In the end it’s a thriller about one ordinary individual undermining the authoritarian society.Īlmost from the opening it is saturated in sensual pleasure. Made with great visual oomph and a clever tweaking of Huxley’s plotting, it is, ironically, top-grade escapism while lingering on Huxley’s satiric depiction of a society soothed and manipulated by pleasure and drugs. This is all threatened by the arrival in the allegedly blissful, peaceful capital New London of a character from outside, one John the Savage.īinge-watching guide: The recent shows you need to catch up on, all available to stream
A loose and ambitious adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s 1932 dystopian novel of the same name, it depicts a seemingly utopian future of life among people engineered to enjoy endless pleasure. As a bonus, most of the outstanding material is found on conventional TV, not streaming services.īrave New World (Sunday, Showcase, 9 p.m.) was made for the new Peacock streaming service, but comes to us in Canada on Showcase. No family.Please log in to bookmark this story.
That still requires some liberal adaptation, though, with the rules of New London here enshrined as "No privacy. George Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World (Sky One, Friday, 9pm) tend to trade pole position in told-you-so prescience, depending on the concerns and emphases of the moment, while people weigh up “a boot stamping on a human face – forever” or an anaesthetised society in which “everyone is happy now!” and decide which dystopia called it best.īoth of them make dire warnings about tyranny and conformity, but if one conforms more readily to the tyranny of titillating, formulaic entertainments, it’s Huxley’s. Imagine a place of instant gratification, rampant consumerism, self-medication, flesh-baring hedonism and the crippling awareness of everybody’s status, and chances are you have either summoned up the merry warnings of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, written in 1931, or merely recreated the content of any social media feed.
The future has begun to feel awfully familiar these days.
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