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| Fiona
O’Shaughnessy as Jessica Hyde, in Channel 4's Utopia |
A mysterious and possibly prophetic graphic novel, two brightly-dressed killers armed with small gas canisters and bottles of
bleach, the suggestion of
an ever-diminishing global food supply,
four unlikely allies thrust into a worldwide conspiracy because of an
online comic book forum: welcome to Channel 4’s Utopia – a pre-apocalyptic conspiracy thriller from the pen of
playwright and TV writer Dennis Kelly.
Writing
about television comes with its own unique challenges: the best TV shows tell
long, even open-ended stories, and it is often difficult to assess them while
they’re still in progress. As I sit down
to write this, I’m still questioning whether it would perhaps be better
to wait until
Utopia’s full season has played out in its entirety. (It’s
now aired only two of its promised six episodes, after all.) Waiting however comes
with its own risks: I already regret, for example, not writing immediately
about the first episode of ABC’s now-cancelled
Last Resort. (To be candid,
I have also regretted weighing in too soon. See
A Gifted Man, where
almost everything that was so impressed me in the pilot episode made the series
frustrating and tedious by the middle of its first, and thankfully only,
season.) Sometimes, as with
Last Resort, a first episode is so unprecedented,
so “fall off your seat” shocking, that you can’t stop talking about for the
rest of the week. Visually arresting, unrepentantly violent, and darkly funny,
Utopia
is like nothing else currently on television. From its opening scene, you
already know you’re seeing something entirely new.
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| Nathan Stewart-Jarrett as Ian |
Premiering o
n January 15th in the UK,
Utopia is already the most ambitious
series Channel 4 has ever broadcast, even more ambitious than any series produced
for E4, the channel’s digital sibling responsible for favourites like Misfits,
Skins, and The Inbetweeners. Kelly, most famous for co-creating the BBC 3 comedy Pulling, also wrote the book for Matilda
the Musical, a critically acclaimed
adaptation of Roald Dahl children’s novel which demonstrated Kelly’s
skill for writing to young lead actors, a talent wholly on display in Utopia.
Utopia is set in a world almost, but not
quite, our own. Unbeknownst to most of its population, a crisis lurks around
the corner – the dark details of which appear to have been foretold on the
pages of a comic book called The Utopia Experiments
, published in the mid-80s. The comic has
acquired a cult following, and as word of the recently unearthed manuscript of
a fabled second volume materializes on the book’s online discussion forum, a
handful of unsuspecting fans decide to meet for the first time. Now in the
sights of The Network, the shadowy non-governmental organization behind the
imminent global threat, the lives of our four heroes quickly unravel.
The show
quickly introduces to its main players: Becky (Alexandra
Roach, Iron Lady),
a former medical student turned
doctoral candidate; Wilson Wilson (Adeel Akhtar, Four
Lions), a paranoid
conspiracy geek, and Ian (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett,
Misfits), an 28-year-old IT wonk who still
lives his mother, and Grant (Oliver Woollford), a troubled 11-year-old boy.
They are soon joined by the mysterious Jessica Hyde (Fiona
O’Shaughnessy), who with a sugary sweet voice and kick-ass attitude blows into
their lives like an explosive hybrid of Sarah Connor and
Ramona Flowers:
“Come with
me now or you’ll all die.”
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| Adeel Akhtar as Wilson Wilson |
Stewart-Jarrett
and Roach both shine, with a chemistry that brings relief to the story’s
breakneck intensity from the first moment their two characters meet. And Akhtar’s Wilson
Wilson, a survivalist and conspiracy geek whose
worst paranoid fantasies seem to pale in comparison to the world he’s fallen into,
serves as one of the show’s only sources of traditional humour – and
considering Wilson is the victim of the first episode’s most disturbing scenes
of torture, this should tell you a lot about the overall tone of the show! (One
quick caveat on that subject: the most explicit of Utopia’s violence is, to the show’s credit, almost
impossible to watch without squirming. I should confess that I had to look away
during that torture sequence. FYI: it didn’t help much. The scene sounds
almost as disturbing as it looks.)
