"Every setback is an opportunity in disguise." John Adams said that, and I tend to believe it. Also, I wasn't fired, I was on hold. And when I think about everything I'd accomplished over the past few months, my value to this colony was undeniable. I was doing the best graphic design of my career. I was living my passion. And more importantly, I was part of something bigger. ... Everyone had a purpose. Mine was graphic design, and nobody could ever take that away from me.
— Jeff Cooper
Fired on Mars is a Max original adult animated sci-fi series created by Nate Sherman and Nick Vokey, based on their 2016 short film of the same name. It follows the life of Jeff Cooper (Luke Wilson), a graphic designer at corporate start-up Mars.ly which has recently established a colony on the Red Planet. But soon after his one-way trip to the new office, Jeff's position is unceremoniously put on hold. Unable to return to Earth or go anywhere outside of what Mars.ly has made habitable, Jeff struggles to find some place where he can fit in as a valued member of the team.
The series premiered on April 20, 2023, with 8 episodes released two at a time every Thursday.
Fired on Mars provides examples of:
- 20 Minutes into the Future: Mars.ly has the technology to colonize Mars, but the work environment is otherwise familiar to that on Earth.
- Desperately Looking for a Purpose in Life: Jeff's central conflict. Having left his Earth life behind and his future on Mars not going as expected, he must find other ways to make his time useful and meaningful.
- Fingore:
- While moving rocks on the surface of Mars, Jeff uncaps his index finger to answer a text message, only for the extreme cold to freeze the finger in seconds. It ultimately falls off, though he gets a cybernetic replacement later.
- When he explains this incident to Crystal, she shares her own experience with losing her thumb in an acid accident. Her replacement is relatively fancy, looking like an ordinary thumb while also housing a pen.
- I Just Want to Have Friends: Jeff struggles with constant loneliness while trying to find a job on the colony, feeling disconnected from his co-workers.
- Retraux: Smartphones and computers have an interface modeled after Apple Macintosh operating systems of the 1990s.
- Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist: Despite how put upon he is, and how relatable his plight might be, it's hard to root for Jeff throughout the series. He is whiny, selfish, self-righteous, impulsive, careless, pushy, indecisive and generally very obnoxious. He is a consummate corporate bootlicker and has serious social climbing tendencies. He is very prone to poor and brash decisions that cause serious trouble for him and many other people, and rarely owns up to his mistakes, even when other characters directly point them to him. He is probably a very realistic character, given the setting, but not a likeble one.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: On many occasions, Jeff's good intentions have disastrous consequences.
- In the first episode, he finds new purpose in the advice from a book on label theory, but gets carried away and wastes most of Mars.ly's label supplies on items that didn't need them, such as individual pens and coffee pods. Most of the consequences are off-screen, but when Martin calls him out on it, he mentions how a biologist mistook a cup of fluoroantimonic acid for ginger ale and almost drank it due to the label shortage.
- In the second episode, Jax tasks him with setting up party favors for Reagan's birthday, but he ends up stuck with tacky substitutes like latex gloves for balloons and bales of hay instead of flowers. In a last ditch attempt to salvage the party, Jeff turns up the nitrous oxide like Jax taught him earlier so the partygoers are too euphoric to care how stupid it looks. It goes well, until someone tries to light a candle and ignites the gas in a floor-wide explosion.
- One of his biggest screwups comes in Episode 6, when he joins a group of rebels seeking to start their own colony, and they task him with feeding their replenishable food supply of grasshoppers twice a day. Under the stress of balancing his time with the rebels and increased responsibilities up at Mars.ly itself, Jeff gets the idea to steal Sluggo's cuckoo clock to use as a makeshift button presser for the feeder. It doesn't take long for Sluggo to find his missing clock, though, and when he takes it back, a chair that was propping it up falls on the switch, holding it down and overfeeding the grasshoppers, causing them to swarm the entire building.
