Peacock's 'Brave New World' Spoiler Review: It's an updated plot consumed by sex orgies and an all-powerful AI
In the original 'Brave New World', John 'the Savage' retires as a hermit, unable to adjust his Shakespeare-infused Victorian morals with all the free love in the 'New World'. Since then, we've had the sexual revolution and we choose our sexual partners via AI-driven apps.
So, not surprisingly, John the Savage is a lot less prudish about sex in his 2020 avatar, loving "sex with Betas and soma" just like every other New Worlder. Hammering that in, pretty much every episode has a form of this 'Sense 8' type collective orgasmic high experienced by the New Worlders, high on "soma", the mandatory happiness drug to keep everyone's dopamine "levels" up. This drug-fueled connection is everything in a society where everyone is afraid to be alone, conditioned to avoid "solipsism". It is a fun-house mirror reflecting our current 'pornified' society that chases multiple sexual conquests and mind-numbing agents privately while adhering to the principles of monogamy and sobriety, publicly.
In the New World, everyone is beautiful because they are genetically bred, all except the poor Gammas and Epsilons who have no sex and work all day. So in essence, for the elite classes, partners are interchangeable and disposable. However, John with a high ego drive is having none of that as he struts around, an alpha wolf in a den of sheep, "infecting" others with the same millennial need to be special snowflakes.
At the start of his journey, he is asked, "are you a free man, or a washer of cars?", a line meant to be deep but comes across as corny. But it underlines the main conflict of the series — whether to be free and "special" (read individualistic) and damn the consequences or trade that freedom for safety in numbers and numbness. There is a lot made about the "incompatibles" who don't fit in, with each of the main characters exhibiting some form of "deviancy" — be it Lenina, the Beta Plus who acts like an Alpha, Bernard who is an Alpha but acts like a Beta or John himself, the disruptor or "virus" that threatens to destabilize New World's class and power hierarchies.
While the original 'Brave New World' spoke to the inner anxieties around sex drive and morality, the new version tackles external AI algorithms that herd us based on numbers, from our credit scores to our sex lives. More and more facets of our lives and habits are being captured and monitored until we are all nothing more than numbers on a page. All our "specialness" is reduced to programmable algorithms that can anticipate how we will behave, what we will like, and when. It is this modern anxiety of being completely known, with no dark corners of privacy or self left unconcealed or uncommodified, that drives the show.
In the show, the only music that plays is the kind that plays in malls, only with no words (replacing jazz in Huxley's version). There is no art. There is no cinema. Only heightened "designed sensations" aptly called "feelies". Art, that domain of communicating what cannot be communicated, the private revealed in a dance of the seven veils, is non-existent because nothing private or individually sacred exists anymore.
As the music, film, and TV industry goes along the algorithm-driven garden path, it is obvious why the creatives behind 'Brave New World' made the all-knowing, all-giving AI, Indra, the Big Bad — a satire on number-crunching studio execs?
It is a fun premise that makes for an eminently binge-able Season 1. Harry Lloyd as Bernard Marx is possibly the most entertaining, swinging between pathetic and evil, followed by Hannah John-Kamen, who plays the hedonistic "Feelies" auteur, Wilhelmina "Helm" Watson with relish.
The third mention should go to Gary, John's "Gama" manservant, who makes you laugh out loud at least once per appearance. Joseph Morgan is intense in a way that will give you 'Klaus Michaelson' feels. Demi Moore appears for only three episodes, but she shines as the abandoned Beta, who is a good mother in the end despite her "conditioning". Alden Ehrenreich as John, and Jessica Brown Findlay as Lenina Crowne, disappear into their roles, adequate in a way that doesn't break the narrative flow but otherwise unremarkable.
Whether you are a fan of the show will depend entirely on you not taking it very seriously and popping it like another pop culture "soma pill" it was meant to be.
'Brave New World' is available to stream on the newly launched Peacock streaming platform from July 15.