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Hulu has released the first trailer for its Mars show The First

Hulu has released the first trailer for its Mars show The First

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Venturing into the unknown has a cost

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Hulu unveiled its first trailer for The First, an upcoming show from House of Cards creator Beau Willimon about the first astronauts to visit Mars. The trailer also came with a release date: September 14th.

The streaming service greenlit the show last year, and at the time, Willimon described it as a “story about the human spirit, about our indomitable need to reach for unknown horizons.” The trailer backs that up nicely, featuring Sean Penn looking up at the sky and quoting Carl Sagan’s famous comment that all of humanity lives on “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” Along the way, we get some glimpses of life on Earth, while astronauts go through training or fly through space.

The entire video looks very much like digital artist Erik Wernquist’s short film Wanderers, a beautiful meditation on humanity’s desire to go beyond what is familiar and explore the unknown.

Willimon has a solid track record when it comes to television: House of Cards is the show that put Netflix on the map when it came to original content (he left the show after its fourth season), and this promo looks less like a typical science fiction story — like say, The Martian — and more like a serious drama about the first people who will set foot on Mars.