A delicious little pleasure of mine is when a TV show kills off an interesting character within minutes of introducing them. A squalid little treat for the pig boy. I mean, think about it: how many shows go entire five-season runs without introducing a single interesting character? Interesting characters on TV are rare and difficult and should be clutched closely like jewels. And then Utopia turns up, and … sorry, did they just shoot that person in the head?
That jangling feeling of deja vu you have is correct: Utopia (Amazon Prime Video, Friday), is a glossy new remake of … Utopia, the Channel 4 dark comedy in the shape of a conspiracy thriller, only this time headed up by Gone Girl’s Gillian Flynn. As with every US interpretation of UK original material, it replaces the stuff we do well – a certain texture, a certain subtlety, dialogue that doesn’t end in someone shouting: “YOU JUST DON’T GET IT, DO YOU?” – and replaces it with what they are good at, which is sheen and John Cusack. This has done that, exactly. The original was dark and uncomfortable, a woozily ambitious series that was gone too soon. The new one isn’t really any of that but it does look really good, it’s still gleefully violent, and the story is still intricate like a clock is.
If you missed it the first time round, the rough outline is this: the titular Utopia is a popular graphic novel (and yes, before you breathlessly ask, the first episode does feature a number of slightly fish-in-a-barrel scenes about comic conventions), which certain fans online are convinced has predicted a number of deadly virus outbreaks (and yes, before you breathlessly ask, watching a show that pivots round the ambient horror of a pandemic is a bit much in the middle of a real-life one). Our ragtag crew of hardy conspiracy theorists – all the big hits, here: “sweet-but-nervous guy who’s in too deep”, “weirdo with a heart of gold”, “shy girl with warm maternal energy”, “wily boy” – band together with their leader, “badass”, to decode the new source material before it’s too late.
But wait, because you’re right in thinking watching four nerds read a comic you can’t see while going “That’s IT!” might be boring: there are forces of evil working hard against them. Cusack is on form as the suspicious cult-of-personality CEO; Rainn Wilson is up to something in his role as “bearded scientist who nobody believes the ravings of”; and there is a shadowy cabal looming large in the backdrop, known only as The Harvest. For something that could feasibly be pitched as “what if comics … were real?”, it really clips along.
Your own personal mileage may vary a little – there are a lot of scenes where someone says, desperately: “WHERE DO I FIND IT?” and the answer is just a solemn: “Look in … Utopia” – but Utopia offers something interesting, if unnervingly prescient: a labyrinth of a story wrapped up in conspiracy, with interesting new takes on violent set pieces and a willingness to either put a bullet in a character’s brain or make them say a clever line. The Channel 4 original set the bar very high. The remake has all the potential to match it.
