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‘brave new world’: tv review.

'Brave New World,' the long-gestating Aldous Huxley adaptation about a dystopian future society, starring Jessica Brown Findlay and Alden Ehrenreich, debuts on Peacock.

By Inkoo Kang

Television Critic

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There’s no counting the number of crises currently plaguing America, but a hair-raising uniformity and orderliness among its people isn’t one of them. The past five or so years have, in fact, given us myriad reasons to fear the ongoing fragmentation and polarization of our nation, with technology accelerating the creation and distribution of “alternative facts” and algorithmically curated realities.

The novel coronavirus pandemic is only the latest example of this tendency toward fracture and balkanization, as one marginalized group is blamed for the disease; other marginalized groups are left to suffer the bulk of its ravages; easy and effective measures like mask-wearing fall prey to the culture wars; and thousands of opportunists exploit the uncertainty and anxiety surrounding the contagion, chipping away at expertise, consensus and social cooperation to found and swell their own information cults.

Air date: Jul 15, 2020

All of which is to say, there are plenty of dystopian elements to be mined from today. And yet here comes Peacock ‘s Brave New World to warn us of a world in which technology has ensured that there’s too much conformity, too much sharing, too many orgies (more on that soon). If creator David Wiener thought about why Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel is relevant to 2020, viewers aren’t clued in on the answer.

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The nine-part debut season feels like it’s built on miscalculation atop miscalculation, but the gravest one is that the citizens of New London are effectively extraterrestrials. They resemble no human society to date: There are no parents, spouses, children or, really, friends. Monogamy is verboten, while marriages and families are the outdated practices of the “Savages,” who are coded as poor (white) Americans and live on a reservation that New Londoners treat like a zoo.

The civilized do have bosses, one of whom reprimands an employee by pulling up a hologram of her having sex and calling her “selfish” for doing it with the same person 22 times, as happens in an early scene. (Sleeping with a single partner means depriving others of the pleasures of one’s body. The solution, as it is for practically any problem in New London: Get thee to an orgy.)

As in any dystopia onscreen — and Brave New World is plotted as rotely as any of them — the characters we follow are the square pegs. Each person in New London is genetically modified, then trained from childhood, to conform to one of five strictly hierarchical castes. As an Alpha-Plus, Bernard Marx (Harry Lloyd , Counterpart ) is at the top of the heap, but his task of indoctrinating all those below him to believe that everyone is happy in New London is hampered by his own deep unhappiness.

Bernard is smitten with Lenina Crowne ( Jessica Brown Findlay , Downton Abbey ), the Beta-plus whose aforementioned moments of intimacy he threw back in her face. But when the two visit the Savage Lands, where he hopes to woo her, she meets someone more intriguing: John the Savage ( Alden Ehrenreich , Solo: A Star Wars Story ), who has experience with all kinds of things foreign to her, like music with lyrics, a mother (Demi Moore), and hours upon hours of moping. It’s the last one that grabs her most: New Londoners pop feel-good pills at the slightest discomfort. Emotions are an exoticism.

Those spherical, translucent pills — in yellow, orange and red, signifying different levels of intensity — dot New London, but each resident also carries around their own metallic Pez dispenser. The ubiquitous clicking noise of pearl-clutching New Londoners reacting to small incivilities is one of the few ways that the writers seem to have thought through what it feels like to live in this society. In contrast, a scene in which a character doesn’t understand what blood is strains credulity — surely even in a designed-to-death utopia like this one, a child has tripped and skinned their knee before. And in a world where there’s both constant rutting and constant displays of power by the Alphas against those below them, it feels flat-out improbable that, say, the worst thing that might happen to a lower-ranking woman is that she wouldn’t orgasm during a sexual encounter.

Too much of Brave New World is the writers delighting in shocking the audience with how strange New London’s customs are. No one has ever cried before or knows what “a virginity” is. Bernard’s superior (Sen Mitsuji) gives him a performance review while the employee is on the toilet. Everyone is young and hot, and when they reach a certain age, they’re sent to the crematorium — not that the show dares to consider the darkness of that premise. That’s the thing about New London — its practices are so extreme, their ramifications so unexplored and thus their resonance to our world so limited that anyone who lives there is too outlandish to care about. The few times they do approach humanity, it simply feels like a narrative contrivance.

John eventually ends up in New London, which he has a stronger connection to than his humble existence in the Savage Lands would suggest. If there’s one believable thing about the show’s characterizations, it’s John’s conflicting desires to take advantage of his unexpected privileged position and to do away with New London’s cruel class system. But unbeknownst to him, New London is already crumbling from the inside — with a disgruntled Epsilon named CJack60 (Joseph Morgan) ready to fight, leaders (Nina Sosanya, Ed Stoppard) too afraid to confront its problems head-on and party (i.e., orgy) designer Helm (Hannah John-Kamen) providing endless distraction for the masses. (So why aren’t the group-sex scenes remotely sexy?)

Also endlessly distracting, but in the good way: the sleek, futuristic production design by David Lee, which makes New London look like a kind of exclusive, ostentatiously eco-friendly airport only millionaires would be allowed to set foot in, and the corresponding costume designs by Susie Coulthard that are part-sticky sexbot, part-Eileen Fisher’s 2050 spring collection.

Huxley wrote Brave New World to warn readers of technology-assisted totalitarian control. The effect of this adaptation, in contrast, seems to be reassurance: that we, unlike the pathetic saps of the future, have the freedom to marry, have kids, feel sad and not attend orgies if we don’t want to. Hooray? It doesn’t stop our world from feeling any less like a dystopia, not that the show’s writers have anything to say on that condition. If this lavish but lifeless production is Peacock’s most prestigious original offering, well, there’s always Jim and Pam.

Cast: Jessica Brown Findlay, Harry Lloyd, Alden Ehrenreich, Hannah John-Kamen, Demi Moore, Sen Mitsuji, Joseph Morgan, Nina Sosanya, Kylie Bunbury

Creator: David Wiener

Showrunner: David Wiener

Premieres Wednesday, Jul. 15, on Peacock

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Brave New World Is Worth the Price of Admission (Which Is Free)

For the most part, new streaming services come with a now-familiar two-part offering. First, there is the library, the collection of known titles that guarantees the service will already have something of value to most customers. Disney+ came with Marvel movies, HBOMax came with a huge film library including hard-to-find classics like the Studio Ghibli catalogue, and NBC’s new Peacock service has NBC Universal titles like Law & Order , 30 Rock , and a world of Bravo reality. But the second prong in the New Streaming Service Promise is always an iffy proposition: original programming. Outside of possibly The Baby Yoda Show on Disney +, no new streaming service in the past several months has come with original programming worth a subscription all on its own.

