Bingeing while the world burns.In the science fiction novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley shows a “revolution of revolutions” resulting from technological advances. Perhaps he can even imagine us now, pulling up Peacock, clicking on one “Brave New World” episode and then another. (Very few of us had both a global pandemic and an overdue racial reckoning on our 2020 bingo card.) But the idea of a computer in every pocket, a social media feed for every mood, entertainment on demand and life as livestream wouldn’t have surprised him. How much thinking will you do while you watch the buildings, the clothes, the toned bodies, the glowing skin? How well do sex and social critique actually mix? Well enough for more seasons, Wiener hopes. Yes, it traffics in philosophy and muses upon “the relationship between happiness and freedom, and what you’re willing to risk of each for the other,” Lloyd said.īut as Olmstead, the Universal Content president, told me - twice - the show shouldn’t feel like homework. “Brave New World” - available soon on the Peacock app! - is one more of them. “The moment where you sit on your own in the darkness to question what it’s all about, there’s so many things to do on your phone.” “That’s something that we definitely recognize today,” Lloyd, who plays Bernard, said. One of the novel’s spikier and more resonant points is that entertainment is its own drug, numbing us against discomfort. Mostly, Lee looked to Brutalism - Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasília, Carlo Scarpa’s elegant interiors, Soviet monuments that stretch heavenward.īut possibly that’s just the prop soma talking. 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.

Aldous huxley brave new world