Space Oddity

With The Office and Parks. and Rec, Greg Daniels created two of our most indelible sitcoms. Now, with space force, he's shooting for the moon –and under serious pressure to top both.

- By Margaret Wappler

GREG DANIELS ISN’T happy with the last syllable of “Kokomo.” For the past hour, the 56-year-old TV writer and showrunner has been sitting in an editing room at Universal Studios, outfitted with a video screen, soundboard, and foosball table no one has touched. Dressed in a plaid shirt and dark pants and flanked by a half dozen producers and executives, Daniels is critiquing the first episode of Space Force, a Netflix comedy out in May about a new branch of the Armed Forces. He created the show with the actor Steve Carell, who plays Mark R. Naird, a tightly wound and uber-patriotic general.

In TV, most sound is added in postproduction, affording showrunners like Daniels, the creative visionary behind such unfuck with able sitcoms as The Office and Parks and Recreation, the power to tweak endlessly. Two sound engineers, stationed at mixing consoles, keep replaying snippets of the show on a screen at his command.

Space Force follows Carell’s General Naird as he tries to launch the new, titular military branch and return astronauts to the moon. He quickly gets sidetracked by his doddering dad (Fred Willard) and his wife and daughter, whom he must uproot for his new gig. Then there are his co-workers. Dr. Adrian Mallory (John Malkovich), a “civilian scientist,” proves especially grating, with his knack for summoning scientif ic data that runs counter to whatever Naird wants to do.

For Daniels, the problem with “Kokomo,” the 1988 coconut-scented Beach Boys hit, is not the song itself, which Naird sings along with in a pivotal scene, but the way the last syllable is isolated and drenched in reverb. “I feel like the last sound of