The
dialogue is often surprisingly straightforward and unambiguous. Utopia is
populated by people who actually answer questions when they’re asked them
directly, and (at least in the first two episodes) characters are rarely not
what they appear to be. Jessica Hyde herself (whose enigmatic identity frames
much of the first episode) seems almost incapable of dissembling. She is beyond
coyness, revealing who she is and what her plans are unceremoniously just 15
minutes into the second hour – and the show actually bothers to
corroborate most of the details of her story before the episode ends!
New
characters are introduced in almost every scene, and often just as quickly (and
violently) dispatched. The narrative flipside of the disturbing ease with which
the show and its many players disposes of life means the story cleans itself up
as it moves forward, always forward. You feel by the end of the second episode
that you may never see the same set twice. This forward rush – which leaves no
small number of bodies in its wake – gives the show a pulp fiction energy and a
kind of urgent clarity.
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| Alexandra
Roach as Becky |
The details
of the conspiracy are complicated but relatively unembroidered, making the
unfolding of the mystery not so much confusing as it is simply overwhelming in detail
– paralleling for the audience the experience of its heroes as they fall deeper
and deeper down the rabbit hole. Information
comes down in waves. Details are dumped on us just as they are dumped on our
protagonists: names, scientific facts, historical and political specifics.
There’s no way for them to keep up, and no reason for us to try. As the
depths of the conspiracy unfold it is less about ambiguity than about the
revelation of new and richer layers, less concerned with pulling out rugs (in
the
Lost vein), than about, as Wilson Wilson puts, “opening up a door.”
In that, it is rather reminiscent of the later seasons of
Fringe: a big
story with an emotional realism that belies its unbelievable frame.
The surreal visuals and labyrinthine
complexity of the plot are
kept in line by relationships which continue to bring us back to a human
reality: Wilson Wilson’s concern for a friend he’d only ever interacted with online;
Becky and Ian’s immediate sexual chemistry; young Grant and Alice, the surprisingly self-possessed
schoolgirl with whom he forms a rapid connection. No doubt these relations are
also new threats in such a dangerous world, but, as the rest of that world
spins further into chaos, they give viewers solace and grounding.
With barely a handful of spoken dialogue in those first two hours, 11-year-old
Grant Leetham (played by the 14-year-old Woollford) is a large part what makes
the show so watchable, in spite of the nightmarish scenarios it portrays. Grant
is a survivor – a juvenile delinquent with a troubled home life, but possessing
a powerful self-awareness and survival instinct. He’s smart, and he’s curious,
and, like most of the denizens of this broken Utopia, surprisingly
human. They're all survivors in their
own ways: Grant, Wilson, Ian, Becky, even Michael, the miserable blackmailed government
employee. They may be pawns of a larger conspiracy, but they aren’t slaves to
the story, and they rarely seem to do what you would expect them to do.
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| Oliver Woollford as Grant |
We are
thankfully long past an era when ambitious television reaches to the movie to
signal its ambitions. No doubt, Utopia would seem to be doing that with
its choice of aspect ratio, opting for the underused cinematic 21:9 aspect
ratio instead of the current HDTV norm of 16:9. But the letterbox framing has
the effect of calling attention to the visuals as a kind of framed panel, and combined
with the heightened colours and compositions of director Marc Munden’s
camerawork, It evokes the page of a graphic novel more than the big screen.
Though not itself adapted
from a graphic novel, perhaps the comic book aesthetic is really the best way
to describe it. Every scene seems deliberately framed, and the dialogue is
often terse and multivalent.
The third
episode of Utopia airs tonight on Channel 4, with its final episode
airing on February 19. As I write this, I have no idea where the story will
take us – but this kind of anticipation and uncertainty is exactly what
watching broadcast television should be like. It’s not even clear whether or
not the show is intended as a one-off miniseries or if it will come back for
another season. (This isn’t unusual for a British series – with their shorter
seasons and a more irregular broadcast schedule, UK networks can opt rather late to
bring a show back without having to lock actors and writers into long-term
contracts from the beginning.) I’m not
sure if I get a vote, but if anyone at Channel 4 is listening, count me in.
