Eliana Willis

Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel “Brave New World” famously imagined a future society in which people were enslaved to pleasure. The future’s diversions were so absorbing that they commanded attention over everything else.If only you could say that about its latest TV adaptation. Dull, generic and padded, the series, one of the premiere offerings for NBCUniversal’s Peacock streaming service on Wednesday, transmutes a provocative warning into a vision of a sci-fi world that feels neither brave nor new.The premise, as in so many new series based on pre-existing intellectual property, is essentially that of the novel, but stretched out. We arrive in New London, the gleaming citadel of a hedonistic society that has snuffed out discontent with three rules — “No privacy, no family, no monogamy” — and an endless supply of soma, a feel-good drug dispensed like Pez.The citizens, stratified into castes labeled “Alpha,” “Beta” and so on, shrug off the class inequities with the help of pills, orgies and “feelies,” tactile entertainments in which a populace mostly alienated from physical struggle can experience virtual thrills like getting punched in the face.Outside the city, “savages” still practice primitive rites like having babies biologically, and perform at theme parks for the amusement of their safariing betters. (“Brave New World” shares with “Westworld” a faith in the future health of the live-amusements industry.)Bernard (Harry Lloyd), a supercilious Alpha, strikes up a friendship with Lenina (Jessica Brown Findlay), a Beta whom he’s investigated for having sex too often with the same man — a transgression of “solipsism” against the “social body,” in which “everyone belongs to everyone else.” After a getaway to the Savage Lands adventure park goes awry, they return to New London with a fugitive native, John (Alden Ehrenreich), whose defiant authenticity makes him a subject of fascination.That John will threaten the complacency of New London by teaching its citizens how to feel is no surprise. “Brave New World,” while an enduring tale, was also a product of a time concerned with totalitarianism and threats to the individual. The job of any adaptation is to retain the DNA of the original while mutating it to the times, and that’s where this version fails.“Brave New World” was originally developed for NBCUniversal’s Syfy channel, then for USA, and as in some of those networks’ less-accomplished series, its future feels off-the-rack. It’s one of those dystopias in which the prosperous locations vaguely resemble the World Trade Center Oculus and the impoverished zones are strewn with fires burning in oil drums. Its main distinction from basic-cable fare is the copious nudity in the orgies, which are nonetheless antiseptic and unsexy, like a fancy cologne ad.And this world is populated with flat characters. Demi Moore has little to do as John’s drunk, idle mother, and the antagonists back in New London — suspicious of John’s popularity and of Bernard’s interest in him — are one-note sneering technocrats.The series doesn’t lack for dystopian pedigrees. The showrunner, David Wiener, hails from Amazon’s “Homecoming” and it shares a director, Owen Harris, with “Black Mirror.” But it doesn’t compare well with either predecessor, each of which better explored the dangers of digitally and biologically fine-tuning humanity.The one area in which this “World” is reimagined to relate to 2020 is its focus on social technology. The denizens of New London are equipped with eye implants that not only apply a digital overlay to everything they see but connect them to a universal network, in which they can they can see through the eyes of anyone else logged on to the system. It’s the ultimate overshare: Facebook for your face.This builds on Huxley’s original idea of an anti-individualist society. But more thought seems to have gone into the design of the optical device (a lens with a nerve-like wire, unsettling for those of us who don’t even like putting contacts in) than to what led this society to fetishize radical openness.In theory, “Brave New World” is ripe for a newly relevant update. After the 2016 election, there was renewed interest in George Orwell’s “1984,” with its warnings about totalitarian politics and language. But as the media critic Neil Postman wrote in his 1985 fire alarm “Amusing Ourselves to Death” (revivified after that same election), the “Huxleyan warning” was in many ways more relevant to Western culture, in which the populace was often seduced by entertainments rather than bludgeoned by blunt force.This speaks to 2020 — to a point. One difference is how our society’s versions of soma — Twitter, YouTube algorithms — as often seek to inflame as to pacify us. (The