I was curious about Peacock's new streaming service, so I tried watching their Brave New World series. It's terrible. I'm a huge fan of the book, so if you haven't read it you might like it, I guess? I don't want to sound snobby, but if you haven't read it, you probably need to stop living under a rock or something.
So to start with, the show has no Fordism. At all. They don't replace it with anything. There's just no underlying philosophy that's anything like Fordism. People just conform because they are conditioned to conform. Also, the world state doesn't really have socialism, and the savage lands doesn't really have capitalism. They don't really depict exchange of goods in a very clear way. The world state has a brutalist aesthetic, more like how I picture like 1984, with some Minority Report AR tech. John has never read Shakespere, as far as I can tell (which seems like a really big deal, since Huxley named the book after that). Bernard is not argumentative, at all. Helmholtz Watson was written out. Mustafa Mond shows up early, and investigates a every little thing personally. Slow day at the office, I guess? Or maybe she's not a dictator, but a detective, in a society without police? It makes no sense. Everybody treats the castes below them as sub-human, which is not the way it was in the book at all. On top of that, the orgies are the most boring sex I've ever seen in a show. I mean, I didn't expect Caligula, but at the same time, I didn't expect it to be that boring. Then there's a violent revolt in the savage lands, because TV producers seem to think you can't have sci fi without something that passes for action every 5 minutes. The revolt is the most tactically nonsensical thing I've seen since Walking Dead (edit: I just looked up the show's creator, it's David Wiener, he made Fear The Walking Dead, so the stupidity shouldn't have surprised me). John's mother dies on the plane ride home from a mystery wound. People in the world state don't seem to be conditioned to deal with death like they were in the books.
That's the first 3 episodes. I couldn't take any more. I turned it off and checked out some reviews with spoilers. Apparently, the episilons have a violent uprising at the end of S1, and the world state is run by an algorithm, instead of Mond. God, I hate this show. The show runners are clearly too stupid to tell this story. This has to be the dumbest thing TV has ever done with fine literature. Watching this is like watching an 8 year old trying to explain the finer points of Wittgenstein.
Peacock is going to have to do better than this if they want to compete in the streaming wars.
