4 out of 5

Director: people with similarly weird styles

The first episode of Utopia was grisly, so strange, Twin Peaksy, over-over stylized look-wise to the point where it moves past cheeky and becomes interesting again, and hyped me up so badly for the next episode that I couldn’t expect anything but failure.  The next episode didn’t disappoint, oddly, adding more elements that seemingly fleshed out the plot but kept it in this odd world of conspiracies and unknowns… but it did introduce the main problem things like this will have, starting to become top heavy with oddity, and though there was the idea that a lot of this was piled on purposefully as maguffin upon maguffin – which is an interesting idea, a whole show about nothing but claiming to be about something – Utopia’s hedging toward violence and a drive to ‘solve’ matters kept stuffing things into that Obscure sack instead of trailing them out more contemplatively.

So it ends up being just a little too weird for its own good.  With Twin Peaks (which, despite the violence and more ‘thriller’ feeling Utopia ends up taking over mystery – was the closest reference at mind during the first half of the 6-ep season), you go back and rewatch it and there’s definitely a sense of consistency and scope to the whole jazzy, slinky affair, which we’ll go ahead and attribute to David Lynch’s understanding of symbols and style.  There’s a point Utopia passes where you get that it’s totally a conspiracy show, and we’re dealing with typically shady government stuff, and suddenly the answers don’t seem to matter as much.  There’s still an interesting overall drive to understand what’s at the core of the story, but even then, once the basic details are in place, the rest doesn’t matter so much.

This half-in half-out feeling was confirmed by the eventual double, triple, quadruple reveals of the last couple episodes, where the veil slips and you wonder if you’ve just been taken for a ride the whole time.  You – or creator Dennis Kelly – could swear up and down that this was part of the subtext of events, a tie-in to how government deals with people and ideas, and I wouldn’t disagree, but I don’t feel the overall direction of events ends up aligning with that mentality.  If things had continued much beyond six episodes, this could’ve been an ‘The Event’ style letdown of a whole lotta’ bluster for nothin’.  Keeping it short was key.

The music is excellent, and the look of the show of very flat but distinct pop colors spaced effectively between gorgeously deep wide-angle captured sets of blues and greens and browns is absolutely a defining element.  Thankfully, the camera remains static and far enough away to never shove this stuff in your face – our POV sits back and we get to mostly watch the scramble play out before us.

So that’s the bad.  It just has a hard time not turning into a regular TV show.  The good: the characters, while none truly likeable, are all very well realized.  I saw each of them as distinct people, real ones (except our chief weirdos, who are supposed to be nothing but weird, really), and on the whole they behave reasonably when faced with the events before them.  Which are what, you ask, me having blabbed vaguely about vague things for long enough without explaining?  Well – there’s a book called Utopia, and some people are after it, and willing to kill to get it.  It contains a secret which somehow ties in to a Russian Flu that’s suddenly going around and might be totes lethal.  Four nerds – one paranoid dude, one snarky kid, one journalist, one IT guy – meet in a chat room to discuss Utopia for all of its conspiracy funness, and don’t realize that shmibble they’re getting in to when they get their hands on the rarely seen ‘Utopia volume 2’.  The schmibble being their personalities ruined and some killer sent after them to not hesitate in getting Utopia, or finding where Jessica Hyde is.  Who’s Jessica Hyde?  Yeah.

I also give a lot of credit to the writer’s direct handling of the potential of Utopia in episode 4 or 5… some bold questions are posed that, had that been more the focus, would have been a satisfying direction for things, but they end up having to shy away from it in favor of a Scooby Doo ending.   ‘Utopia’ is totally not for everyone – the first episode really pushes the implied violence to make sure you want to be on board – but cool kids will like it ’cause it looks good and is quirky, and the show definitely promotes ‘Lost’ style WTF fanaticism, though it doesn’t have the space to milk it.  Definitely worth watching for its uniqueness, and great look,  but I wonder if it’ll gain or lose value upon a second view.