![]() now?Ĭonsider: The British series premiered seven years ago, before the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa. ![]() There's certainly been a healthy appetite for shows like The Boys and Utopia out there, which offer ugly, mean-spirited visions of humanity as a miserable collection of gullible fools who are only too eager to allow themselves to get manipulated by institutions.īut the question you need to ask yourself before committing to watching even a single episode of Utopia is: Do you possess that appetite. A handful of always-charming actors - Cougar Town's Dan Byrd, You're The Worst's Desmin Borges and The Kominsky Method's Ashleigh LaThrop - form the nucleus of the aforementioned group of characters the show gleefully tosses into the sausage grinder (not literally).Īnd visceral thrills are, after all, visceral thrills, especially when they come dripping with this much actual viscera. ![]() John Cusack plays a tech genius with the perfect blend of condescension and smarm, and Gotham's Cory Michael Smith is great as his son, who exhorts his employees to greater heights via buzzwords and a dead-eyed, unearned confidence one can only describe as Jaredesque. There are performances that work nicely here. Sneering, nihilistic gags we're meant to take as "darkly ironic." The presentation of a few, fleeting moments of tenderness the show intends to come off as heartfelt, instead of cynical attempts to get us to care about characters who are about to have their eyes gouged out, fingernails ripped off and/or families slaughtered. Visceral scenes of physical violence and torture, offered up with metronomic regularity. cold, corporate evil - radical individualism vs. A central conflict involving a rag-tag group of underdogs vs. The service has lacked a distinctive identity for years now, but Utopia seems eager to follow in the bloody, gobbet-flecked footprints of The Boys, a show with which it shares several elements: Comic books. The series would seem to slot neatly into Amazon's current catalog, as well. Flynn's work, of course, teems with such amoral sociopaths enacting grisly violence. The British series was about a bunch of comic book nerds trying to save the world from malevolent forces attempting to hunt them down and kill and/or mutilate and/or dismember them - often all at once. On paper, it's all a good, or at least logical, fit. Pop Culture Happy Hour Superhero Satire 'The Boys' Doesn't Have Much New To Say, But Says It Loudly Fincher dropped out, but Flynn stuck around as showrunner and writer when Amazon bought it. ![]() "What did you do in this episode to earn your place in this crowded script, and in this crowded landscape of streaming choices?"Īs a result, there's a stretched-out, languishing quality to the pace of the Amazon show, which was set to be developed for HBO by Gillian Flynn ( Gone Girl, Sharp Objects) and David Fincher ( Se7en, House of Cards). Given that the Amazon show is adapted from the first, six-episode season of a well-regarded 2013 British series, you may find yourself demanding something similar of various scenes and characters in the comparatively overlong and overstuffed US version, and even - ultimately - of the show itself: It's a question one particular character in Amazon's new eight-episode series Utopia demands of others, frequently. "What did you do today to earn your place in this crowded world?" (Center to Right): Samantha (Jessica Rothe), Becky (Ashleigh LaThrop), Ian (Dan Byrd) and Wilson (Desmin Borges) are bunker buddies in Utopia.
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