Utopia Season One Review

Disclaimer: I have not seen the British version of Utopia, so this review will simply discuss the American version of the series. Critics were provided with seven out of eight episodes for review, so while I don’t foresee the season’s final episode changing my views much – if at all – I do feel it’s important to make it clear that I have not seen the season finale and my review is only based on the initial seven episodes.

There is a lot of expositional background you need to understand Utopia, the newest dark, apocalyptic, and stunningly violent series on Amazon, which, in and of itself, isn’t a bad thing. The problem arises when you get through nearly half of the season and still have very little understanding of just what is actually going on in terms of the mythology surrounding the central story and how the show’s central characters factor into things. In the interest of helping you, dear reader, not to feel like you’re lost in the woods while watching the series (assuming that you, like me, have not seen the British series on which this adaptation is based), here’s a spoiler-free (for the actions within the series itself) primer to get you up to speed.

Once upon a time there was a popular comic entitled “Dystopia.” It told the story of a young girl named Jessica Hyde, whose father was a brilliant scientist. The duo were kidnapped by the evil Mr. Rabbit, and Jessica’s father was forced to create horrible viruses in exchange for guaranteeing Jessica’s safety. Jessica was able to escape under the tutelage of Artemis, her protector, who taught her how to fight. The comic gained a cult following, desperate for more information on Jessica’s journey and her continued fight with Mr. Rabbit. Within that following there was a subset of fans who became convinced that “Dystopia” actually predicted major virus outbreaks within the world through clues hidden within the comic artwork (including three of Utopia’s main characters: Becky (Ashleigh LaThrop), a young woman suffering from a disease she believes “Utopia” may hold the cure for, Wilson (Desmin Borges), a conspiracy theorist, and Samantha (Jessica Rothe, who really shines in the early episodes), a bleeding-heart who wants to save the world).

For years after its initial release, there were no subsequent issues. Until a young woman discovered a sequel comic, entitled “Utopia,” in her grandfather’s home while she was cleaning it out after his death. After learning that there was a subculture desperate for more of Jessica’s story, she and her boyfriend decided to auction the newly discovered comic to the highest bidder at a local Con in Chicago (well, from the looks of it, probably Rosemont just outside of Chicago, but I digress). Fans diverge from all over the world, but it turns out someone far more sinister also wants to get their hands on the rest of Jessica’s story. And that’s where Utopia the series kicks off.

As you can see, that’s a hell of a lot of backstory – and I didn’t even give you all of it, lest I spoil some key reveals – all of which is crucial to understanding just what is going on in the series (as well as the motivations of several characters). And the audience is thrown into the story more or less in media res. We are left to pick up stray clues here and there, trying to piece together just what is happening and why we should care at all about these characters or their connection to Jessica Hyde’s story. I often found myself wondering if there was a prequel series I should have watched to get up to speed on it all. Unfortunately, the series (which was adapted by Gillian Flynn, author of the excellent “Gone Girl” and “Sharp Objects”) cannot figure out the proper balance of character and narrative, leaving the series a confusing mess.

Yes, dealing with genre exposition and complex plotting is hard. And there is so much to lay out to bring the audience into the strange parallel universe of Utopia (I didn’t even get into the flu pandemic that may or may not have been orchestrated by John Cusack’s morally gray Dr. Kevin Christie – a story that doesn’t make nearly enough of an impact, despite our current situation, thanks to a distinct lack of character and narrative development from Flynn) that I suspect it would have been hard for even the deftest showrunner to pull this together*. But boy, after seven episodes, I should actually care whether characters live or die in the season finale. And I really don’t feel any emotional connection to any of them. And that’s a really big problem.

*It’s my understanding that the pandemic angle of the story was not part of the British series, and it really shows in the narrative. If the series revolved around the central characters attempt to piece together which elements of “Utopia” are prescient and how to potentially stop them, I think the series would be much more successful. Instead, as soon as we get some traction in that side of things, we get pulled away to deal with the ever-worsening pandemic and Rainn Wilson’s troubled epidemiologist Michael Stearns desperately trying to promote his possible cure. It’s exhausting and while the threads of the story eventually begin to tie together, it takes far too long and the payoff isn’t worth the sacrifice of choosing not to craft strong central characters for the audience to follow.

Utopia suffers from a lot of the things that plagued HBO’s Westworld. On paper, it sounds like a really cool concept. Hell, when it was done the first time it was a really cool concept. So, let’s modernize it and make it even cooler! Utopia has a lot of that same puzzlebox structure – the narrative movement relies on reveals that are doled out throughout the season. Unfortunately, all of the reveals are easy to spot from miles away, so they are met with a yawn rather than excitement when the show pulls back the curtain. Even worse? The reveals and the mythology surrounding the story are considered far more important that creating and building complex characters to inhabit the story. There are some gnarly and violent fights and the show’s body count is shockingly high, but when you know next to nothing about the characters involved, well, they have little impact. Far and away, the show’s most interesting character is Arby, a mild-mannered assassin played brilliantly by Christopher Denham. But that’s about it.

And I would be remiss if I didn’t, briefly, touch on the violence in the series. Now, I’ve watched plenty of violent television shows over the years. Hell, The Boys is hyperviolent and I didn’t mind a bit. Violence absolutely has a place in storytelling. But the violence needs to serve the story in some manner. The violence in Utopia largely does not. And that’s a problem. Numerous characters within the series are trained in violence and torture and utilize it routinely to get what they want (or because they don’t know any other way to do things). But the violence is often gratuitous in nature and feels designed to elicit squirming and squealing from the audience rather than an impression on or of the characters involved. It is telling us that this character trades in violence rather than words, which is perfectly fine as a character development piece. But then that becomes the only piece of development the character receives throughout the series and that’s where things fall apart. When your protagonist is just hell bent on revenge and uses whatever means necessary to achieve it, well, she better have some other traits to balance her out and make us care about her. In Utopia, she doesn’t.

By the time I finished the seventh episode of the series, I had a solid handle on the mythology and the narrative arc the show was trying to get across, but it legitimately took me that long to fully understand just what was going on in that arena. I did not, however, have a strong grasp on who these characters were beyond their plucky archetypal descriptors (for example, Wilson is the conspiracy nut and very little else), as the series had failed to put in the time or energy in developing them. And I should stress, that this is a failure of writing and not acting, as it’s not easy to create a three dimensional character out of nothing. There’s so much happening in the story that I can understand how character development ended up left on the side of the road 30 miles outside of Chicago. But it’s a shame it was. There’s a good show hidden under all the mythos, blood, and guts in Utopia. I wish Flynn had taken the time to dig through all of the muck to find it. Instead, go watch the British version if you can. I suspect it’s significantly better than this mess.

Utopia premieres on Amazon Prime on Friday, September 25. Seven of the season’s eight episodes were provided for review by the site.