Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Command Z’, Steven Soderbergh’s Amusing Bite-Size Sci-fi Satire Series

Only a few breaths after Steven Soderbergh debuted his HBO noir series Full Circle, he surprise-dropped Command Z, a satirical sci-fi web series (hey, remember web series?) available only via the filmmaker’s website for a one-time price of $7.99, and benefiting the Children’s Aid and Boston University Center for Antiracist Research charities. The title refers to the “undo” keystroke on a Mac (that’d be “ctrl z” for us PC peeps), which reflects the series’ concept: Set in the future, the AI CEO of a tech corp sends three employees back in time to 2023 to tweak things here and there, and make their world less hellish. Command Z is divvied up into eight episodes of varying lengths and totaling about 90 minutes, all directed by Soderbergh himself. So it’s like a movie cut into pieces – or like Quibi, but by one of our era’s master directors, which makes it worth at least a curiosity watch.

COMMAND Z: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A closeup on a microwavable packet of freeze-dried “wheat loaf with pork marrow,” which appears to be the horrible-sounding stuff people will eat in the future. It has 19 grams of protein and four grams of fat, if you’re counting your macros.

The Gist: Two jumpsuited employees – Jamie (JJ Maley) and Sam (Roy Wood Jr.) – of an unnamed corporation sit in a dim, dingy room. A screen cycles through news headlines and commercials – something about “Walmazon” accepting blood as payment now, and a new product called Coke 500, now with more sugar. Emma (Chloe Radcliffe) soon joins them, pulling off her yellow hazmat suit, late for work. (Note, she’s always late; in a future episode, it’s because flooding was so bad, a whale had to be drone-lifted off the commuter-train tracks.) The floating head of their boss soon appears on the screen; played by Michael Cera in the halting voice of something that’s very human but not quite there yet, he’s the artificial intelligence resurrection of the company’s billionaire CEO, who died a while back when his rocket to Mars exploded <insert Elon Musk joke here>.

The AI CEO outlines the plan for his three employees: He developed an artificial wormhole that’ll allow them to travel back in time to the year 2023, which he determined to be an inflection point in world history. They’ll inhabit the bodies of a few influential people and try to tweak the course of history in pursuit of “a more livable, fair and decent world.” The wormhole is housed in a clothes dryer, and making the hop requires the user to wear a wire harness on their head and drink a cup of disgusting liquid. They have 10 days to accomplish their task before it collapses. Emma laughs: “His shit never works,” she quips <insert Elon Musk joke here>. Is our trio of protagonists up for the task? The general consensus seems to be Yeah Sure Why Not, and we’ll find out if they’re successful in the remaining episodes. 

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? If Silo was cut up into eensy pieces like Quibi/Roku Channel’s Most Dangerous Game and injected with acerbic Arrested Development-style comedy, you’d be in the Command Z ballpark.

Our Take: The Command Z trailer proclaims that it’s “From the ass of Steven Soderbergh,” which sounds about right, for better or worse, mainly for better, because I’d argue that even the most trifling of somethings pulled out of Soderbergh’s derriere is at least as good as the most heavily watched Netflix crap. The first episode clocks at eight minutes, setting up the premise and packing in many, many jokes, most of them aiming to skewer Very Serious Things, e.g., the effects of climate change, corporate greed, late-stage capitalism, etc. It also establishes Emma as the cynic, Jamie as a pollyanna type and Sam as the comically confused one. 

Not much happens in the first episode, so I violated the Stream It Or Skip It rules and watched the next two, where our intrepid “heroes” inhabit the bodies of a rando social media influencer, the daughter of a fossil-fuel company’s CEO and the longtime deputy of a Wall Street creep (notably played by Liev Schreiber). Sometimes they manage to change things for the better, sometimes they don’t, and the joke is, even when they’re successful, it doesn’t seem like enough. Some of the comedy aims at big, easy targets, but it’s consistently funny, queueing up one-liners about “Northern Hemisphere common dollars,” “super luxury bunker communities,” “meth coffee” and “walk-in organ donation spots.” In this future, you can take a submarine vacation trip from Houston to New Orleans, which sounds like it’s about as much fun as one can have in this dystopia. The subtext being, Hey, let’s do what we can now to NOT get to that point, OK?  

Sex and Skin: None (at least in the first three episodes).

Parting Shot: A comedically ominous low angle shot of the wormhole dryer.

Sleeper Star: So far, Maley is funny and perfectly on-point as the naive optimist among our three principals.

Most Pilot-y Line: The AI floating head explains how he acquired time-travel tech: “I outbid the CIA to acquire a small company run by physicists who claimed they could generate an artificial space-time wormhole. Turned out they could!”

Our Call: I’m amused – and compelled to see if Command Z can maintain this level of reasonably biting comedy through all 90 minutes. (And hey, the money’s going to worthy causes.) STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.