Apple TV’s 10-Part Sci-Fi Series Had a Great Premise With One Big Problem
Strange Planet had almost everything needed to become a standout adult animated sci-fi comedy. Nathan W. Pyle’s bizarrely wholesome world of blue beings, literal language, and everyday existential problems was already a proven concept, and bringing it to Apple TV gave the webcomic room to become something bigger.
Pyle also had Rick and Morty and Community creator Dan Harmon helping translate his work for television, along with a stacked voice cast led by Tunde Adebimpe, Demi Adejuyigbe, Lori Tan Chinn, Danny Pudi and Hannah Einbinder. The problem is that Strange Planet’s greatest strength was also its biggest weakness: There is only so much mileage in the joke.
‘Strange Planet’ Turns Everyday Life Into Alien Anthropology
The beings of Strange Planet live on a world that looks a lot like ours, but they describe everything with unnervingly literal language. Coffee becomes “jitter liquid,” a cat is a “vibrating creature,” teeth are “mouth stones,” socks are “foot tubes,” and kissing is “mouth pushing.” By stripping ordinary experiences of the language we take for granted, Pyle makes familiar routines suddenly look ridiculous.
That works because humans are nothing if not creatures of habit. We rarely stop to question why we do things the way we do them, and Strange Planet gets its laughs by forcing its characters to approach those conventions as if they were encountering them for the first time. The joke is that their clinical descriptions expose how strange our own behavior sounds when you take away years of cultural conditioning.
The animated series preserves that quality remarkably well. Its blue, pink, and purple visual palette looks like Pyle’s comics brought to life, while its characters remain deliberately sexless and largely anonymous. That anonymity gives the series an unusual universality. These are stories about friendships falling apart, parents struggling with their children, romantic relationships changing, and people wondering what they’re supposed to do with their lives.
The Webcomic’s Biggest Strength Doesn’t Translate to TV
Unfortunately, what makes a four-panel comic clever doesn’t necessarily make a 25-minute television episode compelling. Pyle’s original comics work because they deliver a joke, an observation, or a small emotional truth almost instantly. The reader encounters a familiar situation, watches the beings describe it with their strange vocabulary, and gets the joke. Then the strip ends, and there’s no need for a larger narrative arc, recurring character development, or escalating conflict.
A television series doesn’t have that luxury. Strange Planet has to fill 10 episodes, each running roughly half an hour, which means its simple observations need to support substantially more story. The series tries to accomplish this through multiple interconnected vignettes, recurring characters, and increasingly elaborate plots. Sometimes that expansion works, as frequent shifts in tone in the series are quite similar to stretching a joke beyond its original capacity.
Over time, the show’s humor becomes less effective, especially when it tries to contrast its subtle humor with more grandiose, cartoonish antics. Events like power generation, tunnels on the cliffside, and talent shows look absurd when shown alongside deeper discussions of love, loneliness, and mortality. A poignant observation about honesty or impermanence can lose some of its impact when it’s buried inside a plot that feels considerably more conventional.
The recurring characters help, particularly the Manager of the cliffside restaurant Careful Now and her shy potential love interest, but even they remain intentionally vague; the Manager is still simply “The Manager.” Most beings don’t have names, and their appearances are distinguished largely by clothing, accessories, and occupation. That approach works well in the comics, where the characters exist primarily to deliver a particular observation. On television, it can make it difficult to become deeply invested in who these people are.
‘Strange Planet’ Is Better in Small Doses
Strange Planet‘s warmth is one of the show’s most appealing qualities, particularly in an adult animation landscape that often leans toward cynicism, vulgarity, or outright bleakness. This show finds humor in awkwardness rather than cruelty and repeatedly returns to the idea that life is strange, temporary, and worth appreciating anyway.
The voice cast also does a tremendous amount of work. Adebimpe, Pudi, Chinn, Adejuyigbe and Einbinder bring personality to characters who are intentionally designed to look and sound somewhat interchangeable. Their performances help give the otherwise minimalist world some texture.
Critics largely responded positively to the series, with Strange Planet earning an 83% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Yet even favorable reviews repeatedly circled the same problem: The show’s observations are clever, but the gimmick can start to feel thin when expanded across an entire season.
Strange Planet feels like a missed opportunity rather than a failure. The series had a genuinely distinctive premise, a beautiful visual identity, and a creative team capable of turning its gentle observations into something meaningful. What it never quite solved was the fundamental question of how to make a four-panel idea breathe for 10 television episodes.
The best version of Strange Planet might not have needed to become bigger at all. It simply needed to stay small. Sometimes a joke works precisely because it ends before you have time to get tired of it.