Peacock’s Brave New World is not an exception to the rule, but unlike Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon Prime, Peacock is available for free — and at that price, Brave New World is perfectly fine. It is attractive and, at points, even compelling TV; the adaptation is neither too close nor too far from the original source material; and at major twists in the plot, it did make me curious about what would happen next. It’s not at all exciting or innovative, though, and, especially later in the series, several of the major plot developments seem held together mostly with abstract CGI visuals and overly on-the-nose board-game metaphors.

It’s hard to say what the world will look like two weeks from now, two months from now, two years from now — that’s the Real Future, and it’s terrifyingly in flux. But TV has settled on a very good idea of what the Fictional Future looks like. It is slick and seamless and rendered in high-gloss metallics, severe streamlined hairstyles, ever-present computer interfaces, and the total control of messy human nonsense like emotions and physical flaws. It’s the Westworld vision of humanity, in which sterile surfaces are everywhere and dirt is around only to signal (false) authenticity, and Brave New World is not interested in reimagining that very familiar look. There’s the controlled, polished world of New London, where no one’s clothes are ever wrinkled and no one cries, but no one actually feels happy, because all their emotions are chemically controlled. Then there are the Savage Lands, a dirty, chaotic, hardscrabble place full of uncivilized people, used primarily as a theme park for the New Londoners. And as in Aldous Huxley’s original novel, there are characters who represent various problems and opportunities of these dystopian places. There’s Lenina (Jessica Brown Findlay), a New Londoner who finds herself unexpectedly drawn to the wild disorder of the Savage Lands; John (Alden Ehrenreich), a Savage Lands resident who’s actually the son of New Londoners; and Bernard (Harry Lloyd), a New London middle-manager type who finds himself pulled in opposite directions.

There are also many orgy scenes. There are arguably too many orgy scenes, especially because the show’s depiction of sex is mostly designed to argue that the New Londoner’s experience of physical pleasure is empty and meaningless. The surfeit of orgies mostly achieves that, but it’s hard to get over the sense that Brave New World wouldn’t mind if its viewers were at least a little titillated by all the sex, even when the bigger message is supposed to be how ungratifying it is. And although the sex and physicality of the show are absolutely part of the original novel, their presence is also just one more way Brave New World feels like every other dystopia rather than a bracing work of individuality. It’s a little strange to say, but the orgy scene feels like a basic box that has to be checked in any depiction of an enlightened but broken future society, going back to Star Trek and including stories like Battlestar Galactica and Westworld . It’s in the Matrix trilogy, too, which is a major influence on this TV adaptation: One of the few significant changes it makes from the book’s underlying social structure is the addition of a Matrix -like computer network that plugs into and feeds from individual brains.

It’s not Brave New World ’s fault that Huxley’s novel has become so influential and ubiquitous in the history of dystopian imaginings that all of his nearly 100-year-old ideas now feel yawningly overfamiliar. John arrives in New London and becomes a great disruptor, creating a shock wave that rattles the system. The book Brave New World was itself intended to be a similar disruption, a startling strangeness meant to jolt its readers. It succeeded. Without its own imaginative leap, though, the TV show instead feels as if it’s echoing ideas from the past. It’s very weird for a dystopia to feel kind of comforting, but that’s what the TV adaptation of Brave New World is. It’s a story built to be a social alarm bell, but the bell plays an immediately recognizable melody. I knew I was supposed to be running to do something about the alarm. Instead, I was happy to just hum along.

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Brave New World on Peacock a chilling dystopia in Ikea gray

Review: Streaming on Peacock now, the adaptation of Aldous Huxley's sci-fi classic is absorbing but nebulous.

Alden Ehrenreich explores a Brave New World.

When I first read Aldous Huxley's famous 1932 novel Brave New World, I expected something fusty and old-fashioned. I wasn't prepared for how scathingly direct or unsettlingly dark it was, and still is today.

The new TV adaptation, available on NBC's streaming service Peacock , re-examines the story for a modern age. It certainly adds a dash of cursing, a touch of violence, some Radiohead and a load of people getting their kit off. But it lacks a certain directness. The Handmaid's Tale is about sexism. Watchmen is about racism. Westworld is about robots in cowboy hats. Brave New World is about genetic engineering, but it's also about social conditioning, and over-medication, or the loss of intimacy, or possibly technology and surveillance, and also maybe socialism is bad?

Aldous Huxley's scathing novel came before George Orwell's 1984  and presents a sort of flip side to Orwell's infamous dystopia. Orwell imagined a viciously totalitarian future, and even today, the mention of Big Brother is never far away as authoritarian governments come to the fore. Huxley, meanwhile, imagined a world of repression rather than oppression, a world where we're all too happy to be distracted from our subjugation. Now nearly a century old, Huxley's vision was perhaps more prescient as we sleepwalk into a brave new world of our own.

But the fact remains: Huxley's vision is somewhat wide-ranging, especially compared with The Handmaid's Tale or 1984 or other dystopian fictions. By drawing on all the book's various themes, the TV adaptation certainly throws up interesting questions and subtexts. But that also makes it a little unfocused. I'm not trying to be reductionist: This version of Brave New World is absorbing, uncomfortably compelling and beautifully produced. It's even pretty funny. The creators include showrunner Dave Wiener (Homecoming, Fear The Walking Dead); directors Owen Harris ( Black Mirror ) and Ellen Kuras (Umbrella Academy); and comic iconoclast Grant Morrison ; and they craft an intricately unsettling future -- then make you itch to burn it down.

Sure, it's not as bold or as audacious or as declarative as other recent highbrow sci-fi shows, but that isn't a bad thing. It's just ambiguous rather than audacious, carried largely by the characters rather than the concept.

The story begins in New London, where there is no privacy, no family, and no monogamy. Everyone is very happy. That's because the haughtily emotionless elite of this society accept a tyrannical hierarchy and total lack of personal freedom in exchange for technological trinkets, mood-altering drugs and neon-lit rave orgies. Those bits don't actually look so bad... I mean, who needs privacy when you can have an augmented reality contact lens? Who needs freedom when you can have neon rave orgies? See -- that's how it creeps up on you.

Everybody's happy in the Brave New World.

But not everybody is happy in this brave new world. Sensitive bureaucrat Bernard is puzzled as to why a cloned drone worker would jump from a great height. Frustrated scientist Lenina wonders if socially siloing people by their DNA is a tad unfair. Together, they begin to explore boldly transgressive ideas, like not having sex all the time and maybe even easing off the color-coded happy pills. That is until a trip outside of their beautiful bubble introduces them to the savage alternative -- specifically, a savage named John.

John is played by Alden Ehrenreich, who recently played the young Han Solo . In a sense, he's our killer robot, the potential spark that could burn everything down, but despite Ehrenreich's smoldering, the character is something of a cypher. In the first half of the season, John is caught up in by events, storm-tossed by the actions and agendas of others, his motivations as blank as his expression. The same isn't true of his mother, a disturbed and drunk blonde with a haunting backstory. The scene-stealing actor playing this haunted character will probably look familiar, but it may take you a second to make the connection when you see Demi Moore 's name in the credits.

