Extrapolations: Trending Toward Hopelessness

Extracurriculars

It’s not uncommon for cultural works set in the future to pierce the public consciousness. However, if you take away all the futures that tread well-worn ground fertile for action movies¹, there are many fewer examples. There was a brief moment earlier this year, when Extrapolations was released on Apple TV, that it registered in the national conversation, as a drama that took a serious look at the consequences of global climate change as a set of interconnected stories set from 2037-2070. However, the conversation quickly faded for a number of reasons: Apple TV, as a smaller player in the streaming wars, has a harder time making a sustained impact; climate change is not very tidy as a character; and the show was mostly considered not great. Well, dear reader, the bad news is that the critics were right: it’s pretty bad! The good news is that I watched all 8 episodes² so you don’t have to, and I’m here to talk about how it touches on various topics in futures.

The title itself is indicative of one of the biggest problems. Extrapolating current trends isn’t antithetical to the goals of foresight, but it only occupies a tiny piece of the futures cone and doesn’t do much to help the viewer imagine new futures. Even the opening sequence just consists of line charts being extended forward in time. To its credit, the show does a great job visually depicting likely direct effects of climate change (rising temperatures, flooding, wildfires, air pollution, etc). There are a few other things in society that advance alongside climate change (phones shrink until they are just a gem you stick on your temple, drones become more ubiquitous, etc), but lots of things are frozen in time: for example, if AI can easily create video, then video is no longer reliable evidence of events. This may have been intentional to make a climate-stricken future seem more relatable, but it made the show’s vision of the future seem myopic.

Similarly, the show struggles to create because the characters have almost no agency. The show focuses on how wealthy or middle-class Americans³ suffer from climate change and are sad about it but nothing they do makes a difference because of the momentum of events. Blame is placed alternately on the CEO of a megacorporation that profits from the ongoing climate crisis, and on all the ancestors who didn’t stop emitting carbon when they had the chance (hey that’s us!). I understand the framing of “we need to make difficult decisions now, or our descendants will have fewer options”, but scientists have been pulling that “only five years left and then there’s no hope for humanity” line for a while, and it just seems like a science version of ineffective parenting techniques. For example, the show is deeply skeptical or dismissive of future efforts to reverse climate change via geo-engineering or carbon capture, presumably because they would make it so the future doesn’t just hinge on what we do today.

I’m not a TV critic, but there are a lot of ineffective creative decisions. There’s a lot of lecturing the audience, whether in the form of protest speeches, international negotiations, courtroom statements⁴, or characters carefully explaining the stakes to one another; it seems like the creators assume these would be moving or inspirational. The antagonists often rise/sink to the level of Captain Planet villains (especially in episode 1⁵). There are leaps of logic that undermine the immersion and suspension of disbelief: the plot requires what seem to me wild misunderstandings of how basic things like corporate monitoring, DNA identity verification, courtroom and criminal justice proceedings, air traffic control, blockchain, and patents do/would work; the twist in episode 4 hinges on Edward Norton being the only person in a room of government officials who can multiply numbers together, and even he needs paper and pencil for it.

It’s not all bad. The dominant color palette is either a smoggy grey or a smoky orange; showing that our worst weather days might represent normal days in the future is a great way to make that point vivid and visceral. There’s an interesting technology or social twist in most episodes that plausibly depicts emergent ideas⁶ (and also skirts become fashionable for men in the 2060s for some reason).

So, if this is an effective way of creating an image of unabated climate change, but an ineffective way of motivating people to do something about it, what might be a more effective alternative? I am not a successful TV executive, but I can take a shot. These days everyone from Dr Strange to Spiderman to the Daniels is into the multiverse, so maybe instead of loosely connected chapters at various points in the future, show a single set of characters across a wide range of potential future scenarios and allow people to compare the effects of different choices over the next 10 years, with the differences between recurring elements of the stories⁷ doing the “show, don’t tell” heavy lifting⁸. Maybe that would be less dramatic than Meryl Streep as the last whale, but it would give people the chance to think about what world they want their grandchildren to live in, and what they might be willing to change to get there.

1. Killer robots, aliens, and cyberpunk probably cover most of the ground here.

2. Most of them binged while dealing with a bout of COVID, though I’m pretty sure my observations and opinions are sound and not some sort of fever delirium (I wasn’t that sick).

3. The exception is Episode 5, “2059: Nightbirds”, which follows a driver in Mumbai taking a dangerous, high-stakes job. This is by far the best episode of the series, with clear stakes and destination, strong visuals, sympathetic characters, etc. My notes describe it as “pumpin’”, and “maybe even hopeful”.

4. Episode 8 is particularly brutal, as a trial filled with statements and testimony explaining what we saw in the last 7 episodes and why it should make us angry.

5. Complete with the Earth administering retribution via an angry walrus, which I assume is supposed to be some kind of moral lesson but mainly seems like a way to force an ending to the episode.

6. To give highlights, episode 1: Arctic development; episode 2: decoding animal speech; episode 3: elevation becomes a commodity as sea levels rise; episode 4: geo-engineering; episode 5: corporate ownership of seed genetics; episode 6: human surrogates; episode 7: household carbon budgets and digital uploading; episode 8: carbon capture and sequestration.

7. For example, think how much mileage you could get out of a trip to the zoo.

8. This wouldn’t be so different from the way Apple TV handled different views of reality in The Afterparty (though they also used a genre-spanning gimmick to keep it fresh), where the mystery construct was used as a way to encourage close watching.