Utopia - Season 1 - Review

A long-term reader of this blog will notice that TV shows generally get a short review per episode. Why then, you ask, does 'Utopia', the Channel 4 series from 2013, only get one review for the entire first series? The answer, is because I was so enthralled by this show that I watched the entire ~6 hour spectacle in one sitting.

Bright and bold, the title card reflects the punchy vibe of the show.

It's a show that I was aware of but had never had any compulsion to watch. This was probably because I'd only seen billboards for it, in which it looked interesting (I suspect if I'd seen a trailer for it I definitely would have stuck around to watch it, it's that striking) but not interesting enough to make me watch TV. I'm a college student, of course I don't watch TV. The concept of it did of course look interesting… whatever it was, so when I logged on to Netflix for the first time in several months and it was the top of my suggested watch-list I thought, why not, and that is basically the story of how I lost an entire day.


Utopia is undoubtedly a masterpiece, and it's difficult to know where to start talking about what's so bloody amazing about it. Well, it's easy, everything is bloody amazing, but then this is a proper critical review essay, and I can't possibly leave it at that.

It's a classic science-ficiton conspiracy-drama, except it packs the punch of a nuclear power station. The pacing is impeccable, rarely too slow, and even at its most fast paced keeps the audience in the know just enough that they can be dragged along comfortably. Plot twists are occasionally predictable, but when they aren't they give an element of whip-lash to the roller coaster ride that is 'Utopia'. Though the beginnings and ends of the series had nitro-glycerine-fueled rocket-launch pacing, suffered mid-season, as often happens when opening stories are dragged out to the length of a full season in order to save the 'big reveal' until the finale. Several side-excursions seamed superfluous to the action and sometimes 'playing the waiting game' with our confused fugitives became an irritating game of 'who's backstabbing us now?'. On the whole, however, the constant to-and-fro of allegiances from shady personalities kept the audience on their toes, and occasionally gave a self-satisfying gratification when you managed to stay ahead of the plot-twist curve (except the finale's plot-twist, fucking nobody saw that coming).

Writing was on-point. Though occasionally losing the plot of whether to have the audience on side or completely out of it, the script played a fun game of playground tag between revealing and concealing. The characters were well-drawn mentally, and what little exposition there was was, though sometimes noticeable, most certainly necessary when it was use - this is, after all, a conspiracy, and telling a conspiracy story is difficult without characters explaining things to the audience. Even when exposition was used, thought was put into why a character is revealing what they are revealing and to who, and how they do it, and how much they reveal, instead of just a load-dump for the audience to indulge their curiosity, which shows a synergy in creative vision between the writers, director and actors.

Stylistically, 'Utopia' achieved something that seemingly hasn't been achieved before. In terms of acting, soundtrack, cinematography, 'Utopia' created a beautiful surface which counterpoints the gruesome reality beneath in the most beautifully subtle satire of our society that I've ever seen. Minor characters are often beautifully recreated caricatures of the officious bureaucrats that we're used to hating in reality, who are pitted in life-or-death situations against our heroes and heroines in situations which seem plausible purely because of the officiousness of our hated caricatures. Our protagonists are  the under-achiever almost-anti-heroes that has been popular for a while in modern dystopian fiction, but very clearly original and avoid being tropey and hackneyed rehashes of old stereotypes. Much like a kid burning ants with a magnifying glass, the protagonists take the satirical looking glass of Utopia's aesthetic to dystopian character tropes, and the results are a group of interesting, self-motivated characters who loathe the sardonic world they inhabit as much as they are denizens of it, shaped by it.

Continuing the discussion into style, the music - because I want to save the aesthetics till last for dramatic effect. The OST of 'Utopia' carries on the theme of satirical world-view, with sarcastically up beat tracks made of clashing major tones and fast drums, which almost always act as a juxtaposition to the carnage occurring on screen (take for example the music playing when a mentally troubled, psychologically conditioned wet-worker shoots up a primary school. Yes, it's like that.). I include a link below to a song which I think perfectly encapsulates the vibe of 'Utopia'. Keep 'bloody massacres' and 'violent explosions' in mind as you listen to this track and you'll get an idea of the juxtaposition created by the soundtrack.

Finally, cinematography isn't usually thought about when it comes to television, especially not on British television, since we seem to like 'talkies', though an obvious exception to this would be BBC's 'Sherlock', which uses visual storytelling and intuitive cinematography to create a multimedia experience. An apt comparison, except that 4's 'Utopia' is far the superior. The visual storytelling in 'Utopia' is all pervasive and entertaining - nothing is on screen unless it is significant and adds meaning, while choice camera angles and holding shots a few seconds longer than they need to be maintains the upbeat-but-definitely-wrong feel of the show. Whoever was in charge of colour correcting the footage for the final show was undeniably a genius, the show is visually sumptuous and rich in colour, again a counterpoint to the 'darkness' of the show's subject matter - fantastic!

10/10, doubtless.

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