When it comes to sci-fi, there are a lot of great television series out there. Series like Silo, Black Mirror, Fallout, and countless more take viewers into worlds unlike our own, often with unexpected twists, turns, and uses of science and technology that dazzle, stun, or terrify and sometimes in equal measure. But there are also series that never quite found their place. Sometimes, things just don’t come together for a sci-fi series to be a success — and in the case of one of Prime Video’s darkest sci-fi series, they sometimes deserve a second chance.
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Airing for just one season in 2020, Prime Video’s Utopia was the American version of the UK series of the same name. The series originally started out at HBO with David Fincher set to direct, but when that fell through, Amazon stepped in with Gillian Flynn as showrunner. Starring Sasha Lane, Rainn Wilson, Jessica Rothe, John Cusack and more, the series ultimately debuted on September 25, 2020, and was cancelled soon after in November.
What Happened to Utopia?
While Amazon didn’t really offer a reason for Utopia’s cancellation, the series was likely a victim of timing. Utopia’s release came during the COVID-19 pandemic and while there were plenty of shows that survived and even thrived during that time, it’s Utopia’s subject matter that probably a major mismatch. The series followed a group of comic book fans who discover a terrifying global conspiracy when they realize that the underground comic book, Utopia, contains information about various diseases around the world. They discover that the comic holds clues about future events, revealing that there’s a plan to convince the world of an outbreak of a deadly new virus only to introduce a vaccine that really isn’t a vaccine at all, but will sterilize most of the population, thus decreasing the global population overall and averting ecological disaster.
While the story about a group of comic book fans going up against the global elite is interesting, taking a step back, it’s easy to see why the series just didn’t land. Not only was the world still dealing with a deadly virus in real life, but the vaccine for said virus had just started to roll out and there were already those who questioned both the nature of the pandemic and the vaccine. The series was just very poorly timed — and depending on your worldview, may have hit too close to home.
Utopia was also an extremely violent show. Children in particular were killed almost routinely in Utopia, but there was other violence as well as the main characters were chased and hunted down by a shadow organization while they attempted to take on the burden of saving the world. The show is bloody and bleak. Coupled with the global vaccine conspiracy story, it was just too much.
Five Years Later, Utopia Deserves a Second Chance
While Utopia had its issues, five years on, the series deserves another chance. Removed from the immediacy of the pandemic, Utopia’s virus and vaccine conspiracy plot works a little bit better now than it did then. It’s still a very dense and complicated series, but it feels more like science fiction now than perhaps it did in 2020. Also, given how the series ended, there is an opportunity to revisit the story with a time jump to see how the cliffhanger actually worked out — there were some big revelations about one of the central characters, Jessica, as well as key developments about the vaccine and its creator’s endgame. It would be fascinating to see where the series could go. It would also be interesting to see how much further from the UK series that Prime Video’s Utopia would deviate. The UK original ran for 12 episodes over two seasons, ending in a similarly bleak place as the US version.
Both the US and UK versions of Utopia are available to stream on Prime Video.
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Image courtesy of Stage 6 Films -
Image courtesy of Lucasfilm
