Utopia show series#

And while the images are comparatively unremarkable - the UK Utopia was a visually stunning piece of television - the violence is just as visceral. The show is steeped in genre storytelling, often times resembling a comic book itself.Ī great many changes have been made, immediately setting it apart from the British original. While some conspiracies are harmless - for instance, no one cares if Tom Cruise worships Xenu - others have real-world consequences.īut Utopia never pretends to be a documentary, or even as realistic as something like, say, Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion. Although it’s interesting to observe how, in the span of just a few years, the pendulum has swung from audiences perceiving fast wealth as aspirational, to now being suspicious of it.Įven though Cusack’s character - Dr Kevin Christie - is an American, I’m worried that Utopia might play into the Trumpsters’ narrative that the Covid-19 virus was manufactured in a Chinese laboratory. Every night at the dinner table, he asks his family the same question: “What have you done today to earn your place in this crowded world?” Cusack brings a quiet menace to his performance that is far too subtle for the show, which is shrill to a fault. It’s a disconcerting experience, for sure.īut while the UK original featured a faceless organisation as the ‘villain’, the US remake, like most US remakes, simplifies things, by casting John Cusack as the ‘pharma-bro’ antagonist. In fact, the show, in many ways, is as prescient as the fictional comic book that everyone in it seems to be after.

With a central plot that involves a shady pharma company, major infection hotspots, and the looming threat of a large-scale outbreak, I won’t deny that I got the heebie-jeebies drawing parallels to the ongoing pandemic. Meanwhile, a shadowy organisation known as The Harvest, also looking to get its hands on the precious manuscript, is hot on their heels. They’re convinced of this because the book’s precursor seemingly predicted major tragedies such as the SARS and MERS epidemics.

Utopia show series#

Based on the cult UK series of the same name, Utopia is a conspiracy thriller about a group of nerds who band together to locate a comic book manuscript that they believe contains information about future pandemics.