#Brave new world series full#
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#Brave new world series series#

Scraggly facial hair, southern accents, bad tattoos, sunburned wrinkles, and hardscrabble earners: it’s a regular Hillbilly Elegy out there, and just as oversimplified, dull, and problematic. Weddings in the Savage Lands are an amusing farce (unlike so much of the straightened-out series’ dystopia) meant to highlight the dangerous, backwards, and unhappy ways of those outside of perfect New London.ĭiscarding its tasteless indigenous content without losing the name-the “Savage” reservation in New Mexico has been changed to a more satirical theme park-the Savage Lands looks like an amalgamation of dusty rural stereotypes with a Mad Max facelift. Here is a world where people don’t know what deer were, but where Luther Vandross’ “Here And Now” is still played at (faux) weddings. It’s a place where the universe’s confused cultural decay and odd timeline are most apparent. Through some silly plot contrivances-no sillier than what’s to come-including an entirely uninteresting suicide investigation subplot, Lenina and Bernard galavant off to the Savage Lands outside the utopia, where humanity as it once was is preserved … kind of. Lloyd sells a Michael Fassbender-like serpentine charm with a crooked grin and pathetic desperation by primping his hair, while Findlay’s wounded stares and uncomfortable shrugs (she puts as much apathetic affect in her gestures as her line deliveries) reveal cracks beneath an unblemished surface. They’re both a bit off, Bernard because his gangling frame (accentuated by his loose clothes) mirrors how insufficient he is as an upper-cruster and Lenina because she’s been sleeping with the same guy for a few months-a big no-no.īoth are well-acted.

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Our representatives are Alpha Plus Bernard Marx (Harry Lloyd), introduced as a bit of an unhappiness detective investigating incidents of nonconformity, and Beta Plus Lenina Crowne (Jessica Brown Findlay), a scientist tasked with assigning those Greek class rankings. Did this dystopia need another villain beyond its own pleasure-seeking populace? Those looking for an excuse for humanity’s bad tendencies get a technological scapegoat and a critique blandly becomes a cowardly conspiracy.

#Brave new world series series#

The series provides a world where people’s constant disillusion is kept in line by sex, drugs, and an all-seeing program. The novel provides an effective satirical utopia because it is, top to bottom, filled with people happy with their lot-as fucked up as that may be. The latter is perhaps the most important undermining of Huxley’s Brave New World. The boogymen of the book have been updated to self-medication and biocybernetics. Peacock’s bows at the altar of soma (the ever-present feel-good pill being popped by New London’s residents) and Indra, a society-permeating digital network that has the same etymological root in Hindu mythology as soma. Huxley’s utopia worshipped Ford and Freud: assembly-line industrialism and psychological conditioning.

#Brave new world series full#

I watched the full nine-episode first season, which finds New London’s stratified perfection fall into chaos. No monogamy.” Orgies all the time, sci-fi healthcare, and guaranteed employment? Brave New World’s bad timing is the least of its flaws, as the AAA series from Peacock is a foolish, dull, and cowardly take on a literary classic. But showrunner David Wiener ( Homecoming) has the misfortunate to see his Aldous Huxley adaptation debut during a time when the very real and dangerous concerns of a global populace couldn’t be further from the tenets listed during the show’s opening moments: “No privacy.

Nothing sets up a big flashy dystopian launch show from a new streaming service like a series of pandemic-era protests during the worst presidential administration of American history.