'Brave New World': Alden Ehrenreich's Numbing Peacock Show Doesn't Produce Soma-Inspired Bliss [Review]

It feels almost like a prerequisite for a prestige cable or streaming service to have a dystopian sci-fi show in their line-up, and NBC Universal’s Peacock, launching on July 15, is not about to be the exception. It may take plot points and the name of Aldous Huxley’s classic anti-utopian futurist tale “Brave New World” but make no mistake about it: this adaptation owes more to the televised dystopias of the last decade than the original source material. There’s a little bit of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” a lot of “Black Mirror” (including a few stars and a shared director), and so much “Westworld” that it reminds one how much the creators of that film and series stole from Huxley in the first place. Once again, a seemingly perfect society will crumble due to the imperfections of human nature and the need to rebel against an unfair caste system. Like the worst parts of “Westworld,” “Brave New World” seems infatuated with its own ideas, spending most of its nine hours spouting coffee shop philosophy about human nature that adds up to shockingly little that we haven’t heard before. Even worse, it’s a show that’s just too thin on storytelling to justify its length. Apparently, every streaming service needs a few bloated dramas that could be half as long too. Peacock is checking off some boxes early.

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In this futuristic vision, there are three main tenets of existence in New London: No Privacy, No Family, No Monogamy. The concept is one of societal need, meaning that your personal existence is of no value. Residents wear contact lenses that allow other people to literally watch their lives and to see the social status of everyone in the city (a la the “Nosedive” episode of “Black Mirror”). Of course, the upper-tier consists of the Alphas, who order around the Betas, and so on and so on. The Epsilons are basically the working-class tier, while the Gammas do the bidding of the Alphas in roles like servants. When an Epsilon ends up dead, falling (or maybe jumping) from a balcony, it begins a journey for both Alpha Bernard Marx (Harry Lloyd) and an Epsilon witness named CJack60 (Joseph Morgan). Both seem startled at the very concept of suicide—after all, this is a perfect society in which everyone is happy, as long as they have enough of a drug called Soma to push away the bad thoughts.

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Meanwhile, Beta Lenina Crowne (Jessica Brown Findlay) is introduced as a character just waiting to break from her patterned life. She has been monogamous with a fellow gorgeous person named Henry Foster (Sen Mitsuji), and Bernard reminds her that having sex with the same person too many times in a row isn’t allowed in New London. After all, other people may want carnal relations with Foster or Crowne. And the Betas are encouraged to get their freak on with regularity at parties that inevitably turn into orgies. In those scenes, Peacock and the producers of this show seem very eager to show that they’re not under the restrictions of ad-supported television like most NBC Universal projects. There are a number of scenes of beautiful people writhing to techno music as each cut produces less and less clothing and more and more grinding. These scenes are surprisingly dull, playing out not unlike the Zion rave scene in “The Matrix Reloaded” with less clothing. Perhaps they’re meant to be a bit flat and simplistic to illustrate that even anonymous sex with beautiful people can get boring, but it feels like they’re just poorly directed more than thematically consistent.

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Lenina and Bernard end up on a trip to something called The Savage Lands, the world outside of New London where people are banished, and residents actually do awful things like get married and have children. This is where John (Alden Ehrenreich) lives with his mother Linda (Demi Moore), and the production design here wants to recall the desperation of a George Miller film but ends feeling more like a weird ride at Universal Studios than the more instinctual counterpart to New London it should have been. After Lenina and Bernard stumble into a rebellion, they end being forced to take John back to New London, where the very existence of the “Savage” completely disrupts utopia. John tells Betas and even Epsilons stories of human emotion, teaches Bernard how to throw a punch, and, of course, creates a love triangle because no collapse of a fictional utopia is complete without a little bit of jealousy.

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At the end of four hours, an architect of this society named Mustafa Mond (Nina Sosanya) tells Bernard that “We’re at the beginning of something,” and that’s indicative of the pacing of “Brave New World,” a show that doesn’t really develop a personality until viewers have already committed a large chunk of their day to it. The midsection of the season, roughly episodes four to six, have a playfulness that’s welcome when compared to how seriously the prologue and endgame take themselves. Here’s where the charming version of Ehrenreich is allowed to shine, revealing how it would maybe be a little fun to be an overnight sensation in a world of stuck-up fashion models. Findlay isn’t given much of a character and has almost no chemistry with Ehrenreich (a scene with Hannah John-Kamen and the “Solo” star crackles with so much energy that viewers will start imagining the better version in which she played the Lenina part), but there are other strong performances sprinkled through “Brave New World.” Morgan is consistently interesting, and Lloyd is arguably the MVP, thanks in part to being given the biggest arc from a company man to the guy who sees the wizard behind the curtain.

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Say what you will about the way it circled in on itself a few too many times, at least “Westworld” knows to keep surprising viewers with new mysteries to unpack. Other than a couple of unexpected deaths in the first half, “Brave New World” is shockingly low on actual plot. The main problem is that the stakes just feel too low. Nothing is really on the line until around eight hours in, and the story doesn’t really go anywhere that isn’t largely predictable. In every way, from sterile production design to unremarkable storytelling to flat techno orgies, a show about exploding normalcy needs to feel more spontaneous. There’s nothing brave or new to see here. [C]