Peacock’s Brave New World Is a Mishandled Orgy of Bad Ideas

Nothing sets up a big flashy dystopian launch show from a new streaming service like a series of pandemic-era protests during the worst presidential administration of American history. But showrunner David Wiener (Homecoming) has the misfortunate to see his Aldous Huxley adaptation debut during a time when the very real and dangerous concerns of a global populace couldn’t be further from the tenets listed during the show’s opening moments: “No privacy. No family. No monogamy.” Orgies all the time, sci-fi healthcare, and guaranteed employment? Brave New World’s bad timing is the least of its flaws, as the AAA series from Peacock is a foolish, dull, and cowardly take on a literary classic.

I watched the full nine-episode first season, which finds New London’s stratified perfection fall into chaos. Huxley’s utopia worshipped Ford and Freud: assembly-line industrialism and psychological conditioning. Peacock’s bows at the altar of soma (the ever-present feel-good pill being popped by New London’s residents) and Indra, a society-permeating digital network that has the same etymological root in Hindu mythology as soma. The boogymen of the book have been updated to self-medication and biocybernetics.

The latter is perhaps the most important undermining of Huxley’s Brave New World. The novel provides an effective satirical utopia because it is, top to bottom, filled with people happy with their lot—as fucked up as that may be. The series provides a world where people’s constant disillusion is kept in line by sex, drugs, and an all-seeing program. Those looking for an excuse for humanity’s bad tendencies get a technological scapegoat and a critique blandly becomes a cowardly conspiracy. Did this dystopia need another villain beyond its own pleasure-seeking populace?

Our representatives are Alpha Plus Bernard Marx (Harry Lloyd), introduced as a bit of an unhappiness detective investigating incidents of nonconformity, and Beta Plus Lenina Crowne (Jessica Brown Findlay), a scientist tasked with assigning those Greek class rankings. They’re both a bit off, Bernard because his gangling frame (accentuated by his loose clothes) mirrors how insufficient he is as an upper-cruster and Lenina because she’s been sleeping with the same guy for a few months—a big no-no.

Both are well-acted. Lloyd sells a Michael Fassbender-like serpentine charm with a crooked grin and pathetic desperation by primping his hair, while Findlay’s wounded stares and uncomfortable shrugs (she puts as much apathetic affect in her gestures as her line deliveries) reveal cracks beneath an unblemished surface.

Through some silly plot contrivances—no sillier than what’s to come—including an entirely uninteresting suicide investigation subplot, Lenina and Bernard galavant off to the Savage Lands outside the utopia, where humanity as it once was is preserved … kind of. It’s a place where the universe’s confused cultural decay and odd timeline are most apparent. Here is a world where people don’t know what deer were, but where Luther Vandross’ “Here And Now” is still played at (faux) weddings. Weddings in the Savage Lands are an amusing farce (unlike so much of the straightened-out series’ dystopia) meant to highlight the dangerous, backwards, and unhappy ways of those outside of perfect New London.

Discarding its tasteless indigenous content without losing the name—the “Savage” reservation in New Mexico has been changed to a more satirical theme park—the Savage Lands looks like an amalgamation of dusty rural stereotypes with a Mad Max facelift. Scraggly facial hair, southern accents, bad tattoos, sunburned wrinkles, and hardscrabble earners: it’s a regular Hillbilly Elegy out there, and just as oversimplified, dull, and problematic.

John (Alden Ehrenreich) lives here alongside his immodest and ultimately unimportant mother Linda (Demi Moore). Those that had an English class in high school might not recognize them from the book, though. John doesn’t cling to Shakespeare as his one source of contraband human culture; he cleans a car to Car Seat Headrest, playing from what looks like an old iPod duct-taped to a promotional flash drive, and acts like any Joe Blow. Shakespearean morality has been replaced by modern musical hipness. It’s as bad as Ehrenreich’s all-over-the-place performance.

Linda’s embarrassing (to John) immodesty is contained to drunkenly tooling around the house in a nightgown—with Moore being very Flat on a Hot Tin Roof—rather than sleeping with all the men in town. The shocking, in-your-face cavern between the cultural standards of Old Society and New London is lessened because, well, it’s Demi Moore and you don’t ask your movie star to engage in HBO-esque debauchery—even in Brave New World’s constantly-gyrating sci-fi Euphoria. Moore is actually less here, representing a series of ineffective compromises that sacrifice the source’s bite for prestige TV trappings.

Transferring the “savage” identifier from indigenous people to the working poor (complete with a white woman, who’s there purely as set up for Season 2, talking about how the New Londoners took their land) is the series’ wrongheaded attempt to preserve aspects of its source material in name only. This faux-reverence pops up all over the place, always a disappointment. The slogan of New London—“Everybody happy now,” grammatically diminished from the original’s spooky pseudo-utopian phrase—is another unforced error in a show that’s feet are full of self-inflicted gunshot wounds.

The show (and John) eventually moves on from the Savage Lands’ Arkansan backwater to more visually interesting locales, like New London’s stark white, hyper-minimalist upper echelons or stark grey, hyper-minimalist lower Epsilons residing in what looks to be Apple’s “1984” commercial.