Defying Gravity, BBC Two

In space, no-one can hear you snore. The opening two-parter of Defying Gravity introduced us, in a sluggish and tortuous manner, to the six-year mission of the spacecraft Antares, which contains eight astronauts and will visit seven planets, starting with Venus. Everything was meant to be stirring and momentous as mankind took up the baton previously lifted by the likes of Vasco da Gama and Neil Armstrong, to pursue the quest for knowledge and new frontiers. More prosaically, the trade journals tell us that Antares may be brought down by networks pulling the financial plug before it can be guided to its destiny by the mysterious life form lurking in the ship's Pod 4.

A British/American/Canadian/German co-production, Defying Gravity could hardly avoid suffering from design by committee. This surfaced most prominently in an ostentatious walk-on by Peter Howitt (who also directs several episodes) as a pushy British TV journalist, deliberately goading flight engineer Maddux (yep, that’s how they’re spelling it) Donner with questions about why he left two fellow astronauts to die on Mars 10 years earlier. And would you believe it, the ship’s pilot Nadia Schilling is played by German actress Florentine Lahme. Doubtless they’ll bump into a Canadian backpacker somewhere in the 23rd Quadrant.

The show won't perish for lack of narrative tricks, traps and triggers. There are flashbacks reaching back five and 10 years, and there’s going to be bags of back-story action between the characters. Donner (Ron Livingston, previously the hard-drinking Captain Nixon from Band of Brothers) has a fraught relationship with geologist Zoe Barnes, as well as a difficult past with his alcoholic dad who wanted him to be a baseball player. Married astronauts Jen and Rollie Crane are now facing a six-year separation after Rollie had to quit Antares after developing a sudden heart murmur, while medical officer Evram Mintz has some ‘fessing up to do about his problems with the demon drink. And they have to cope with all this while the intensely irritating Paula Morales (right) runs round the ship delivering a live video commentary for all the folks back on earth.

There’s going to be front-story action too, with Donner finding himself dreaming prophetic dreams. And a slow fuse set to splutter throughout the series has been lit by whispers about a dark secret which hasn’t yet been revealed to the Antares crew. But rather than thrilling us with anticipation, all this is like looking at a 900-page legal textook and knowing that you have to memorise it for an exam next Tuesday.

The neurotic screwing around with time seems to have defeated the production designers, because while the main action supposedly takes place in 2052, things like clothes, furniture, digital cameras and even the ketchup bottles look suspiciously 2009-vintage, while pop music still hasn't progressed beyond Britney. The indie-rock tracks shoehorned into the soundtrack to add emotional colour might have worked on Grey’s Anatomy (also from Defying Gravity’s creator James Parriott), but they sound gratingly inappropriate in a futuristic space saga.

Most problematic of all is that Gravity can’t decide whether it’s flat-out sci-fi like Star Trek, or something more discursive and philosophical, like Solaris. But since they’ve saddled Donner with a voice-over where he utters sententious homilies like “we can find redemption in the simplest acts of humanity” or “being an astronaut is all about control…you don’t want surprises”, expect a slow crawl round the bus lane of the universe, with very few jokes.