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The first few episodes are mainly carried by the unhappy couple, played by Jessica Brown Findlay , her luminous ladyship from Downton Abbey , and Harry Lloyd , previously a scene-styling villain in Doctor Who . Suave and sleek in their understatedly futuristic wardrobes, they manage to find the humanity in these chic apparatchiks, inspiring sympathy as we learn of their imperfections in a "perfect" world. 

In this finely-balanced future, everybody aspires to an emotional state as level and blank as a concrete floor. That's reflected in the show's actual floors, and walls and clothes. Dressed in anonymous grey and beige suits, the characters drift amid steel and concrete sets that look like a WeWork and a prison all at the same time. Everything's the grey of an Ikea sofa or a headstone.

As in many sci-fi shows, the production design does a lot of the heavy lifting, subtly immersing you in the beautiful but vacant society. The understated yet striking aesthetic is reminiscent of Gattaca , a movie clearly inspired by Brave New World's genetics anxiety that also used vaguely retro-futuristic design to make its sci-fi predictions feel both timely and timeless.

Clipped English accents and stuffy styling also make the dystopian society hark back to twentieth century England, where the book was written. CG whistles and bells add cutting-edge extras to Huxley's vision, including contact lenses connecting everyone in an intrusive social network. Satire!

Things are very different outside the society's bubble. Just for kicks, the medicated new worlders leave their antiseptic society to jump on a rocket and fly to the other side of the world, where they can experience the unshaven thrills of the so-called "Savage Lands." This walk on the wild side is a voyeuristic theme park gawking at the misery of those left behind by the future, filled with scuzzy denizens who dress up in colorful outfits and act out their delightfully primitive behavior for the education and titillation of the visiting new worlders. Their depraved old world is everything the brave new world isn't: rural, traditional, and very American.

There are echoes of Westworld in these two overlapping worlds. One is a future that  looks like the future, and the other feels stalled in the present. It's a fun contrast, but once again the nebulous premise means Brave New World lacks the excitement sizzling from the screen in Westworld. In HBO's sci-fi western, there's a simple and direct tension: when are the robots going to flip out? Brave New World is less immediate. Or, to give it the benefit of the doubt, more ambiguous. At least it's easier to follow than Westworld's brain-wrecking timelines. But even despite the breadths of themes explored, there are some gaps. Primarily, when a story deals with inequality, genetics and so-called "savages," it feels like a glaring omission to have no direct acknowledgement of race in the fictional world.

It's certainly a good time for sci-fi classics coming to the screen. The Handmaid's Tale already raised the bar for TV (and scored a hit for Hulu ). Denis Villeneuve's take on Dune is coming soon, as is Apple TV's epic version of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, and Brave New World feels like a curtain raiser for those forthcoming adaptations. It's a well-made and thought-provoking adaptation, even if it could be a little braver. 

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‘Brave New World’: TV Review

By Daniel D'Addario

Daniel D'Addario

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“ Brave New World ,” a TV adaptation of the Aldous Huxley novel, takes place in a fictional universe in which pleasure and indolence are the paramount virtues; individuals in the upper echelon of society (served by those bred to be beneath them) spend their existences in a pursuit of leisure one might call single-minded if we suspected any of these poor creatures had much to call a mind at all. This everything-is-free ethos hides a deep repression: The wealthy spend their lives doing nothing in order that they may stay in line.

All of which makes it an uneasy fit for a streaming-TV adaptation — premiering with the July 15 launch of NBCUniversal’s new service Peacock — from the very start. It’s a bit rich to be expected, as a viewer, to form a critique of the idle characters onscreen while sinking into hour four of a binge. It also stacks the deck: So many of the characters we meet in this series are not merely loathsome but have so completely had the character trained out of them through a lifetime of sloth that we grab onto what little signs of life are there elsewhere.

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Those sometimes flicker from Jessica Brown Findlay, the “Downton Abbey” actress here playing Lenina, a citizen of the show’s futuristic uber-city of New London who feels some doubt about the life she’s been assigned. With a member of her cohort (Harry Lloyd), Lenina travels to the “Savage Lands,” a region of Earth that hasn’t been groomed and remade along New London’s utopian lines. It’s intended to provide simple titillation and reinforcement of New London’s core values, but Lenina encounters not merely a roguish stranger ( Alden Ehrenreich ) but also a rebellion that challenges her perceptions.

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Both Brown Findlay and Ehrenreich (of movies including “Solo” and “Hail, Caesar!”) seem frustratingly tamped-down here. Brown Findlay has the problem of her character’s personality having been largely squashed by her surroundings, but Ehrenreich — playing a character raised in the wilds by a troubled, secretive mother (Demi Moore) has no such excuse, but perhaps that the outsidedness of the Savage Lands might dwarf all but the most dialed-in of performers. To wit: The theme-park-like zone of degradation features living exhibitions of all the vices New London had left behind, with staged superstore stampedes standing in for the greed and privation of the old way.

The Savage Lands’ stage plays make a point about the manner in which propaganda is communicated to the gullible, depicting disengaged performers running through a rote script they don’t themselves believe. The rest of the show, though, commits these sins, staging, for instance, endless orgy scenes in order to communicate, again and again, that the citizens of New London live lives absent any virtue but gratification. The point comes through so often and completely that one starts to wonder if it’s much of a point at all — and, but for little extant bits from Huxley’s work, like Lenina’s name, there’s no meaningful explication of New London’s politics beyond what they look like as lived by its version of the one percent.

Unlike the book to which it’s most frequently compared, George Orwell’s “1984,” Huxley’s “Brave New World” is far more driven by its milieu than the elements of character and plot; the rewards it provides come from the way its depiction of radical class stratification mirrored its world then, and ours now. Both Ehrenreich’s and Brown Findlay’s characters exist in the book, but their stories are action-movie amped-up and surrounded with indulgent, goofy depictions of future sex that seem eventually to serve no purpose greater than titillation. No wonder the actors seem exhausted; their project, deep into its first season, doesn’t know what kind of show it wants to be. It’s a shame, and somewhat fitting of the show’s consumption-first universe: “Brave New World,” handed a fully-thought-through creative bible, could find no more substantial goal than getting the viewer to click play on the next episode.

Peacock. Nine episodes (six screened for review).

• Crew: Executive producers: David Wiener, Grant Morrison, Darryl Frank, Justin Falvey, Owen Harris, Brian Taylor.
• Cast: Alden Ehrenreich, Jessica Brown Findlay, Harry Lloyd , Kylie Bunbury, Hannah John-Kamen, Sen Mitsuji, Joseph Morgan, Nina Sosanya, Demi Moore.

