In ‘The First,’ on Hulu, the Future Is Not That Dark

NEW ORLEANS — These days, the most natural question to ask about a television series set in the future is a simple one: So how bad does it get?

The success of shows like “Westworld,” “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Black Mirror” indicate that dystopias, or at least deep discomfort, are resonating with viewers. “The First,” Beau Willimon’s Hulu series about the space program in the not-too-distant 2030s (debuting Friday), is a bit of a curveball.

Starring Sean Penn and Natascha McElhone as an astronaut and a private-sector aerospace mogul at work on the first manned mission to Mars, the show explores high-level ambition and aspiration. Willimon has plumbed the dark sides of these all-too-human traits before through the manipulative and unpleasant power brokers that populated his Netflix series, “House of Cards,” and his plays “Farragut North” (which became the film “The Ides of March”) and “The Parisian Woman.” Here, it seems, he’s reflecting a sincere, if guarded, faith in our better natures.

The optimism of frontiersmanship, the desire to boldly go where no one has gone before, has long been a fascination for Willimon.

“I’ve always been interested in space and adventure travels,” he said over the phone recently. “Not just space, but also tales of people pushing themselves to extremes, to their limits. Whether it’s climbing a mountain or going to the ocean depths, or Shackleton trying to traverse Antarctica.”

“Some of these desires are almost irrational,” he added. “Because there really is no way to explain why someone would place themselves in that much risk and peril in order to get to this place that doesn’t necessarily even have a practical benefit other than the accomplishment itself.”

Willimon began work on the optimistic “The First” shortly before leaving “House of Cards” after its fourth season. His main character, Tom Hagerty (Penn, in his first major television role), is a decidedly different protagonist than Machiavellian politician Frank Underwood of “House of Cards.” A veteran flyboy, Hagerty is a bit of a swashbuckler, but torn between his daughter’s newfound yet shaky stability and the tantalizing skies.

Hagerty’s emotional foil, Laz Ingram (McElhone), is a cerebral but slightly awkward STEM visionary, all clockwork brains and fierce drive, frustrated by the tiresome bureaucracies that throw roadblocks in her path to the stars.

Another star, though inanimate, is the show’s setting. New Orleans wasn’t initially a factor during Willimon’s conceptual and writing process. But once Louisiana bolstered a tax credit program for film and TV production that had briefly been in flux, the city’s presence began seeping into the creator’s writing.

“Here’s a place that’s teeming with life in every sense,” said Willimon, who also had a New Orleans-set play, “Lower Ninth,” a conversation among tenuous survivors trapped on a rooftop in the aftermath of the 2005 floods from Hurricane Katrina. “From this sort of swirling biological chaos of swamps and the Delta and the ocean, to the swirling human chaos of a city that’s so rich in culture and history and every sort of person you can imagine.”

Hagerty’s troubled daughter, played by Anna Jacoby-Heron, has a pivotal scene set at the Pearl, a long-standing bohemian art space in the Bywater neighborhood, which just happened to have a spaceship-shaped piece of discarded industrial metal in its backyard. After finding himself there at a party, Willimon wrote it in.

A similar thing happened with Hagerty’s house, a key location in the show. After searching the elegant Garden district to no avail, Willimon happened to be back at the edge of Bywater, looking across the Mississippi, and found it: a two-story house with a balcony that feels like a ship’s prow, where an explorer might look out at expanses of water and sky and grassy levee and see the edge of the world. “Everything started to click,” he said. “It suddenly became Tom Hagerty’s house almost instantly, and I started writing to the architecture.”

And the river itself, the wide earth-colored force that has both cradled and menaced the below-sea-level city for centuries, is the site of a tragedy essential to the plot.

As befits a show about the future, “The First” is full of neat gadgetry and believable technology like reliable self-driving cars, augmented reality and Google Glass-ish personal communication hubs. (The only thing that seems far-fetched is the implication that by 2031 listening to voicemail messages will have made a comeback.) New Orleans was also convenient to real-life NASA facilities like the John C. Stennis Space Center, a rocket-testing facility (and summer space camp site!) on the Mississippi border, and the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston. Actors as well as writers and production designers put in hours there and with consultants Christopher Ferguson and Michael Lopez-Alegria, both retired NASA astronauts. Some scenes were even shot at Stennis.

“I think we all recognize, whether it’s in ourselves or in others, this thing that is the explorer, the wanderer, the person who wants to take themselves out of either their own or society’s comfort zone,” Penn said.

Spending time with astronauts — particularly Chris Hadfield, the first Canadian to walk in space and probably the first person of any nationality to record a David Bowie song there too — unlocked a new level of understanding for Penn. He zeroed in on the way Hadfield spoke about the beauty of a spacewalk, the way the elite military people and scientists who went to space would use words like “imagine.”

“To hear him talk about it, it’s universe-broadening,” he said. For LisaGay Hamilton, it was the emotional, rather than the technical details that she hoped to understand. She spoke with aerospace engineer Jeanette Epps in preparation for her role as Kayla Price — who, like Epps, is a black female astronaut. “I wanted to speak to someone who looked like me, and who potentially had a similar experience of the world,” Hamilton said. The conversation was grounding, she said. One of the topics that the two women spent time on was death. “I mean, here you are, actually going into a profession where you could die, and not come back to earth,” she said.

Price butts up against some of the uglier realities that, perhaps no surprise, still plague us in even a hopeful future. In this way, she provides the flip side to Willimon’s belief that the impulses that propel us to the stars are timeless; so too are the ones that drag us back to earth.

“It’s both a noble pursuit and it has potentially really damaging and selfish aspects to it as well,” he said. “And I think those two things go hand in hand. You can applaud someone who discovered the North Pole, but you can ask yourself the question, well, at what cost? What did that person put their family through? How much ambition was part of that? It wasn’t purely a selfless act.”