John C. Reilly, Fred Armisen, and Tim Heidecker Join The Space Race With SHOWTIME’s MOONBASE 8

By BILL HARRIS Special to The Lede There are some inconsistencies in the qualifications of the astronauts played by John C. Reilly, Fred Armisen, and Tim Heidecker in the new SHOWTIME comedy series MOONBASE 8, which drops all six episodes Sunday on Crave. On the one hand, Cap (Reilly), Skip (Armisen), and Rook (Heidecker) presumably have passed a series of tests prior to being stationed at a moonbase simulator in the isolated desert of Winslow, Arizona, with an eye toward being picked for an actual space mission someday. But on the other hand, in the first episode, Cap, Skip, and Rook have a vigorous debate about what the acronym NASA actually stands for – none of them has a real grip on it. Point being, while Cap, Skip, and Rook technically are smart enough to be astronauts, they’re not exactly at the top of NASA’s call list. Add in their personality idiosyncrasies, magnified by the isolation as they pretend to be in space, and it makes for a comic stew that good friends Reilly, Armisen, and Heidecker couldn’t resist. Coincidentally, something called “beef-style stew” is one of the staples of the astronauts’ diet in MOONBASE 8. “One of the great things about the space program, and space travel, is that there’s so little room for error,” said Reilly, in a virtual panel presentation for TV reporters. “You know, everything is so rehearsed, and so serious, and everything is life and death once you get up into orbit. But that’s a natural complement to comedy, because anything that has to be serious is a wonderful thing to play off of with comedy.” Of course, the astronauts in MOONBASE 8 aren’t really in orbit, and Earthbound problems do arise. For example, in one of the early episodes, a prowler (animal or human, undetermined) is messing with the team’s recycling bins. But every time the astronauts hear something banging around out there, they have to put on their spacesuits before investigating – because going “outside” is supposed to mean going into space – and the culprit is long gone by the time they arrive. What the astronauts decide to do about it is pretty extreme, after some fun bickering – fun for the viewers, that is, not so much for the astronauts. “One thing we love is disharmony in the characters, and finding those little microaggressions,” Heidecker explained. “Part of the stakes becomes John’s character really trying to keep them together, not because he loves these guys, but because he needs to show NASA how he can keep everything together. So we thought, there’s just a million different comedy ways to play with that.” Armisen added, “Plus, we liked the whole look of it, the outfits and everything. I don’t know what we got right and what we didn’t, but from where we saw it, we thought it looked pretty cool.” Reilly, Armisen, and Heidecker stressed that the purpose of MOONBASE 8 is not to mock the space program, which they all still revere with childlike wonder. But that said, how do they think real astronauts are going to react to the show? “I remember when we did Talladega Nights, the big concern was that race fans would be offended that we were making so much fun of NASCAR,” recalled Reilly, who starred in that film alongside Will Ferrell and Sacha Baron Cohen. “But what we found was, everyone was just so psyched to be on the cultural map. Once something’s made fun of, it’s really a mainstream thing that everyone knows about. So hopefully the way we poke fun at the space program becomes one of those cultural moments when we can finally laugh about some of this serious stuff.” billharristv@gmail.com @billharris_tv