pacification, maybe, comes more from the surfeit of streaming-TV services that Peacock is adding to.) If you’re not going to delve into what Huxley has to say to a future nearly a century later, why bother making another adaptation?There are a few, welcome flashes of life. Lloyd gives Bernard a pitiable desperation as he comes to find his accustomed life more and more empty. (“Everybody’s happy unless they choose not to be!” he tells himself, crankily popping a soma.) And by late in the season, the series starts to loosen up and have dark-humored fun with its premise.But it’s not enough to be worth the wait. For the most part, we’re left with an unsexy portrait of decadence, a thriller without thrills, a prescription that’s less soma than Sominex. More

Season 1, Episode 4: ‘Chapter Four’There’s a new victim in the Charlie Dodson murder case: his mother’s lawyer. In a concluding scene that colors everything that’s gone before it, this episode of “Perry Mason” ends with the apparent suicide of the debonair defense attorney E.B. Jonathan. (I say “apparent” only because we haven’t yet seen a dead body; years of prestige-television watching have taught me not to count my chickens before they’ve died on-screen.)Plagued by the vicissitudes of old age, irretrievably deep in debt, constantly one step behind his legal opponents, and threatened with the ruin of his reputation by a district attorney who’s willing to blackmail him to force his client to plead guilty, Jonathan just can’t take it anymore. He gets dressed, sets up his hummingbird feeder, then fills his closed kitchen full of gas fumes.There will be no more humiliating defeats, no more deflating setbacks, no more embarrassing interviews with the press, no dragging his name through the mud, no prosecuting him over financial misconduct involving old clients. He has filed his own verdict on himself, and that will be the last word.If Jonathan’s death hits harder than you’d expect for a character we’ve only known for four episodes, the credit must go to an earlier scene between Jonathan and his wrongfully charged client, Emily Dodson. Jonathan visits her in jail, ostensibly to persuade her to cop a plea in order to spare him District Attorney Barnes’s promised retaliation. But the more he talks, the more he seems to be talking himself out of it, not talking her into it.As the director, Deniz Gamze Ergüven, alternates between tight close-ups on their tear-streaked faces, we watch Jonathan break down over the injustice he’s attempting to inflict on this innocent woman. And in the end, he can’t go through with it. If he committed suicide because he’d run out of options, it’s to his credit that he ruled out the sleaziest option available to him on his own.I’m not sure either party would agree, but I see a connection between what E.B. goes through in this episode and what happens to Emily Dodson’s most ardent supporter, Sister Alice. Recovering from the epileptic seizure she suffered onstage, Alice is under pressure from her practically minded mother Birdy, the conservative church elders and a contingent of outraged congregants — including a family of apparent well-wishers who dump a box full of live snakes onto her — to dismiss her promise to raise little Charlie Dodson from the dead as a symptom of her illness, not a command from God.“You think I want this, Mama?” she asks at one point, exhausted. “You think I want God in my head?”But just as E.B. buckled when the time came to coach Emily Dodson into accepting 20 years in prison for a crime she didn’t commit, Sister Alice can’t contradict what her heart — her God — is telling her to do. In the middle of an address intended to squash the controversy, she goes off-script and promises to resurrect Charlie, on Easter Sunday no less. When the cries of “Blasphemer!” start ringing out, the elders are chanting right along with the crowd.By comparison, the show’s title character has it relatively easy this week. It’s true that he gets beaten up by Chubby Carmichael (Bobby Gutierrez), the famous actor he caught in the act. But other than that, it’s smooth sailing for the private dick and his sidekick Pete Strickland. Using flagrantly illegal tactics, they relocate the dead body of the kidnapper George Gannon to a sand trap in a local golf course, guaranteeing that their friendly mortician Virgil will get to perform an autopsy. Unlike the previous, bowdlerized examination, this one will prove that Gannon was the victim of murder rather than suicide.A subsequent visit to the buildings where the Dodsons and the kidnappers each holed up to await the ransom handoff provides Perry with another vital clue. One of the buildings is connected via a skyway to an Elks Lodge, to which the kidnapping plot’s missing “fourth man,” the crooked and