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‘The Right Stuff’ Review: Disney+ Grows Up
The one-year anniversary of the launch of Disney+, the company’s direct-to-consumer streaming platform, is imminent. And in that year it’s been pretty well established what you can expect from the service — shows based on preexisting Disney properties, documentaries exploring animated films or theme parks, movies meant for pre-COVID theatrical exhibition, stuff with Muppets. But now The Right Stuff comes along and blows all of those preconceived notions out of the water (with jet fuel, no less). Based on the original nonfiction book by Tom Wolfe and the Oscar-nominated feature by Philip Kaufman, this new version of The Right Stuff is an elegant, hugely entertaining original series that boldly obliterates any preconceived notions of what a Disney+ original series is supposed to be. With The Right Stuff, Disney+ grows up.
This version of The Right Stuff, like those that came before it, chronicles the foundation of Mercury space program and the Mercury Seven, America’s original astronauts. While all of the astronauts are well characterized and given sufficient depth, most of the show centers around an odd triangle of sorts between John Glenn (Patrick J. Adams), a straightlaced family man whose political maneuvering rubs the other astronauts the wrong way; Alan Shepard (Jake McDorman), the handsome, womanizing flyboy who plays by his own rules; and Gordon Cooper (Colin O’Donoghue), who is just trying to keep his family together (his wife is a fellow pilot).
By now, the trials and tribulations behind the formation of the space program have been well documented and dramatized, and not just in earlier versions of Right Stuff. We all know how ramshackle the program initially was, and how fraught with technical issues it became. Thankfully, the new show does much to focus on the personal lives of the astronauts and what they were going through while also attempting to get this program off the ground (and into space).
