The Future Ain't What It Used to Be: TV's Dystopia Boom

Kindley, Evan. "The Future Ain't What It Used to Be: TV's Dystopia Boom." The Nation 12 March 2018: 44-45. On line here.[1]

Good essay by an academic (a teacher at Claremont McKenna College), significant for appearing as part of the coverage of culture in the oldest continuing magazine in the US, and an eminently respectable venue specializing in politics from the Left.

"Stretching the criteria a bit," Kindley mentions the "the long-running zombie odyssey The Walking Dead and its spin-off, Fear the Walking Dead (using a fairly recent idea of "zombie," one including some literally ghoulish behaviors);[2] and gives a nod to the "dystopian elements" in situation comedies such as The Good Place and The Last Man on Earth. The shows directly considered include Westworld on HBO, Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale, Amazon's The Man in the High Castle, HBO's The Leftovers, Netflix's Altered Carbon. After concluding that "Thus far, the most hospitable TV format for the dystopian impulse has been not the serial drama but the anthology series" — and giving a gracious not to Rod Sterling's The Twilight Zone[3] — Kingley gets to his main topics, the UK Channel 4 series, via Netflix in the US, Black Mirror and Channel 4's Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams on Amazon (p. 45).

RDE, Initial Compiler, 10July19