TV Has a Cynical Message for Humanity
Reality has no order—that’s why we’re always trying to impose our own framework on it, with the help of notions such as “karma” and “Mercury in retrograde.” The conventions of storytelling, conversely, are blessedly clean and concise; they allow us to at least pretend that a plot might cohere into some sort of plan. Lately, though, the rules have seemed trickier to follow. On television, the most ambitious parables about humanity are also the ones having the hardest time conceding to narrative, as though they can’t imagine anymore that a hero might be coming to save us. What happens when stories start to break down in the face of relentless human failure? Well, we get things like Apple TV+’s Extrapolations and Amazon’s The Power: sprawling, cynical, extraordinarily expensive exhalations. Characters are strangely passive; they react to circumstances rather than act on their desires; they shuffle through riots and Category 4 hurricanes and political turmoil without any point or purpose of their own.
In real life, this kind of static inertia is desperately plausible. On television, though, it’s deadening. Both shows left me, Scott Z. Burns’s speculative anthology series about the potential future of Earth amid climate change, has one of the starriest lineups of any non-Marvel product this decade, yet every actor seems nothing short of exhausted. In one scene, a zoologist played by Sienna Miller apologizes to a communicative whale (voiced by Meryl Streep) about humans’ infinite capacity for lying; in another, a character played by Matthew Rhys (and clearly inspired by Donald Trump Jr.) is gored to death by an avenging walrus. Oddly, neither scene is played for comedy. I laughed, but I don’t think I was supposed to.
