There’s no honest way to say WondLa looks ugly or uninteresting. The environs, in particular, make wonderful use of gentle pastels broken by sharp primary colors to create a world both beautiful and utterly alien (no pun intended) to our protagonist, Eva (Jeanine Mason). But visually attractive isn’t the same as unique or arresting. Sadly, once one begins to scratch the show’s surface, it reveals many all-too-familiar elements. Sometimes, it is just a general sense of the thing. At others, it is nearly one-to-one. For example, Eva’s first otherworldly ally, Otto (Brad Garrett), is a furry talkative sibling to Raya and The Last Dragon’s Tuk Tuk.

Similar design elements are typically easy to accept for this critic, provided the story utilizing them offers enough to chew on. It is here that WondLa truly stumbles. A collection of other “coming of age” and “humanity’s end” stories’ greatest hits, the series never offers something fresh enough to get its audience to sit up and take notice. A collection of strong voice work, including Teri Hatcher—who has proven herself a real voice talent asset over the years—is further hamstrung because the voices come from mostly thinly sketched characters.

In some unnumbered future year, Eva is the only child living in a vast underground bunker known as a Sanctuary. Her only true companionship is a robot surrogate parent, Muthr, who sees to the child’s physical—and, with time, inevitably—emotional needs. When Eva turns six, she—and the audience—learns she is part of a program to “save” humans from themselves. Under the direction of Cadmus Pryde (Alan Tudyk in a rare straightforward voice performance), the dwindling human populace built an array of Sanctuaries. In each, a robot raised children until the planet healed from the various environmental catastrophes and violent conflicts people visited upon it. When the Earth is ready and the children properly trained, they will be released to the surface to re-establish society and maybe treat each other and their planet right this time.

After her sixteenth birthday, the Earth is apparently ready, and Eva is on the cusp of her big skills test. Her curiosity gets the best of her, though, and she discovers a wing of the shelter that she’s never seen. There, the adolescent finds evidence she wasn’t always the only resident of the facility. She also finds a page ripped from a book that reads “WondLa” on the front and a hasty note to Eva scrawled on the back. Even those unfamiliar with the Tony DiTerlizzi-penned source material will likely immediately recognize the book the page hails from. For those that don’t, the series’ eventual quartet of travelers will almost certainly make it clear. And suggest certain inevitable disappointments for Eva to come.

Her discovery also alerts alien big game hunter Besteel (Chiké Okonkwo) to her presence, forcing her above ground to escape him before she takes her final exam. In a kind of twisted good news, it seems unlikely the test would matter anyway. The planet Eva finds waiting for her hardly resembles the one she spent her life training to resurrect. On her quest to figure out why—and where her other Sanctuary brothers and sisters are—she’ll encounter and team up with the sweet-natured Otto and the taciturn tracker Rovender (Gary Anthony Williams).

Despite the familiarity, there are some interesting beats. Unfortunately, the series too quickly discards them or fails to ever fully explore them. For instance, Muthr nearly explains what happened to the other kids who once lived in Eva’s Sanctuary. Disappointingly, the explanation is interrupted, and the story never circles back to it. Given the robot’s evolution through the show’s seven episodes, the ellipsis is frustrating as it suggests a missing piece of a puzzle that the viewers can only vaguely see the shape of. Another example comes near the season’s end. To praise the show, it goes through with one of the darkest—but still appropriate—revelations in family television. It is genuinely surprising, especially given the aforementioned familiarity of most of the plot beats before it. However, WondLa doesn’t let it sink in as much as it should. Then, a last-minute twist suggests it isn’t all that accurate anyway.

There’s nothing especially bad about WondLa. At seven under 30-minute episodes, it goes down fast and easy. It’s a frequently pretty thing to look at. Still, the thinly constructed characters and the sense one has seen or read this all before keep intruding. There are certainly worse things to watch on TV and streaming. On the other hand, there are also much better shows to enjoy with significantly fewer reservations.

WondLa tests the atmosphere for breathability at AppleTV+ on June 28.

WondLa Trailer: