HBO:s 'Avenue 5' is an awful comedy series.

When it comes to creating quality comedy shows for television, it's not exactly a secret that coming up with quality shows is not easy. Most shows that get produced aren't even remotely well made and don't have what it takes to keep us entertained.

Indeed, in order to create a solid series that could be funny, you need to come up with stuff that actually makes sense. You need to have a solid premise, relatable characters and you also need to have storylines that would feel relevant, which is pretty difficult.

So a couple of months ago, when I noticed that HBO was coming up with a new sci-fi comedy called 'Avenue 5', I was not getting my hopes up. I was pretty certain that this would not be a series worth watching and that it would not be worth my time.

The reason for this is that 'Avenue 5' was made by the same guys who had done 'Veep'. 'Veep' was a wildly overrated 'satire' about politics that had nothing going on in it except for excessive cursing and unnecessary vulgarity (Hollywood at its worst).

Not surprisingly, having now finally seen the first episodes of 'Avenue 5', I can say that my predictions (based on the trailer) turned out to be completely correct. The series, unfortunately, is exactly as empty as I had thought and possibly even worse.

So when it comes to the show, one of the worst things about 'Avenue 5' is that no one seems to know what the purpose of it is. The premise of a carnival cruise space ship full of passengers that malfunctions isn't well thought out and doesn't have much potential in it.

In reality, once you start watching the series, it doesn't take long before it becomes obvious that there's just something terribly wrong here. The whole thing feels unfocused and disjointed (everything seems to be all over the place). 

When it comes to the characters on the series, things aren't unfortunately any better. As the supposed main protagonist, you have a 'captain', played by the usually awesome Hugh Laurie, who doesn't know what he's really supposed to do.

Indeed, on the show as a 'fake' captain wearing the outfit, he just keeps scrambling and is clueless. This is somehow supposed to be funny, even though it really defies all kind of logic and feels like the creators of the show weren't even trying here. 

Unfortunately, the supporting cast is peppered with characters that are even worse. You have characters like an obvious 'Jack Black' doppelganger, an arguing married couple, poorly crafted token minorities and other weirdos that just feel out of place.

Not surprisingly, since the premise of the series isn't well thought out and the characters aren't well defined or interesting, the storylines don't work either. There doesn't seem to be any real stakes, even though the ship is supposedly in real trouble.

Indeed, once I kept watching the episodes, all I could think was that the characters behave as if there was nothing wrong with anything. Their superficial and vain behaviour is just so out of touch that at least to me it felt super infuriating. 

In hindsight, the only 'good thing about the series is that its production values seem to be really solid. It's obvious that a lot of money was spent on the series and that at least at some point the top brass at HBO actually believed in the show. 

After all, when you look at the visual production values, things at least in that department look good. The sets look really expensive and you can tell that the CGI-folks have been working on the show quite diligently (the ship looks pretty good). 

Still, when it comes to the show as a whole, even though the production values are high in 'Avenue 5', those production qualities are obviously not enough. It's apparent that everything else about the series is totally abysmal and does not work.

After all, even though (among other things) Hugh Laurie is a superb actor, there are just too many basic problems here. These flaws (like concept, characters, storylines) are just too serious and too severe for the show to have potential to work in any decent way.

In that sense, if you haven't seen 'Avenue 5' yet, it's safe to say that you should not waste your time on this series. You should not be excited about it and thinking that it would be worth your time or worth watching at some point.

After all, even though there are some big names involved here, in the end, the show just doesn't work. It doesn't work and despite its big production values, the series manages to be disappointing and doesn't have anything meaningful or real going on in it.