murderous Sgt. Ennis, belongs. Apparently feeling his oats, Perry walks right over and lets Ennis know he’s been found out. It’s a power move from a guy who, for all his shrewdness and doggedness, rarely projects power of any kind. (Except perhaps in his bedroom romps with Lupe, who still finds time post-coitus to gently razz him for his beating-incurred bruises and his unwillingness to sell her his family farm.)Indeed, Perry is such a bruised soul that I’m dreading his reaction to the death of E.B., an avuncular if not outright fatherly figure for Mason ever since the private detective was a little boy. I have a feeling it will cause him to redouble his efforts to clear Emily Dodson’s name, and probably drive him into more foolhardy encounters with the police, about whom the show maintains warranted skepticism.“Cops investigating cops? That’s a trip for biscuits,” E.B. says at one point.Which leads me to my final point about this episode: E.B. Jonathan’s way with words. Aging, he tells Perry at one point, is a matter of finding “a nose hair half the length of your arm, half your friends in the cemetery and a million strangers on the street.” Truth, he says, “won’t move wind chimes.” George Gannon’s faked suicide note? “Donkey dust.”Perhaps that’s the most chilling thing about his suicide: His cynicism sounds persuasive, his despair hard-earned. If Perry Mason ever follows in his mentor’s footsteps — to say nothing of previous versions of the character — and becomes a defense attorney, I wonder whether his fierce commitment to uncovering the truth will leave him, too, feeling like a man out of step with the world.From the case files:Based on the final scene of the episode, this pleasure will be a fleeting one, but man oh man, what a treat to watch John Lithgow and Stephen Root act together. At one point during one of their tête-à-têtes their characters both just chuckle at each other, each of them confident that they’ve bested the other. The actors seem to be having so much fun that it’s contagious — I chuckled right along with them.It’s handled so gently that calling attention to it seems melodramatic somehow, but we learn via a visit to the boardinghouse where she lives that Jonathan’s legal secretary, Della Street, is a lesbian. Given the strictures of the time period, this is one secret I hope stays kept.Sgt. Ennis, the series’s chief antagonist thus far, has a daughter afflicted with polio. This doesn’t make him any less of a bad person, but it does make him a more interesting character.My plea to mystery-driven television shows: Can we do away with the convention of the “conspiracy wall,” where the investigators pins up all the notes, clues and newspaper clippings as they try to put together the pieces of the puzzle? More

Season 1, Episode 4: ‘Chapter Four’There’s a new victim in the Charlie Dodson murder case: his mother’s lawyer. In a concluding scene that colors everything that’s gone before it, this episode of “Perry Mason” ends with the apparent suicide of the debonair defense attorney E.B. Jonathan. (I say “apparent” only because we haven’t yet seen a dead body; years of prestige-television watching have taught me not to count my chickens before they’ve died on-screen.)Plagued by the vicissitudes of old age, irretrievably deep in debt, constantly one step behind his legal opponents, and threatened with the ruin of his reputation by a district attorney who’s willing to blackmail him to force his client to plead guilty, Jonathan just can’t take it anymore. He gets dressed, sets up his hummingbird feeder, then fills his closed kitchen full of gas fumes.There will be no more humiliating defeats, no more deflating setbacks, no more embarrassing interviews with the press, no dragging his name through the mud, no prosecuting him over financial misconduct involving old clients. He has filed his own verdict on himself, and that will be the last word.If Jonathan’s death hits harder than you’d expect for a character we’ve only known for four episodes, the credit must go to an earlier scene between Jonathan and his wrongfully charged client, Emily Dodson. Jonathan visits her in jail, ostensibly to persuade her to cop a plea in order to spare him District Attorney Barnes’s promised retaliation. But the more he talks, the more he seems to be talking himself out of it, not talking her into it.As the director, Deniz Gamze Ergüven, alternates between tight close-ups on their tear-streaked faces, we watch Jonathan break down over the injustice he’s attempting to inflict on this innocent woman. And in the end, he can’t go through with it. If he committed suicide because he’d run out of options, it’s to his credit that he ruled out the sleaziest option available to him on his own.I’m not sure either party would agree, but I see a connection between what E.B. goes through in this episode and what happens to Emily Dodson’s most ardent supporter, Sister Alice. Recovering from the epileptic seizure she suffered onstage, Alice is under pressure from her practically minded mother Birdy, the conservative church elders and a contingent of outraged congregants — including a family of apparent well-wishers who dump a box full of live snakes onto her — to dismiss her promise to raise little Charlie Dodson from the dead as a symptom of her illness, not a command from God.