, has attempted to disrupt the TV landscape by doing exactly what everyone else is doing. I worry for the sea of creatives and showrunners who quickly discover that the support to get their novel, exciting projects a devoted audience and highly anticipated follow-up seasons doesn’t really exist.

Whether it’s ineffective marketing or the muddled timeline of making streaming-exclusive content, five years in, you still get the sense that Apple TV+ has to fight to get audiences to tune in to more than a couple of its shows. This makes it hard to separate Constellation from the production anxieties that surround it—sure, the sci-fi drama comes from the broadcaster of For All Mankind and Severance, but there’s about half a dozen other expensive genre flops Apple is currently pretending don’t exist too.

These streaming anxieties don’t crop up because Apple’s new mind-bending, conspiracy-addled, clearly-commissioned-in-the-wake-of-Severance thriller, is bad. On the contrary: it’s ambitious, slickly made, and well-acted, with Noomi Rapace giving a career-best performance as an ISS astronaut who starts to unravel upon returning to Earth from a near-death incident in orbit that involved a near-fatal collision with a cosmonaut corpse that isn’t supposed to be up there. It’s engaging, often unsettling, and ably wrestles with family drama as often as subatomic physics—this is a space show interested in the space that grows between us all.

Any show that reminds you of The OA deserves at least some attention, and Constellation’s fascination with the dramatic potential of quantum mechanics and the tactile emotional experience of a relative jettisoning themselves into space and not coming back the same person helps ground the cerebral and disorientating sci-fi that creator Peter Harness wants to probe us with. 

But as the season pushes on, the pleasant surprise that we’ve not been handed yet another high-concept but neatly self-contained streaming miniseries (the most disposable, expensive thing in television) turns a bit sour. There’s not a sense of where the show will go next, or at least, no sense of how it will go on being as interesting as it has been. Getting a second season for Constellation would be a net positive for TV; expecting audiences to wait the best part of two years for one person to write a second season of a prestige sci-fi show that hasn’t even finished paying the bills for Season 1 feels like we’re being set up for disappointment. These are the TV Times we live in, when being a certain type of “good” is a death sentence.

Constellation starts strong, dazzling us with an explosive two-episode premiere tracing a calamitous ISS accident that Swedish astronaut Jo Ericsson (Rapace) must battle to survive, directed by veteran prestige TV director Michelle MacLaren (responsible for Game of Thrones’ “The Bear and the Maiden Fair” and The Leftovers’ “Cairo”—two Hall of Fame episodes). Psychological distress awaits Jo back on Earth: her testimony is contradicted, memory inconsistencies disrupt family life, and she’s plagued with impossible, jumpscare visions—or at least, impossible for a not-dimensionally-messed-with world.