Watched: Utopia, Season 1
This took brutality to a context I haven’t seen before. There’s a scene late in the season, after the death toll has considerably racked up and dozens of schoolchildren have been murdered, where one of the principal characters remarks that wholesale slaughter is nothing to the people at the center of this show’s grand conspiracy. That idea lies at the heart of this. There’s a very interesting moral dilemma that lies at the heart of this show, and a cause so powerful that it not only drives people to do terrible things, but makes something like the significance of torture pale in comparison.
Focusing on the violence isn’t fair, though. There are so many gleefully tangled threads in this show, so tightly wound that every line is a delight to hear. The acting is solid (and there are more than a few familiar faces - in particular, Jamie from The Thick of It appears here as a terrified civil servant), and the music is eerie and brilliant. It’s written by Dennis Kelly, who wrote the book for Matilda: The Musical and upcoming film Black Sea, and his wit shines through in every episode. There are a couple of episodes that deserve a trigger warning for discussion of sexual assault, but it’s justified by the context - there’s a lot of violence, but none of it is gratuitous; it’s all coldly calculated with horrifyingly complex intent.
With that in mind, if content warnings of that nature don’t deter you, watch this. It’s six episodes long, and you should see it before the David Fincher remake appears on HBO later this year.