The standard critical line on last night’s premiere of the new show Defying Gravity seems to be that it’s a ridiculously canned retelling of Grey’s Anatomy, but with astronauts. Hot young new girl has drunken sex with mentor figure the night before becoming a candidate, a group of attractive people in a high pressure job struggle with interpersonal relationships, cheesy cliché-laden voice-overs. Yep, Grey’s Anatomy. Hey look, your clothes allow you to experience gravity on the spaceship, so when you take them off…

My only problem with pigeonholing Defying Gravity quite that simplistically is that there does seem to be a bit more going on here. In fact, there’s a lot more going on here: while the soap opera takes

place at one end of the spaceship, there appears to be an unknown extraterrestrial life form locked in Pod 4, and it’s actually running this six-year mission. Only the crew’s commander and select personnel back on earth know about it, but when the Antares gets to Venus, crazy stuff is going to happen. Right now, the unknown whatever it is in Pod 4 is just giving Hot Young Woman Astronaut and Damaged Mentor Male Astronaut bizarre dreams. Which leads us to yet another thing this show seems to be trying to do. The one-night stand between Hot Young Woman Astronaut and Damaged Mentor Male Astronaut back on earth made Hot Young Woman Astronaut into a hot young pregnant astronaut, but in the year 2048, abortion has been made illegal. Hot Young Woman Astronaut aborts the baby anyway, but now she and Damaged Mentor Male Astronaut are having the crazy dreams where she’s drifting, pregnant, into the vacuum of space. With some nice back light effect.

Okay, so far we’ve got Sex in Space, a mysterious alien puppeteer, and a healthy dose of bioethics. Next, let’s add some spirituality. ABC aired the first two episodes last night, and in the first one, Damaged Mentor Male Astronaut keeps asking everyone what their religion is and whether they believe in fate. (He asks a Hindu and a Buddhist, but so far we haven’t seen anyone answer, “I’m a Baptist. Deal with it!”) When mysterious alien puppeteer rigs the mission so that the Hindu Astronaut has a heart murmur and has to return back to earth, Hindu Astronaut freaks out and takes a space walk with a statue of Ganesha, the lord of obstacles. (This is another problem with unintelligent space shows: the ultimate terror is getting sucked into the vacuum, so every other episode features someone drifting off into space in a leaky suit.)

So, there’s Sex in Space, mysterious alien puppeteer, a Roe v. Wade debate, and some Eastern mysticism. This is starting to feel a little serious, so let’s make sure to include a few Astronaut jokes. For example, let’s have an astronaut describe her experiment on fertilizing rabbit eggs in space and talk about the determination of sperm, and then let’s do a cut to astronauts in swimsuits. Heh. Swimmers.

My problem isn’t that Defying Gravity is what Dan Fienberg dubbed “Grey’s Astronomy” – if it were just that show, that would be one thing. It would probably be bad and boring, but at least it would be coherent. Instead, Defying Gravity seems to be attempting to build its own science fiction mythology while also doing political and religious commentary, while also doing Funny Sex in Space. Battlestar Galactica could rub its tummy and pat its head at the same time, but Defying Gravity is nowhere near smart enough for that. The show comes off as a confusing tonal mishmash, where the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. If it wants to succeed, Defying Gravity needs to hold off figuring out how to defy gravity and focus on defying my bullshit meter.