“You think I want this, Mama?” she asks at one point, exhausted. “You think I want God in my head?”But just as E.B. buckled when the time came to coach Emily Dodson into accepting 20 years in prison for a crime she didn’t commit, Sister Alice can’t contradict what her heart — her God — is telling her to do. In the middle of an address intended to squash the controversy, she goes off-script and promises to resurrect Charlie, on Easter Sunday no less. When the cries of “Blasphemer!” start ringing out, the elders are chanting right along with the crowd.By comparison, the show’s title character has it relatively easy this week. It’s true that he gets beaten up by Chubby Carmichael (Bobby Gutierrez), the famous actor he caught in the act. But other than that, it’s smooth sailing for the private dick and his sidekick Pete Strickland. Using flagrantly illegal tactics, they relocate the dead body of the kidnapper George Gannon to a sand trap in a local golf course, guaranteeing that their friendly mortician Virgil will get to perform an autopsy. Unlike the previous, bowdlerized examination, this one will prove that Gannon was the victim of murder rather than suicide.A subsequent visit to the buildings where the Dodsons and the kidnappers each holed up to await the ransom handoff provides Perry with another vital clue. One of the buildings is connected via a skyway to an Elks Lodge, to which the kidnapping plot’s missing “fourth man,” the crooked and murderous Sgt. Ennis, belongs. Apparently feeling his oats, Perry walks right over and lets Ennis know he’s been found out. It’s a power move from a guy who, for all his shrewdness and doggedness, rarely projects power of any kind. (Except perhaps in his bedroom romps with Lupe, who still finds time post-coitus to gently razz him for his beating-incurred bruises and his unwillingness to sell her his family farm.)Indeed, Perry is such a bruised soul that I’m dreading his reaction to the death of E.B., an avuncular if not outright fatherly figure for Mason ever since the private detective was a little boy. I have a feeling it will cause him to redouble his efforts to clear Emily Dodson’s name, and probably drive him into more foolhardy encounters with the police, about whom the show maintains warranted skepticism.“Cops investigating cops? That’s a trip for biscuits,” E.B. says at one point.Which leads me to my final point about this episode: E.B. Jonathan’s way with words. Aging, he tells Perry at one point, is a matter of finding “a nose hair half the length of your arm, half your friends in the cemetery and a million strangers on the street.” Truth, he says, “won’t move wind chimes.” George Gannon’s faked suicide note? “Donkey dust.”Perhaps that’s the most chilling thing about his suicide: His cynicism sounds persuasive, his despair hard-earned. If Perry Mason ever follows in his mentor’s footsteps — to say nothing of previous versions of the character — and becomes a defense attorney, I wonder whether his fierce commitment to uncovering the truth will leave him, too, feeling like a man out of step with the world.From the case files:Based on the final scene of the episode, this pleasure will be a fleeting one, but man oh man, what a treat to watch John Lithgow and Stephen Root act together. At one point during one of their tête-à-têtes their characters both just chuckle at each other, each of them confident that they’ve bested the other. The actors seem to be having so much fun that it’s contagious — I chuckled right along with them.It’s handled so gently that calling attention to it seems melodramatic somehow, but we learn via a visit to the boardinghouse where she lives that Jonathan’s legal secretary, Della Street, is a lesbian. Given the strictures of the time period, this is one secret I hope stays kept.Sgt. Ennis, the series’s chief antagonist thus far, has a daughter afflicted with polio. This doesn’t make him any less of a bad person, but it does make him a more interesting character.My plea to mystery-driven television shows: Can we do away with the convention of the “conspiracy wall,” where the investigators pins up all the notes, clues and newspaper clippings as they try to put together the pieces of the puzzle? More