8/27/2023 0 Comments Utopia uk tv![]() Those pesky kids…Īs a box-set, it demands to be binged, but it’s not just a thrill ride. Replacing the original Becky and Ian played by Roach and Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, with the younger-looking Ashleigh LaThrop and Dan Byrd adds a slightly Scooby-Doo quality that wasn’t there before. It’s impossible not to miss Alexandra Roach’s strident Welsh accent, though. There has been a slight shuffling of the pack of Kelly’s characters, but the best, such as paranoid conspiracy theorist Wilson Wilson (with Desmin Borges replacing Adeel Akhtar) and the aforementioned Arby, have been translated entire. There’s a little less humanity, sometimes, too, which is thoroughly ghastly. And the horror set-pieces, with their evil accoutrements, are mostly intact, while some of the new ones are panic-inducing. Kelly’s seedy political plotline has been given a great twist with the introduction of John Cusack as a bio-tech entrepreneur. But some of the change-ups warp the plot in new and wonderful ways. Something of the genuine outsider weirdness that Kelly brought to Utopia, as a British-Irish working-class playwright with a penchant for “nasty little plays”, and a blotto, chaotic period in his twenties as a heavy drinker, has not quite made the transition. She has reframed the entire opening episode to include an elaborate set-up at a comics convention, which is luridly compelling and horribly intense. ![]() Yet Flynn’s reimaginings have a power of their own. Zeitgeisty doesn’t cover it.įans of the original – and Utopia (2013) is still very culty indeed – will surely remark on the absence of director Marc Munden’s fabulous widescreen tableaux, which utilise blocks of primary colours that not only reinforce the feel of comic-book graphics but are downright beautiful. The virus drawn in the pages of Utopia even looks like the coronavirus. What must it have felt like at Amazon Studios to be sitting on this piece of work to release in this year, 2020? A drama that contains lines like: “in 2002, Mr Rabbit had a deal with a group of people in China to provide them with a particularly vicious strain of pig flu…” This reference to SARS is just one of a multitude of striking correspondences that will tantalise anyone who has ever entertained the possibility that Covid-19 might have come from a research lab. Then they find themselves drawn into the middle of the very conspiracy they’ve been obsessing about.įlynn has tweaked all sorts of dials on this startling work of drama, but not the central one: the existential threat is a virus. They think they’ve spotted the clues hidden in the drawings of Jessica and Mr Rabbit. ![]() The original Utopia told the story of a cult graphic novel, called Utopia, which a small group of mismatched comic-book fans believe contains details of a conspiracy that threatens the survival of the human race. Well, bad news, because in Amazon’s big budget remake, Arby – recreated far too closely for comfort by Christopher Denham – is back to chill unsuspecting viewers across the world with those very words.Īrby and much of the essential plot of Utopia (2020) was created for television by the writer of the original, playwright Dennis Kelly, which makes the “Created for television by Gillian Flynn” strapline on the US remake a little galling, but we’re all used to the way that power works now, aren’t we? And in Flynn, the writer of Gone Girl and Sharp Objects, the series has a showrunner who brings her dazzling talent for twists, suspense, and black comedy to the party. As uttered in a dense monotone by the psychopathic, childlike assassin Arby played by Neil Maskell, they trigger a queasy sense of the floor falling away beneath you violent death will surely follow. “Where is Jessica Hyde?” Those words alone are enough to induce nightmares in anyone who saw the original British TV series of Utopia (Amazon Prime), which ran for two seasons on Channel 4 back in 2013-14. ![]()
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