Funny how we meet the straight couple and they're slobbering all over each other. Then we meet the gay (male) couple and they're primly making dinner. I'm sure that's a coincidence, and it could just as easily have been the reverse.
No great loss that this one crashed & burned in the ratings. I wouldn't have stuck with it anyway. Most of the characters are annoying or boring (putting them through stupid reality TV draaamas doesn't help) and the "hey maybe nothing is real!" ending is a huge disincentive to sticking with this, if it had been a series - why should I invest ten seconds just to find out none of the characters are real and they never left earth? The whole holodeck/reality/boogaloo routine is far too hackneyed and overdone to serve as an interesting premise anymore.
All that's left is to assess which of the actors are good enough to want to see in other things.
Clea Duvall - Always good, but jeezus, she should order her agent to get her a role that's anything besides "bitch on wheels." Getting typecast there, girl.
Jimmi Simpson - Showed real promise as the creeeepy evil dude. But another actor I'd like to see cast against type next time.
James D'Arcy, Omar Metwally - Cute, good actors. Bring them back in something.
Whoever played the engineer (?) with the dead son - Also a strong actor.
The rest, pfft. People need to stop casting Nikolai Costa-Waldou or whatever his name is in lead roles. His acting is stiff and unconvincing, and he's ugly as hell.
Not one of these people would have passed a simple psych exam, much less be allowed to go on this long mission.
They certainly did not strike me as the right group of people to send on a mission to save Earth. However, they might be a perfect gang of dysfunctional loons to populate a reality TV show that has nothing whatever to do with saving Earth, yet they are easily fooled into believing otherwise, being dense enough to think in their wildest dreams that anyone would entrust them with saving the whole planet.
It doesn't really apply to this show since the supposed "earth's in danger" scenario didn't happen/get made up until after they were in space, but with these "we're saving the world by going into space" plots, shouldn't they send more than one ship out just in case? Hell, they sent two in Armageddon.
Yet another blaring clue that the threat to Earth is bullshit, yet these blazing geniuses can't figure it out simply by looking in the mirror and asking themselves, "Shit. Are
we Earth's best?"
I haven't watch it yet, but i doubt it's a TV show that would have ever worked on network TV.
As much as people like to bash Fox, they called this one right. This premise is far too strained to work on either network or even nichey cable TV. The characters are too obnoxious and while the serial-killer-AI angle is fun, it won't keep people from changing the channel during the badly-written, self-important blather scenes, of which there are far too many.
I just realized that if the "earth in danger" subplot was made up it would lead to alot of unusable footage for the "studio". Otherwise the home audiences would be asking "wtf is the crew talking about the earth being in danger?".
That could be the premise of the reality show - the audience knows that the people have been lied to. Maybe part of the game is waiting to figure out how long it takes them to get a clue.
Don't have much in the way of sympathy for cheaters whatsoever. The guy's wife could follow right after too. 