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‘Brave New World’ Is All Dressed Up With No Place to Go

• By Alan Sepinwall

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In the new TV adaptation of Brave New World , Alden Ehrenreich plays John the Savage, a stranger to the future society of New London, who is constantly puzzled by the city’s decadence as well as its rigid caste system. At one point, John arrives at a fancy party where the guests are preparing for what they claim is an exciting new game that involves lots of technology and vibrant outfits. As the rules are explained to him, John quickly realizes that it’s just a high-tech version of hide-and-seek. When he asks what the special suits do, his host replies, “The suits? They look fabulous!”

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Welcome to this not-so Brave New World , where all the ideas feel old and not nearly as deeply considered as the creators think. But, hey, at least it all looks fabulous.

In addition to Ehenreich, this latest version of Aldous Huxley ‘s middle school English-class staple stars, among others, Jessica Brown Findlay from Downton Abbey, as pleasure-seeking Lenina Crowne, Harry Lloyd from Counterpart, as administrator Bernard Marx, Kylie Bunbury from Pitch, as Lenina’s friend Frannie, Joseph Morgan from The Vampire Diaries, as menial laborer Cjack 60, and Demi Moore, as John’s alcoholic mother, Linda. It’s a great-looking cast, and a great-looking show. New London is a gleaming and wholly plausible paradise for people like Lenina and Bernard, as well as an obvious dystopia for anyone unlucky enough to be born at Cjack 60’s rank. The scenery is gorgeous, the digital FX casually real, so that when Lenina enjoys the wonder of zero gravity on an orbital flight with Bernard, it makes sense both that she’d be giddy and that the other passengers would be utterly jaded to it.

But this adaptation, developed by Grant Morrison, Brian Taylor, and David Wiener, never digs below those polished surfaces, either in exploring the characters or the story’s themes.

We are told at the beginning that New London has three rules to keep everyone happy: No privacy. No family. No monogamy. It quickly becomes clear that the last dictate is the TV show’s primary area of interest. If Westworld hadn’t already ground every last ounce of titillation out of the concept of filmed orgies, Brave New World will in short order. New London is a place where the citizenry are kept docile through abundant drugs, sex, and other distractions. While Huxley was writing about his own time in the 1930s, there are clear parallels to our world, and this adaptation occasionally takes a break from the flash and flesh to point them out. “The Savage Lands,” where John has grown up, have been reimagined from a Native American-styled wilderness preserve into a theme park chronicling the excesses of early 21st-century America: In one scene, Lenina marvels at a re-creation of a big-box store opening on Black Friday. Mostly, though, the show treats the book’s big questions as excuses for spectacles of sex and violence. There’s an impressive action sequence in the second episode, presented largely as a single take, when Bernard and Lenina’s Savage Lands trip goes horribly awry, but it also feels besides the point of the whole thing.

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The problem is that the series has so little interest in exploring what went into the creation of a place like New London, and what motivates the people who live there. There are brief glimpses of the community’s superficial entertainment options — video programs with names like The Moist Boys and Face Punch — but Brave New World itself doesn’t feel significantly deeper. In the book, John has grown up quoting the complete works of Shakespeare; here, he trudges around in a black trench coat saying things like, “You pop that smug little twat in his grille, you’re gonna feel fuckin’ great!” There’s also the problem that the version of the character we meet in the Savage Lands feels wholly different from the one who causes such a stir when he arrives in New London midway through the season. But the intense boredom he feels after a few days of experiencing all of New London’s bacchanal pleasures will feel familiar to anyone who decides to sit through all nine of the show’s chapters.

At one point, Bernard listens to John’s digital-music player, and is stunned to hear Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day,” because he’s accustomed to songs not having lyrics. John suggests musicians in the olden days wanted their music to mean something, but Bernard just finds the words distracting. The Brave New World creative team seems to be on Bernard’s side of this debate, not wanting deep thoughts to get in the way of their pretty pictures.

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Brave New World was originally developed at Syfy, then shifted to USA, and has ended up as one of the initial originals for the launch of NBCUniversal’s new ad-supported, partially-free/partially-not hodgepodge of a streaming service, Peacock (about which you can find more details here ). Though Peacock has a fairly impressive library of old shows and movies, originals are few and far between at this stage, with some of its higher-profile series either disrupted by the pandemic or still very early in development. In addition to Brave New World , Peacock launches with another Psych reunion movie, plus a pair of British shows: the police procedural The Capture and Intelligence , an Office -esque comedy that asks the question, “How long will you tolerate watching David Schwimmer play an unrelenting asshole?” (My answer: The length of one episode, and barely that.) Brave New World is arguably the closest thing the launch has to a marquee attraction, and it definitely has the shine of one. But, like John the Savage turning away from New London’s social elite to listen to his ancient MP3s, odds are you’ll soon lose interest in what’s shiny and new on Peacock in favor of firing up the complete run of Columbo .

All nine episodes of Brave New World premiere July 15th on Peacock. I’ve seen the whole thing.

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Why Is It So Hard to Adapt ‘Brave New World’?

Aldous Huxley’s groundbreaking work of science fiction has long puzzled Hollywood

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In the back half of the 1970s, when miniseries adaptations like Rich Man, Poor Man and Roots became runaway hits, a great book could make or break a TV career—so the influential NBC producer Deanne Barkley scooped up as many great books as she could. By 1978, she’d locked down the rights to James Michener’s Centennial , recruited Natalie Wood for a six-part adaptation of From Here to Eternity , and picked up James Clavell’s Shogun for a lavish production destined to become a ratings sensation in 1980. And perhaps inspired by the Star Wars –stoked interest in all things science fiction, she also commissioned an adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s 1932 dystopian landmark Brave New World —despite it being, as a profile of Barkley described at the time, “a tricky property everyone in Hollywood had been afraid of.” Starring 2001: A Space Odyssey ’s Keir Dullea and Harold and Maude’ s Bud Cort, it was set to debut in 1979 and run for six hours across several nights. Only it never did. NBC found out that adapting Brave New World was tricky indeed—and not for the last time.

After pulling Brave New World from its schedule several times, NBC finally aired it in March 1980. A version of it, anyway—the miniseries had shrunk from six, to four, then finally three hours and been reduced to a TV movie. (What would have been the four-hour version, running just over three hours without commercials, eventually aired on BBC and is now the easiest cut to find .) The network returned to Huxley’s World State again in 1998, with a TV movie starring Peter Gallagher and Leonard Nimoy . Then, for a few years in the late ’00s, Brave New World seemed likely to become a feature film starring Leonardo DiCaprio and directed by Ridley Scott. Instead, it’s coming to us once again as an ongoing series, one of the flagships of Peacock, NBC’s new streaming service (though this Brave New World was developed first for Syfy then for USA before finding its current home). A glossy take on the material filled with TV-MA-friendly amounts of explosive violence and tightly choreographed orgies, it proves that Huxley’s book can be easily mined for concepts and incidents. Adapting it, on the other hand, proves far trickier.

