- Amazon’s new show Utopia tells the story of a plot to depopulate the earth with a pandemic.A group of young adults, who meet online, get a hold of a cult underground graphic novel, which not only pins them as a target of a shadowy deep state organization, but also burdens them with the dangerous task of saving the world.
- Scientists are ignored. Schoolchildren fall ill. Vaccinations offer hope. Utopia is a new TV series so prescient that it feels like the timing of its release could itself have been part of a conspiracy theory. Released today, the Amazon Prime drama focuses on the threat of a global flu pandemic. A graphic novel manuscript foretells its events – it depicts a scientist who created a flu-like disease designed to thin out an overpopulated Earth. This comic book is obtained by a gang of geeks who have to go on the run to escape numerous murderous enemies, intent on stopping anyone seeing the book’s revelations. After spending their lives wanting to decode the graphic novel’s contents, they now have the truth in their hands, even if it could lead to their deaths.
- While the edit of Utopia was only finished in April, right at the height of the coronavirus outbreak in the US and Europe, the show has been long in the works – it is, in fact, a much-delayed remake of the 2013 cult UK drama of the same name. But its mood of paranoia could not be more topical at a time when people regularly take to the streets to decry shadowy forces controlling and manipulating our world. Whether the issue is Covid-19, climate change or US politics, it seems like we have never lived in an age more filled with conspiracy theories, where these narratives have become a way to explain the biggest problems our planet faces.
- People’s opinion is divided and this time some people think that this TV series should not have been released, people say that Created, written and executive produced by Gillian Flynn—the writer behind Gone Girland Sharp Objects, as well as Steve McQueen’s underrated 2018 film Widows—the cynical thriller follows a crew of nerds obsessed with a mysterious comic book that they believe holds clues about humanity’s dark future. Its mood is apocalyptic. Its violence, while often cartoonish, is frequent, nihilistic and brutal. Its credulous attitude toward conspiracy theories doesn’t feel so exhilarating in the QAnonera. And there’s a subplot about a deadly pandemicthat escalates as the story progresses. What makes the show unbearable, though, is that it exploits some of contemporary civilization’s greatest anxieties without saying anything worth hearing about them.A few fans on an Internet message board have coalesced around the suspicion that Dystopia is more than a story, convinced it presaged outbreaks of viruses such as Ebola and MERS.
- Could you ever justify releasing a TV series about a killer pandemic, that also hinges on an off-the-wall conspiracy theory, into a nation plagued by a killer pandemic and an off-the-wall conspiracy theory? It’s conceivable. But it would surely be a tough watch, no matter how worthwhile.
