I’m not usually drawn to reality TV. But when physicist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein mentioned that she was watching the Fox series “Stars on Mars,” which premiered earlier this month, my interest was piqued.
The premise is “Big Brother” meets the 2015 Matt Damon sci-fi survivalist drama “The Martian.”
Twelve celebrities — sorry, celebronauts, in the show’s parlance — begin at the outset, with an elimination round each week, and they range from former pro athletes (Marshawn Lynch) to nepo babies (Tallulah Willis, daughter of Demi Moore and Bruce Willis) to legitimate Hollywood actors (“Superbad’s” Christopher Mintz-Plasse) to reality TV veterans (Tom Schwartz of Bravo’s “Vanderpump Rules”).
Can they survive life on Mars? Or rather, a televised simulation? The show has devised all kinds of tasks to find out. So off they go to the Australian town of Coober Pedy, where the landscape approximates the dusty, reddish, barren look of Mars, and their indoor habitat is equipped with a command center, living quarters, a gym and a biodome where they are expected to grow their own food.
“Star Trek” alumnus William Shatner hosts.
Prescod-Weinstein is a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of New Hampshire, but she is also an avid consumer of pop culture and reality TV. And in her words, the show is “an incredibly well-done piece of propaganda” that aims to normalize the idea of space commercialization, where exploration and exploitation are synonymous.
It wouldn’t be the first time. Propaganda has been part of Hollywood’s output going back decades. The authors of “Hollywood Goes To War: How Politics, Profits and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies” note that, through a combination of patriotism and the profit motive, “Hollywood became a compliant part of the American war machine.” And the 2022 documentary “Theaters of War” looks at the Pentagon’s more recent involvement with certain big-budget movies.
But I don’t know if audiences make that same connection when watching TV and film set in space. We often think of these stories as merely science fiction.
“Stars on Mars” engages in the usual reality tropes. At one point “Modern Family” star Ariel Winter says: “The fact that we have an astronaut (here) is so crazy.” She’s referring to … disgraced pro cyclist Lance Armstrong, who is among the cast, confusing him with Neil Armstrong, the first person to walk on the moon in 1969, and who died in 2012.
I couldn’t tell if this was an organic or scripted moment. Winters is a professional actor; is she playing someone who got it wrong (maybe at the prompting of producers)? Or did she really get it wrong? It wouldn’t surprise me if she’s unfamiliar with Lance Armstrong. But in that same vein, do we think most 25-year-olds know who Neil Armstrong is, either? I smell a setup.
Prescod-Weinstein offered this insight: Another participant on the series is Porsha Williams, who got her start on “The Real Housewives of Atlanta” and became infamous for mistaking the Underground Railroad for an actual railroad.
“My disappointment in that moment is how it was edited,” said Prescod-Weinstein, “because we didn’t get to hear what Porsha said to her. I want to know if Porsha was like, ‘Yeah, one time I made this really terrible mistake during my first season on reality TV too.’”
I think “Stars on Mars” is too dull to be either informative or entertaining, but I’m curious about what it’s actually doing when we scratch beneath the surface. Prescod-Weinstein and I talked further about the show’s life-in-space angle.
Q: What is it about reality TV that you find so compelling?
A: I’m going to go way back and say I was 10 when I watched the first season of “The Real World” put people together in a home and filmed them — and it was people who had some kind of genuine ambition for their lives that wasn’t about being famous for being filmed all the time. I think on some level, there’s always a piece of me that’s chasing that experience, even though I know it’s no longer possible because people on these shows are so self-aware now.
Q: Your expertise is in particle physics and astrophysics, so I’m wondering if you talk about reality TV with your science colleagues?
A: I’m not sure I’ve ever tried to talk to any physicists about reality TV (laughs). I had to pause and think about it, because I’m part of this collective called Particles for Justice and I’m trying to remember if I’ve ever brought it up during any of our hangouts.
Academically, I am a particle physicist, I am a cosmologist, I do astrophysics. But I also have a secondary expertise in the social studies of science. So I think that part of my brain goes to work when I’m watching these shows. But I grew up, like many grandchildren of Caribbeans, watching soap operas with my grandmother. And all these reality shows are just soap operas.
Q: Even in your professional circles, people weren’t either derisively or excitedly like, “Oh, this is happening”?
A: No!
I should be forthcoming and say that nobody has sat me down and said, “Chanda, this is propaganda.” But that’s my educated guess, having attended a workshop that was about how to write space propaganda for pop culture.
It was at a conference for people who are thinking about the future space economy. I’m not sure the general public knows these gatherings are happening, where people are sitting around, planning the space economy. And one of the sessions had people talking about positive storytelling about space, space travel and space economies, and giving us examples.
Q: Was it a session geared toward people who want to do this, or was it a cautionary thing?
A: Oh no, there was no cautionary anything (laughs). We got a worksheet on how to start crafting our own stories and it was a positive how-to.
Q: What kind of message do you think “Stars on Mars” is conveying?
A: I think the show is doing a couple of things. One, it’s reaching out to an audience that’s never going to watch “NOVA” on PBS or even “For All Mankind” (the Apple TV+ drama about space travel). It’s basically planting the seeds of: Check out what going to Mars would be like.
Q: Normalizing the idea of it.
A: Yeah, normalizing going to Mars for an audience that’s not necessarily nerdy and hanging out at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum like me (laughs), and it’s speaking to them in a language that’s familiar.
It’s also setting expectations for us about what we can expect the media presentation of the journey to the moon or to Mars to be like.
This show is coming out on the heels of the announcement of the Artemis crew. (NASA’s Artemis program “will establish a sustainable presence on the Moon to prepare for missions to Mars.”) So it is normalizing for people — this is what it’s going to feel like culturally — without telling them this is something that’s actually happening in the world.
Q: And it waves away any potential ethical questions about these real-world programs. What’s your take on Shatner’s involvement? Last year, after being aboard Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space flight, he very famously said : “My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.”
A: I think Shatner is understood to be a bona fide space expert, not in the technical sense, but in terms of his relationship to the cultural significance of space and even the industrial significance of going to space. I think people accept that Shatner is a genuine spokesperson for the industry at this point. And that was true before he went to the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere, which is what I would call that Blue Origin flight.
But having seen him onstage afterward at the Star Trek Convention, he seemed genuinely changed by that experience.
Q: That’s why I was confused. Why he would host something like this, that gamifies the idea of life on Mars?
A: So, the kind of targeted advertising I get on social media is for the Planetary Society. And I’m very attentive to the fact that the algorithm knows I’m a “Star Trek” fan, so that’s why they put Robert Picardo (who played the doctor hologram on “Star Trek: Voyager”) in those advertisements and he’s talking about how great it is that space commercialization is happening.
I think the way that these things are pitched to actors — who genuinely have this valuable space ambassador social capital — is: You are doing something good for humanity. Because the way that they always talk about it is: This is how we’re going to bring “Star Trek” into reality.
At the Star Trek Convention, William Shatner was talking about the grief he felt about global warming and human relations on the planet. But I think everybody in the “Star Trek” family, and I would include myself, we don’t think trying to build the “Star Trek” future is the problem.
For me, it’s important that “Star Trek” is a socialist utopia. But for a lot of other people, they interpret it as: Going to space led to technology that made the world better.
So I think part of the propaganda is that going to space is going to solve our problems. And one of the points that many of us have been making is that we take our problems with us when we go to space.
Which is why last year, before I attended that conference about the space economy, I said I wanted to talk about what it would mean to take Black feminism into space. Because if we want to be any different in space, it means that we have to be different here on Earth. It’s complicated, and the people around you are shaping what you think. And if the people around you are saying, “This is a good thing, this will help build the ‘Star Trek’ universe,” you’re not necessarily asking a lot of questions like: Doesn’t that launchpad destroy an ecosystem in Texas (as happened after a recent SpaceX launch)?
Q: The climate crisis is here and life on Earth will increasingly become more difficult. Is that also another message of the show? That we have to find other places to live?
A: I think some people think that. But one of the things that was valuable about the film “The Martian” — what it was actually driving home — was just how hard it is to survive in that environment.
———