That’s partly because much of the novel is short on incident and long on ideas, effectively climaxing with one character arguing why the dystopia of New London, however awful in its implications, makes sense as the only recourse against humanity’s excesses. Which speaks to the book’s other tricky element: Brave New World ’s 600-years-in-the-future society—one that’s banned monogamy and family, done its best to erase history, mandates the use the euphoria-inducing drug Soma, and uses a combination of genetic engineering and brainwashing to create a rigid caste system—is quite functional, maybe even desirable. After all, war has been eliminated. And what’s the difference between drug-induced happiness and the real thing when you get down to it (to say nothing of all that attachment- and consequence-free sex)? On the one hand, Huxley’s World State takes some worrisome tendencies from the years of its creation to their logical, if nightmarish, extremes, combining the most dehumanizing elements of communism and capitalism in a culture that despises individualism, places all control in the hands of the state, and reveres Henry Ford for inventing the assembly line and Sigmund Freud for demystifying the soul (even though it sometimes confuses the two men). On the other, it has a certain undeniable appeal.

Much of the power of Brave New World comes from just that tension. It often reads like a novel at war with itself, in part because it was written by a man occasionally at war with himself . The product of Eton and Oxford, Huxley had more faith in the elites than the masses, whom he estimated to make up 99.5 percent of the population , and enthused about the potential of eugenics (with some reservations) . Like the book’s New Londoners, Huxley had little use for monogamy (though he and his first wife Maria incorporated that into a by-all-accounts successful marriage). While Brave New World sounds like a caution against all these feelings, they were hardly alien to its author, and Huxley’s ability to convey their allure helps make the book so haunting.

It’s a funny book, too, less a break from Huxley’s earlier satiric writing than an extension of it. But each adaptation of Brave New World has struggled to convey that. The 1980 version comes closest simply because it hews closest to the source material—at times painfully close, dedicating its first act to backstory Huxley takes care of in a few paragraphs. Helmed by actor-turned-journeyman director Burt Brinckerhoff, it’s set in a white-surface- and jumpsuit-filled future that makes Logan’s Run look tasteful by comparison. It also makes Logan’s Run , whose hedonistic vision borrows heavily from Brave New World , look lively, trudging along from plot point to plot point while attempting to provoke yucks by supplementing Huxley’s habit of giving his characters surnames like “Marx” and “Bonaparte” with characters named “Bowie” and “Jagger.” Only Cort, playing an oddball in a society with no tolerance for oddballs, and Superfly star Ron O’Neal, as the erudite and unapologetic enforcer of the World Order’s strictures, seem to have much of a take on the material.

Brinckerhoff’s strict adherence to Huxley’s novel extends to its depictions of the Savage Lands, an untamed, impoverished portion of the American Southwest with a culture that adheres to the old ways, mixing Christianity and Native American beliefs. It’s not a happy place, but at least it’s free in ways that surprise John, a New Londoner raised in the Savage Lands, when he’s taken back to civilization. In the 1998 adaptation codirected by Leslie Libman and Larry Williams, the Savage Lands are populated by Gen X–inspired no-goodniks who look like they stepped out of a Surge commercial , all decked out in baggy pants and stocking caps. (This fact, a rave scene, a scratch-heavy score, a featured Portishead song, and some distressed fonts make it a vision of a future dystopia deeply rooted in the late-1990s.) It takes other considerable liberties with Huxley’s novel as well, including an out-of-nowhere happy ending at odds with the source’s deeply pessimistic finale, one that suggests that the World State might represent some kind of end point from which humanity can never escape except via exile or death (unless, this version suggests, you’re Peter Gallagher).

In 2008, it seemed likely both these already largely forgotten stabs at updating Huxley would become footnotes thanks to Ridley Scott. After all, who better to bring one of the defining literary utopias to life than the filmmaker who, with Blade Runner , created one of the defining cinematic utopias? Without naming the title, Scott enthused to an interviewer that he’d “waited for a book for 20 years” and had finally secured the rights to it. That same year, the Los Angeles Times revealed the book to be Brave New World , a film that would star Leonardo DiCaprio, be produced by his father George DiCaprio, and be written by Andrew Niccol, writer of the Brave New World –indebted Gattaca . When talk of the project stirred again in 2009 , Niccol was out and Apocalypto screenwriter Farhad Safinia was in. Three years later, everyone seemed to have moved on. While insisting the film remained a possibility, Scott sounded resigned in an interview with Collider , saying “I think Brave New World , in a funny kind of way, was good in [1932], because it had a very interesting revolutionary idea. … When you reanalyze it, maybe it should stay as a book. I don’t know. We tried to get it.”

Whatever kept them from getting it, the Scott/DiCaprio Brave New World remains one of the big what-ifs of both their careers (even more so than the other project Scott was developing around his time: an adaptation of Monopoly ). That doesn’t mean it would’ve worked, or that the issues that dogged previous attempts to adapt it wouldn’t have resurfaced. Would Scott have the clout he didn’t have with Blade Runner in 1982 to keep its pessimistic ending? Would Leo have chosen this sci-fi blockbuster over the Christopher Nolan one he ended up going with? Would there have been too much money at stake not to turn it into a tale of resistance, like the many other early-2010s dystopias it would have appeared alongside, from The Hunger Games to the never-completed Divergent series?

That appears to be the direction in which Peacock’s Brave New World is heading, however slowly. Developed by Brian Taylor ( Crank , Mom and Dad ), David Wiener ( Homecoming ), and comics great Grant Morrison, the series updates Huxley’s world while somehow making it feel less relevant. In spite of smart touches like a privacy-erasing contact lens that feels like a direct descendant of Instagram and a Savage Lands that caricatures 21st-century working-class life—as well as nice moments like John the Savage (Alden Ehrenreich) getting awakened to a richer, wider world by discovering a Radiohead song—it plays less like an adaptation of Huxley’s novel than an extremely watchable dilution, with little of the ambiguity that makes the novel so disturbing. Its New London society is so stuffed with obvious villains that of course it has to come crumbling down (however fun its pansexual dance-floor orgies might look).

But maybe a dilution is the best we can hope for. Or maybe the novel works best as a set of building blocks. Beyond Gattaca and Logan’s Run , Brave New World inspired Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano , George Lucas’s THX 1138 , and other works (to say nothing of one of the Buzzcocks’ best songs ). Or perhaps it’s just one of those books best left to work its disquieting spell on the page. Writing of it appreciatively on its 75th anniversary , Margaret Atwood, no stranger to disturbing visions of the future, contrasted it to George Orwell’s 1984 , which she describes as a “horrific vision of a brutal, mind-controlling totalitarian state.” Orwell’s world might be tough to prevent, but it’s easy to spot; we’re in the midst of a presidential administration that’s used its power to batter away at the very idea of truth in plain sight.

