He and his team wanted to avoid the look of other films and series, though they did reference “Blade Runner” for its scale, he said, and “Gattaca” for its sleek modernism. “Huxley’s world, I mean, it’s a design opportunity beyond belief,” Lee said. To envision New London and the Savage Lands and optical interfaces between (in New London, everyone plugs into the internet via biomorphic contact lenses), the show hired the production designer David Lee (“Watchmen”). (No prize for guessing who she chooses, but here’s a hint: His genes still encode body hair.) John returns with them to New London and he, Lenina and Bernard, each of them grasping for greater human connection, form the basic geometry. When the holiday goes wrong - the Savage Lands has a sedition issue - Bernard and Lenina escape with the help of a sweaty, stubbly John ( Alden Ehrenreich) and his raspy, bottle-blond mom ( Demi Moore). Did I mention that everyone in New London speaks in clipped British accents while the Savage Lands dialect is strictly American? A living history park for the upper classes, the Savage Lands offer playlets based on antiquated customs - marriage, consumerism. The theory part he explained this way: “Huxley,” he said, “was very afraid of a world in which people would become so sexually stimulated, so pharmacologically numb and so distracted by entertainment and media, that they would fail to look within and beyond themselves in uncomfortable ways.” So the future is now?Įager for a holiday, Lenina accompanies Bernard Marx (Harry Lloyd), an administrator with a thing for turtlenecks, on a pleasure tour of the Savage Lands. The showrunner David Wiener (“Homecoming,” “Fear the Walking Dead”) apparently had the solution, situating the social theory within a love triangle. “What often happens when you have big IP, you keep swinging until you get it right,” said Dawn Olmstead, the president of Universal Content Productions. Here’s one: How do you take a nearly 90-year-old novel, a literary crystal ball so dead-on that many of its predictions (chemical birth control, mood stabilizers, genetic engineering) have already come true, and still make it feel like the future?Ī collaboration between Universal Content Productions, which acquired the rights to the novel, and Amblin Entertainment, brought on for their world-building chops, “Brave New World” began at Syfy, then moved to USA, before landing at Peacock, shedding story and concept and the occasional writer along the way. Prestige television likes its glimpses of the future and those futures usually skew dark: “Westworld,” “Black Mirror,” “The Handmaid’s Tale.” But “Brave New World,” which most viewers will remember - vaguely if at all - from some high school or college syllabus, presents a more ambivalent prospect and particular challenges. “But yeah, a couple of days there?” she added. “But the minute you scratch the surface, you start to discover stuff.” “It seems perfect,” said Jessica Brown Findlay, who plays the geneticist Lenina Crowne. Based on Aldous Huxley’s alarmingly prescient 1932 novel of free love and social control, it’s a dystopia dressed up as a utopia. All nine episodes are available on Wednesday. Pop quiz: Is this a paradise? Or a prison?Īnswer: It’s the social science backdrop for “Brave New World,” the flagship drama from Peacock, NBC’s streaming service. Everyone has useful work, perfect skin, total emotional equilibrium. Science has conquered disease and disability. Crime is a nonissue, as are homelessness and hunger. Imagine a society that has solved the problems of overpopulation and environmental collapse.
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