In space, can no one hear your orgasm? A scene of weightless levitating sex (drawing comparisons to the James Bond camp classic Moonraker) is one of the centerpieces of the two-hour premiere of ABC’s Defying Gravity (Sunday, 9/8c; airs regularly at 10/9c on following Sunday). The show defies convention by trying with uneven results to force ABC’s signature style of female-friendly romantic melodrama (complete with pervasive pop soundtrack) onto the ooky, spooky intrigues of science-fiction.

Some fertile wits at the TCA press tour have already dubbed this one Grey’s Astronomy (wish I’d thought of it first). The show is set in 2052, but things haven’t changed much when it comes to the clichés of the meet-cute in a half-century. One of the primary plot points, as the story time-warps back and forth between a space mission and the training process that began a while earlier, includes a messy drunken hookup very reminiscent of Meredith and McDreamy, although this time trading space suits for scrubs. Grey's Anatomy could sue, but it comes natural. The show’s creator, James Parriott, did a tour of duty on Grey’s. (His producing partner, Michael Edelstein, is a veteran of Desperate Housewives).

There’s a heavy-handed Grey’s-style voice-over narration (from a male, not female, perspective) framing the first two back-to-back episodes—there are 13 in all, and I’m not sure how ABC plans to play it out, since Brothers & Sisters will reclaim the slot in about eight weeks. Gravity’s narrator is self-styled “tragic hero” Maddux Donner (Ron Livingston), a bad-boyish flight engineer who has typical problems with authority—he slugs a particularly noxious boss before going on a mission, and yes, you see it coming. He’s shadowed by shame and guilt stemming from a tragic mission to Mars 10 years earlier.

The pilot episode is the usual run-around leading Donner to eventually embrace his fate as one of the leaders aboard a six-year interplanetary mission. (He starts out as an alternate.) One criterion for this ethnically and internationally diverse crew must have been to exhibit an unusually obvious interest in sex. Donner is particularly drawn to rookie geologist Zoe (Laura Harris), who appears in his dreams floating naked in an airlock. Zoe’s kind of preoccupied herself, persistently hallucinating (or is she) sounds of a wailing baby. The reasons why are fairly predictable, as is just about everything involving the various relationships between the space travelers and their loved ones on board or back on Earth. (In one of several bizarre similarities that prompts comparisons to the more provocative Virtuality, a busted Fox sci-fi pilot that aired earlier this summer, the mission is being filmed by one of the crew doubling as a TV reporter.)

Gravity may be weighted down by cliché, but it’s not without interest. A number of puzzling setbacks and dangerous glitches early in the mission reveal (to us, if not the astronauts) that there’s an unseen and unnatural force at work, psychologically manipulating the explorers and their handlers. Is that enough of a suspenseful hook to get me past the smarm and the cheese of this oversexed star trek? Another episode or two should help make up my mind. (That and the ratings. If Gravity crashes to earth and ABC loses interest, I imagine I’ll follow suit.)