Huxley’s “softer” totalitarianism is more insidious, and more seductive. It takes the form of pleasure and safety and a willingness to abdicate responsibility and individuality to maintain the status quo, no matter who gets reduced to a figure in an equation in the process. “ Brave New World is either a perfect-world utopia or its nasty opposite, a dystopia, depending on your point of view,” Atwood continues. “Its inhabitants are beautiful, secure, and free from diseases and worries, though in a way we like to think we would find unacceptable.” For an adaptation of Brave New World to stay true to its origins, it would have to capture the difficulty of saying “no” to a too-good-to-be-true world always waiting to become reality. So far, no creator has been able to do that.

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Brave New World reviews hail Peacock original series' take on dystopia

Credit: Steve Schofield/Peacock

Like George Orwell's  1984 , Aldous Huxley 's Brave New World is a seminal piece of dystopian fiction. Rather than depict a society stifled under the pressure of authoritarianism, Huxley presented a utopian-ish world so zonked out and sexed-up, that it didn't need to think about straying from the accepted norm.

But does that premise properly translate into the television adaptation coming to Peacock ?

According to the first reviews, Brave New World (premiering with NBC's streaming service July 15) is an audacious piece of entertainment that refines its source material for maximum relevancy. Indeed, the show is drawing comparisons to Andrew Niccol's Gattaca and HBO's Westworld , two projects that almost certainly derived aspects of their rather bleak futures from Huxley's 1932 novel.

Critics are particularly gravitating towards the series' aesthetic (that quietly draws the viewer into "the beautiful, but vacant society") and its leads played by Jessica Brown Findlay, Harry Lloyd, Alden Ehrenreich, Hannah John-Kamen, and Demi Moore.

Showrun by David Wiener ( Homecoming ), Brave New World is about  Bernard Marx (Lloyd) and Lenina Crowne (Brown Findlay), a pair of New Londoners who meet John the Savage (Ehrenreich) during a vacation to the Savage Lands. John comes back to New London with them and threatens to disrupt the lethargic peace that exists in this sedated future.

Pop some soma and see what critics are saying below...

"As in many sci-fi shows, the production design does a lot of the heavy lifting, subtly immersing you in the beautiful, but vacant society. The understated yet striking aesthetic is reminiscent of  Gattaca , a movie clearly inspired by Brave New World 's genetics anxiety that also used vaguely retro-futuristic design to make its sci-fi predictions feel both timely and timeless." -Richard Trenholm, CNET

" Brave New World  finds relevance almost a hundred years after its publishing in an adaptation deserving of its stature. It is engaging and provoking thanks to its rich source material, lively performances, and smart decisions about plotting, world-building, and art direction. That it has done away with Huxley's problematic aspects and raises modern questions about the loss of intimacy and consent allows  Brave New World  to enter 2020 as daring as ever." -Eric Francisco, Inverse

"The absence of allegory makes  Brave New World  feel purposeless. It could have taken a greater thematic rather than just visual cue from  Black Mirror  and made the show's shiny happy panopticon and pressure to conform explicitly about social media, or played up the class conflict angle more, but it didn't." -Liam Mathews, TV Guide

"Brown Findlay and Lloyd are perfectly cast as Lenina and Bernard, honoring the integrity of the characters' source material while also providing so much more nuance. Once Ehrenreich's John officially enters the series, the trio becomes electrifying to watch in essentially any context. Ehrenreich, in particular, turns John into a soulful and mesmerizing leading man, further proving that (even after the online vitriol he initially endured for  Solo: A Star Wars Story ) he deserves to be in whatever franchise he wants." -Jenna Anderson, ComicBook.com

"This series has all of the hallmarks of a prestigious BBC or Sky production, especially with the primarily British cast. Both Jessica Brown Findlay and Harry Lloyd are solid in their roles, especially Findlay who gets to shine in a substantial role. Demi Moore is also excellent in one of the best performances I have seen from her in quite some time. The only performance here that is underwhelming is Alden Ehrenreich. I was excited to see him after enjoying his turns in both Solo: A Star Wars Story as well as Hail, Caesar! but he just doesn't fit in this series." -Alex Maidy, JoBlo.com

"Both Ehrenreich’s and Brown Findlay’s characters exist in the book, but their stories are action-movie amped-up and surrounded with indulgent, goofy depictions of future sex that seem eventually to serve no purpose greater than titillation. No wonder the actors seem exhausted; their project, deep into its first season, doesn’t know what kind of show it wants to be." -Daniel D'Addario, Variety

Peacock and SYFY WIRE are both owned by NBCUniversal

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Review: Peacock’s ‘Brave New World’ Is Neither Brave Nor New

This adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s classic novel, inaugurating the NBCUniversal streaming service, is generic and tame (despite the orgies).

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By James Poniewozik

Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel “Brave New World” famously imagined a future society in which people were enslaved to pleasure. The future’s diversions were so absorbing that they commanded attention over everything else.

If only you could say that about its latest TV adaptation. Dull, generic and padded, the series, one of the premiere offerings for NBCUniversal’s Peacock streaming service on Wednesday, transmutes a provocative warning into a vision of a sci-fi world that feels neither brave nor new.

The premise, as in so many new series based on pre-existing intellectual property, is essentially that of the novel, but stretched out. We arrive in New London, the gleaming citadel of a hedonistic society that has snuffed out discontent with three rules — “No privacy, no family, no monogamy” — and an endless supply of soma, a feel-good drug dispensed like Pez.

The citizens, stratified into castes labeled “Alpha,” “Beta” and so on, shrug off the class inequities with the help of pills, orgies and “feelies,” tactile entertainments in which a populace mostly alienated from physical struggle can experience virtual thrills like getting punched in the face.

Outside the city, “savages” still practice primitive rites like having babies biologically, and perform at theme parks for the amusement of their safariing betters. (“Brave New World” shares with “Westworld” a faith in the future health of the live-amusements industry.)

Bernard (Harry Lloyd), a supercilious Alpha, strikes up a friendship with Lenina (Jessica Brown Findlay), a Beta whom he’s investigated for having sex too often with the same man — a transgression of “solipsism” against the “social body,” in which “everyone belongs to everyone else.” After a getaway to the Savage Lands adventure park goes awry, they return to New London with a fugitive native, John (Alden Ehrenreich), whose defiant authenticity makes him a subject of fascination.

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Brave New World Review: Peacock's Sci-Fi Adaptation Strips the Meaning From a Classic Novel

The series based on Aldous Huxley's famous novel isn't a sign of our times

Brave New World is the new streaming service Peacock's flagship launch show. It's an expensive dystopian sci-fi drama series with prestigious source material (Aldous Huxley's classic 1932 novel), a cast that features movie stars past (special guest star Demi Moore ) and present ( Solo 's Alden Ehrenreich ), and copious HBO-style sex. On paper, it has the elements of a hit. But in practice, it's an example of how many things have to go right to make a successful show, and Brave New World has too many parts out of place, with the most vital part -- an interpretation of Huxley's themes that would have made the show relevant to today -- missing entirely. 

