The new animated Apple+ show Strange Planet is interesting as a study of adaptation gone wrong. It’s based on the Nathan W. Pyle web-comic series, the one with the sweet big-eyed blue aliens talking about their lives, which just happen to be very much like human lives on Earth.

For example, in one four-image cartoon, two aliens awaiting the arrival of friends prepare to welcome them. One alien says to the other, “Let us store irregular shapes inside shapes with flat surfaces.” When the friends arrive and say, “Your home is beautiful,” the host aliens respond, “Thank you — we own things but have hidden them.”

That gentle observation is the first Strange Planet cartoon Pyle did back in 2019, based on the way he and his wife hid their toaster before company came over. The subsequent comics, which have achieved widespread popularity, work broadly the same way. A couple of aliens describe something they’re doing or thinking in slightly skewed, overly literal ways — using few or no contractions à la Spock — in order to emphasize the inherent weirdness of conventional behaviors. A parent alien says to a child alien lying in bed, “Imagine pleasant nonsense,” instead of “Sweet dreams.” It’s the kind of dialogue that lends itself readily to catchphrases worn on T-shirts.

But the very spareness of the comic’s panel layout is one key to its charms, and it’s hard to imagine how an animated series of ten half-hour shows could sustain its appeal, once plot and character development get added. This one certainly doesn’t, even with Dan Harmon of Rick and Morty fame coming on board as cocreator with Pyle. From the first episode, everything added seems like a mistake. The animation is very pretty, and favors Pyle’s preference for blue, pink, and purple, but it’s far too detailed, with none of the welcome sparseness that creates an evocative limbo space in the comic panels. The way of characterizing the blue aliens in the TV series is far too ordinary — everyone sounds like a regular, contemporary human talking in blandly uninteresting ways, with no imaginative attempt to evoke qualities that we associate with the alien.

Called “The Flying Machine,” the first episode is based on a Pyle comic of the same name featuring two blue aliens, both wearing pink scarf accessories, standing in an aisle between rows of seated aliens, with one saying, “Before the flying machine ascends, we want to describe a few unsettling scenarios,” and the second adding, “With reassuring joy.”

The episode begins with the well-known airplane safety ritual, including lines like “Please refer to the danger menu in your seat pocket for further tips on how not to die.” It then expands on the workplace scene, letting us in on the lives of the three “comfort supervisors” (aka flight attendants), and the promotion of one of them to “air comfort supervisor supervisor” status, due to their superior skills in handing out “tiny snacks,” “mild poisons” (liquor), and “comfort squares” (pillows). When taken too seriously, this promotion disturbs the friendly working relationship of the employees. We see the airport bar where they drink cocktails, the bus ride home, the homelife of the promoted worker, etc.

B and C-storylines involve two passengers, a young couple whose relationship is based on their shared love of a band called the 4 Sensations, whose romance hits the rocks when one of the Sensations quits the band, imperiling its future. We follow the band and the passenger-fans and the flight attendants through their mild travails till they all learn lessons about how to adjust to changes in their lives. It’s boring as hell.

Finally, there’s a last scene involving flight turbulence, and the new supervisor saves the day by giving a speech to the frightened passengers about how “honesty can be discomforting, and comfort can make us dishonest.” Then she teaches them all to primal-scream, which the bus driver recommended as a way to deal with unpleasant feelings, and this inspires the three remaining Sensations to create a new song on the spot that includes the lyric, “The highest form of comfort is to focus on my own essentials.” All the passengers join in on the chorus which goes, “I wanna live as long as possible!”

Are all the episodes going to be like this? Wholesome as milk, and full of homilies? It reminded me of that Itchy & Scratchy Show episode within The Simpsons, when censors cracked down on the cartoon’s trademark violence, and all that was left was Itchy and Scratchy in rocking chairs, offering each other lemonade.

The insidiously nicey-nice qualities of Pyle’s web comics and series of books have been praised a lot by now — the way the big-headed, thin-bodied blue aliens are apparently free of gender and racial characteristics, for example, so everyone can relax about that stuff. And they’re all called “they,” thus making the Strange World pronoun-sensitive.

The TV series, though, adds back a helping or two of gender. And in all of Pyle’s material, class can be readily inferred. It’s a bunch of bougie blue aliens, this lot!

Just to be fair, I watched the second episode to check whether the series might radically improve after a rocky start. It was even worse. Absolutely loaded up with lesson-learning and impromptu adages from alien characters like, “Relationships require honesty and being yourself,” and “Sometimes there’s a lot of good to be found in chaos,” and “Maybe everything happens for a reason.”

The second episode tackles the relationship of aliens — who refer to themselves as “beings” — with the “creatures,” or animals, that they share the world with. Dogs are called “moral creatures” and cats are called “vibrating creatures” and raccoons are called “greyscale finger bandits.” In the end, the question posed about whether creatures really love their beings or are just in it for the treats is answered this way: “We too may be imperfect and strange, but they love us for who we are anyway. Because of that we can learn how to love other beings from them.”

Some mild humor follows to cut through that pronouncement’s sugary aftertaste:

First alien: “Did you just come up with that?”

Second alien: “My life-giver had a sign like that in their kitchen.”

First alien: “Hm. Long sign.”

Anyway, the point is, a little bit of this kind of cloying whimsy goes a long way. One or two little comics that you occasionally run across on the internet? Fine. One complete television episode? Way too much.