“Project Blue Book” arrived on History in January 2019 with a real case file behind it and a movie actor in the lead. The show is based on the actual Project Blue Book, the U.S. Air Force’s studies of unidentified flying objects. Aidan Gillen plays Dr. J. Allen Hynek, the astrophysics professor who worked the investigations. The series ran two seasons and twenty episodes.
Trailer, via HISTORY.
Aidan Gillen as Allen Hynek
The premise is the strongest thing the show has. Hynek is a skeptic by trade and a believer by accident. He signs on to explain away sightings, and the sightings keep refusing to be explained. That tension is real, and it is the engine the series needs.
Gillen is a good pick for it. He plays Hynek as a man doing math in a room full of people who already know the answer they want. Michael Malarkey plays Captain Michael Quinn, an Air Force veteran and Hynek’s partner on the investigations. The two work sightings across the U.S. as a pair: one believes the file, one believes the science.
Laura Mennell plays Mimi Hynek, Allen’s wife. Ksenia Solo plays Susie Miller. Neal McDonough plays James Harding, and Michael Harney plays Hugh Valentine. That is a lot of cast for a show that mostly wants to be two men in a car driving toward a light in the sky.
Two Seasons, Twenty Episodes
History premiered the series on January 8, 2019. The first season ran ten episodes. On February 10, 2019, the network renewed it for a second season of ten episodes, which premiered on January 21, 2020. In May 2020, the show was canceled.
Here is the run:
| Season | Episodes | Premiere | Finale |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 10 | January 8, 2019 | — |
| 2 | 10 | January 21, 2020 | March 24, 2020 |
The source does not give a season one finale date, only that the first season consisted of ten episodes. Season two ran its ten episodes and ended on March 24, 2020. The show was canceled the following month.
The Case File Is Better Than the Case
The real Project Blue Book is one of the strangest paper trails in American government. The Air Force spent years collecting reports of things it could not identify, then closed the file. A drama about that should feel like watching a man lose an argument with his own government.
“Project Blue Book” gets halfway there. The show is at its best when Hynek is in a room with people who outrank him and know less than he does. It is at its worst when it forgets the file and becomes a show about people standing in fields.
The genre labels tell you the problem. History filed it under Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Mystery and Drama. That is three shows in one. The sci-fi wants the lights. The mystery wants the questions. The drama wants the marriage. Only one of those has a real case behind it.
What the Score Says
The published critical score for “Project Blue Book” is 5.6 out of 10, with a Metacritic score of 56 out of 100. That is a fair number for a fair show. It is not a bad show. It is a show that had a great subject and a limited idea of what to do with it.
Ranking the pieces of “Project Blue Book” from most to least essential:
- The real Project Blue Book and the Air Force investigations it documents.
- Aidan Gillen’s Hynek, a skeptic who keeps getting overruled by evidence.
- Michael Malarkey’s Quinn, the military counterweight to Hynek’s science.
- The 1950s and ’60s settings, which give the cases their cold-war weight.
- The Hynek marriage, which the show treats as a second mystery.
- The supporting cast of Harding, Valentine, Mimi and Susie, who mostly stand around the edges of better scenes.
That order is the show’s problem in miniature. Everything the series is actually about sits above everything the series spends its time on.
The Cancellation Was Not the Crime
History canceled “Project Blue Book” in May 2020, after twenty episodes across two seasons. Cancellation is normal. The source does not say why History pulled the plug, and it does not attribute the decision to ratings, scheduling or anything else.
What the record does show is a show that built a modest run and stopped. Two seasons, twenty episodes, one real case file underneath all of it.
The show never made the leap from a dramatized case file to a story, in this paper’s reading. It had the file. It had the cast. It had a decade of American paranoia to draw on. What it lacked was a reason to keep watching past the next sighting.
That is the verdict. “Project Blue Book” is a competent historical drama with a genuinely fascinating subject and no clear way to escalate it. The UFO cases are the hook. The people are the show. The show leaned on the hook.
Worth watching if you want the real Project Blue Book dramatized, or if you want to see Gillen work. Not worth watching if you want a mystery that resolves on screen. The source does not describe how the series ended, and neither will this paper.
Score: 5.6 of 10.
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