If you read Brave New World , it was probably a long time ago, perhaps in high school, and you may forget some of the details of what it's about. It's set in a future where things are supposedly perfect. Society is peaceful and stable, because everyone has accepted their assigned class role, with Alpha Pluses running things at the top of the pyramid and drone-like Epsilons providing labor. Any time anyone experiences any kind of emotional disturbance, they pop a soma -- a happy pill to keep them regulated -- which they take constantly. And monogamy is prohibited, so everyone is sexually available to everyone else, while families don't exist, as children are born in laboratories and raised by social conditioning teams. It's a dystopia where people are docile and pacified and have everything provided for them, so they have no need or inclination to question the status quo. 

NBC Peacock Trailers: All the Original Shows and Movies Available on Launch Day

The people who do question the status quo are seen as troublemakers. Two of them are Lenina Crowne ( Downton Abbey 's Jessica Brown Findlay ), a Beta Plus scientist who desires to be monogamous, and Bernard Marx ( Game of Thrones ' Harry Lloyd ), an Alpha Plus bureaucrat who's unhappy with his place in the system. They travel together to the Savage Lands, a theme park (in the book it was a reservation) where they observe the way society used to be when there was monogamy and want and crime and that kind of bad old stuff. The savage ways appeal to Bernard and Lenina, but then they get caught up in a violent uprising against the park's New World overlords, and are rescued by John the Savage (Ehrenreich) and his mother Linda (Moore), who travel back to New London with them. John's rebellious nature influences John and Lenina and threatens to undermine the whole structure of the society. 

The plot of the series is broadly faithful to the novel, with the biggest change being the elevation of Lenina to a main character. In the novel, she was a sex object for the men to project their fears and desires onto, but here she gets an interior life of her own, and is the primary point-of-view character for the series. There are other plot changes, and expansions necessary to make Huxley's relatively short novel into what seems intended to be an ongoing episodic series, including a vague investigation subplot into the mysterious death of an Epsilon that, through six episodes sent for review, does not appear to be going anywhere interesting.    

Kylie Bunbury, Brave New World

The most insurmountable problem with this iteration of Brave New World is that the frictionless dystopia it depicts doesn't feel like one the world we live in is heading toward, and the show doesn't try to make a case that it is. When Huxley wrote the novel, he was reacting to the decadence of the prosperous 1920s, the Depression that followed, socialist and Communist movements spreading around the world, and dehumanizing assembly line mass production, which was relatively new at the time. It was a response to contemporary social anxieties about modernity removing individuality from people. That context is removed in the series, and not replaced with social commentary relevant to 2020. 

The absence of allegory makes Brave New World feel purposeless. It could have taken a greater thematic rather than just visual cue from Black Mirror and made the show's shiny happy panopticon and pressure to conform explicitly about social media, or played up the class conflict angle more, but it didn't. And a dystopia where the elites give the people enough so that they don't question why they don't have more doesn't feel like our future when our present is the opposite. People are not checked out; they're more aware of inequality and injustice than ever before, but the fight can feel futile against a power structure that knows we know and doesn't care. 2020's dystopian future (and present) is more 1984 -- "a boot stamping on a human face, forever" -- than Brave New World 's vision of sex and soma and collective pleasure-seeking. 

Brave New World 's lack of perspective would be more forgivable if it were more entertaining, but as a show it's just kind of blah. The costumes and sets are rendered in fitting shades of beige. The performances don't stand out (though seeing Harry Lloyd as a flustered bureaucrat made me wish I was watching  Counterpart , the excellent sci-fi espionage series on which he played a somewhat similar role). There are numerous scenes of orgies with writhing, topless extras, but they lack eroticism. They feel half-hearted, like they had to do them to show that this was a serious TV-MA drama, but they weren't comfortable with it.       

To be fair to Peacock, Brave New World isn't necessarily going to be reflective of the quality of its offerings. It was developed for two of NBCU's cable channels, first for Syfy and then for USA, before being moved to Peacock, and the production value feels more in line with those channels than HBO or Netflix, the giants with whom Peacock is aiming to compete. We'll see if Sam Esmail's Battlestar Galactica series becomes its real sci-fi flagship. 

TV Guide rating: 2/5

Brave New World  is available to stream on Peacock.     

Harry Lloyd, Brave New World

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Sam Wilson, who's officially taken up the mantle of Captain America, finds himself in the middle of an international incident. Sam Wilson, who's officially taken up the mantle of Captain America, finds himself in the middle of an international incident. Sam Wilson, who's officially taken up the mantle of Captain America, finds himself in the middle of an international incident.

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Adapting Aldous Huxley’s pathbreaking novel Brave New World for 2020 was an audacious move, especially since so many people have found it so hard to re-imagine the book over the years. Interestingly, the novel that encapsulates the problems of totalitarianism so shrewdly and is so timely and relevant, has struggled to find the right screenplay for television —until of course, NBC actually went ahead and did it.

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The show took some liberties to make it more identifiable to modern audiences and brought in some perspectives that weren’t part of the original novel, but stuck to the essence of Huxley’s work. But, what are some of the biggest differences between the book and the show? Let’s find out

The Show Introduces More Drama

Both the book and the show try to explore a world where notions like family and marriage are thought to be divisive, and the society in Brave New World upholds a culture that is free about how people should mingle with each other, so there are no misgivings. Bernard stands out because he is not totally comfortable with how transactional and devoid of personal boundaries the sex gets. Even Lenina feels the same way, which is why her decision to sleep with Henry for four long months raises some eyebrows.

But, in the book, these oddities are mostly depicted subtextually, in a subtler manner, with some clever plot devices. On the show, the makers flesh out the drama between the characters, the tensions are more pronounced, the focus on Bernard and Lenina’s inabilities to adapt are made out to be a big deal.

The Show Gives Lenina An Intriguing Trajectory

In the book, Lenina’s character came off as pretty one-dimensional; she was interesting, no doubt, but there were never any answers to why she did what she did. Huxley did not go into a lot of details trying to establish her personal growth.

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The show fixes this by making Lenina one of the most nuanced people on the show who’s humane and sensitive and is individualistic. She also identifies how dangerous Indra could be pretty early on in the show and starts to undermine in one way or another.

NBC's Bernard Is A Misfit, Unlike The Novel

Huxley’s fiction never clearly set someone up as the hero or the villain. However, it became very clear in the novel that Bernard, in spite of not being physically gifted, was being drawn out as a leader. Though the other Alphas made fun of him and he never seemed to get a lot of respect, the novel’s Bernard was never really depicted as an underdog, but rather as someone who’s devious and manipulative.

The show, perhaps to make the viewers connect with Bernard, makes him out to be an emo sufferer who just doesn’t seem to fit in, but, in the book, Bernard was a shrewd political maverick who could maneuver people for his own selfish gains.

