What “The First” does share with “House of Cards” is a sense of outlining an institution. Its energy is procedural. But the show scarcely cares whether the talking points of the political lobbying, or the engineers’ urgent conversations about the return vehicle, or the astronauts’ gasping debates during training drills, amount to mumbo jumbo. The workplace dramatics exist partly as mere trials for inspirational figures to survive, partly as a spur to the sober soap-operatics that play out around kitchen islands and among taupe interiors. An ode to exploration undercut with a vague sense of elegy, “The First” offers escapism in its dream of gaining distant colonies, and introspection in its study of human limits.

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