Netflix’s Away was given the green light way back in June 2018 and details of casting were announced a year later. Now, two years on from its inception, we’ve finally got our first proper look at it via a teaser trailer.
The science fiction drama series centers on Emma Green (Hilary Swank), an astronaut and former Navy pilot on a year-long mission to Mars. The promo highlights Emma’s melancholy at being separated from her husband Matt (Josh Charles) and daughter Lex (Talitha Bateman), showing her staring at a photo of them while shedding a single zero-gravity tear.
Through the window of her spacecraft we see the forbidding red surface of Mars, emphasizing the enormous distance between her and her loved ones. This separation anxiety should fuel a story that’s been billed by its creators as being about how we need one another in order to accomplish apparently impossible tasks.
Along with the teaser comes a series of photos (see above) showing off the rest of the international cast of characters, including engineer Misha Popov (Mark Ivanir), botanist Kwesi Weisberg-Adebayo (Ato Essandoh), fighter pilot Ram Arya (Ray Panthaki) and chemist Lu Wang (Vivian Wu). All of them are out to study various aspects of Mars, with the show apparently focusing on their interpersonal dynamics as much as it does on space exploration.
Judging by this teaser, Away looks set to appeal to fans of slightly harder science fiction than usual, seemingly in a similar vein to movies like Moon, Gravity, Sunshine and Interstellar. Of course, the most obvious comparison may end up being Ridley Scott’s The Martian, though as yet we don’t know how much time will be spent on the surface of Mars and how much aboard the spacecraft. In addition, it’s not clear whether this will be a limited miniseries or an ongoing multi-season story. We’ll find out fairly soon, though, as Away‘s first season touches down on Netflix on September 4th.