The Novel Did Not Have The Supercomputer Indra

Perhaps to add a Big Brother-like  effect, or to resemble some sort of a creepy 24/7 reality TV show, the show introduces a supercomputer named Indra which lets everyone monitor everyone else.

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This was a means of demanding total conformity and helped the leaders make sure that no one was making their own rules. The novel never had the concept of a supercomputer, but it’s possible that makers added it to the show to indicate how uncomfortable and creepy the set-up was, so viewers could imagine themselves in the shoes of the characters

Bernard’s Priorities

A big difference between the book and the show would be how they approached Bernard’s endgame and his ulterior goals. In the novel, Bernard is a rebel who does not fit into the structure and wants to bring about a distinctive collapse of the system, which he does not seem comfortable with. But, it is later revealed quite stealthily that Bernard doesn’t want to topple the system at all, but actually wants to climb it so the elites would accept him, kind of like Dan Humphrey from Gossip Girl , who was always positioned as an outsider but wanted nothing more than to fit in.

In the novel, this becomes very clear as the story progresses, but, in the show, this revelation is quite clumsily unraveled, perhaps to sustain the element of mystery, but a bit more clarity would have helped Bernard’s arc.

The Show Bypasses The Problematic Reservation Arc

In the show, Savage Lands is a quirkily-designed amusement park where "workers" stage cheap renditions of trailer park plays as a reminder to New Londoners as to how different and savage their life would be without Indra’s technology and without their caste system. This is a way of enforcing a dictatorial order where people have to agree on how great the government is.

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But, the novel featured a very different kind of amusement park where World State citizens could go to an actual Native American reservation and just look at indigenous residents going about their day. This would have made for a really problematic storyline, and the makers obviously did away with it.

John Is Problematic In The Book

Huxley creates John as a nuanced and rather misogynist figure who may be quoting Shakespeare but holds outdated views about women, but the show actually positions him rather differently. His motives still aren’t clear, but he’s not exactly sketchy or an antagonist. Plus, the story of how he fell for Lenina is also very different. In the show, he sees Lenina pick up a dead bird and kind of instantly falls in love with her, but the book never has any such swaying moments.

Mustapha Mond’s Depiction

The leader of the new world Mustapha Mond is a man in Huxley’s novel, but, in the show, the role is played by Good Omens star Nina Sosanya. Though the figure is portrayed as complex and thought-provoking in both the book and quite self-contradictory, the show’s Mustapha gets a timely update.

In the show, Mustapha wants to create a totalitarian society, but  she is not a modernist in spite of being a great connoisseur of history and art . So, she naturally develops a tricky relationship with Indra’s AI programming because she doesn’t completely understand its powers and is quite afraid of it. 

Helmholtz’s Portrayal

Helmholtz has been reimagined in the show as Helm and both in the book and the show, her perspective provided a bird's eye view into the thinking of the society. She is the one who invented the ‘feelies’ which is a multi-sensorial movie-going experience, so she’s an innovator in both the novel and show. 

But, her distaste for the society is much more clear on the show. Hemholtz believes that she’s too forthright and transparent for their world, which is why, in spite of not seeing eye-to-eye with Bernard, somewhere they share a kinship.

In The Show, CJack60 Is A Pathbreaker

In the show The Vampire Diaries star Joseph Morgan's character CJack60 is an Epsilon who doesn’t exactly rise up in revolt but starts thinking "above his station," which disrupts the established societal structure. This is an original character that wasn’t a part of the novel, and he essentially introduces an outsider’s perspective into the show, a reality check for the viewers as to how the society is perceived by people who are not the elites. But, most importantly, Morgan’s character showcases the class discrimination that exists within the society that affects so many lives but is not addressed by the alphas.

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Brave New World: Season 1 Reviews

It remains compelling because, despite its lavish, technology-driven future, it remains firmly grounded in the emotional turmoil of a diverse group of individuals.

Full Review | Aug 1, 2023

Despite some evocative (and provocative) visuals and appropriate dramatic tension, it fails to truly excite.

Full Review | Aug 23, 2021

To the likely dismay of Huxley purists, Peacock's Brave New World is sexy, gorgeous, and exciting, a feast of visual and sensory delights that's often purposely empty in its portrayal of purposely empty people.

Full Review | Apr 19, 2021

It's just never compelling, never engrossing and, worst of all, not thought-provoking to the degree it needs to be given its subject matter and acclaimed, if dated, source material.

Full Review | Feb 28, 2021

Although [Alden Ehrenreich] again does not have a hit on his hands (the series got cancelled after one season), Brave New World remains a watchable escapist fantasy.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Dec 1, 2020

Regardless of whether you are familiar with the novel or not, this is a world that is very easy to escape into, and by doing so the series demands we ask bigger questions about the nature of escape itself.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 21, 2020

Dystopian sci-fi series is heavy on sex and violence.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 12, 2020

Disastrously walked into every known pitfall of trying to turn what is essentially a philosophical discourse into gripping drama. Even mediocre drama would have been a start.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 12, 2020

I like the look of it, even if it's not the stand out show we've seen in the last few months, I will certainly keep watching it.

Full Review | Oct 8, 2020

Brown Findlay and Lloyd are likeable leads, and we root for them even though they are explicitly lacking in emotion.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 2, 2020

Miniseries that scratches on Aldous Huxley's novel, staying on the surface. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 45/100 | Sep 30, 2020

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.

Full Review | Sep 11, 2020

The constant writhing of beautiful bodies isn't enough to keep the interest in a show with a plotline as thin as ice. Lazy writing with no engaging qualities leaves this one, one tough pill to swallow.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/10 | Jul 29, 2020

The cast is good. The writing is mediocre. It hews closely to Aldous Huxley's novel, except when it departs from it. There are a surprisingly large amount of orgies, and yet, they are in no way the reason to watch or not to watch Brave New World.

Full Review | Jul 27, 2020

Brave New World is all flash and no substance. It looks good but that's about as far as it goes. It isn't really interested in getting too deep into how the world operates because that's not where its priorities lie.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jul 24, 2020

Temperamentally so right-wing that I wish it were better. As it is, the series is merely tolerable, hampered by a lead-you-around-by-the-nose quality that is more in keeping with the network-TV ethos than with top-shelf cable drama.

Full Review | Jul 23, 2020

The heart of Huxley's book is present but there have been some big changes that don't add to the story. The overall plot structure suffers as the book has had to be expanded into at least one season of stories.

Full Review | Jul 17, 2020

Not only have we had a ton of sci-fi dystopias lately, but Huxley's novel is one of the most popular and enduring ever; most of the stuff you're sick of was already cribbed from it in the first place. That puts this new series in a tricky position

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jul 17, 2020

As far as summer shows go, Brave New World might be ideal, and it scores points because it can be appreciated on multiple levels.

Brave New World rings false in the same simple way its novel does now: capitalism just got bigger and more inhumane.