If you can keep up with new streaming platforms and their flagship shows, Peacock original Brave New World is the latest effort to entice you to a new service. The nine-episode drama—which premieres when NBC’s entry into the streaming wars debuts on July 15—is a loving departure from Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel of the same name, which you may have been assigned to read during some desultory high school summer. The sparknotes: A “savage” outsider disrupts a dystopian future ruled by soothing drugs and biologically determined social classes.
Huxley’s New London is based upon a conveyor belt that mass produces humans—some purposefully genetically engineered to be low-class workers, others coddled to be future elites. Inconvenient emotions—anger, sadness, fear—are dosed with various doses of the drug soma. The populace is kept stimulated with titillating entertainment, dubbed “feelies,” which are more about producing sensations than communicating a story. More often than not, these feelies seem to end in orgies; casual, consequence-free sex is one of the many perks of New London. (A chant from the book: Orgy-porgy / Ford and fun / Kiss the girls and make them One. Surely that last word should be “come”? But it was 1932.)
The new series is a clever modern adaptation, engaging deeply with the source material while dispensing with Huxley’s glaringly racist themes and some of the misogyny, too. Several minor characters are gender- and/or race-swapped—most notably, world controller Mustapha Mond becomes Mustafa Mond, played by Nina Sonsanya, while emotional engineer Helmholtz Watson becomes Wilhelmina, called “Helm,” played by Hannah John-Kamen. Both white male characters are replaced with black women, suggesting immediately a different vision for this particular dystopia. (Don’t worry—there are still orgies.) Another marked departure from the book is the introduction of John the Savage (Alden Ehrenreich), who comes to the story not as the only white man born on an Indian reservation (a plotline that sends 21st century alarm bells ringing in every direction) but rather as a scrappy underling working at the Savage Lands amusement park, where well-connected New Londoners vacation to witness the perverted and backwards customs of history. Rather unlike Huxley’s novel, the series has a sense of humor: Savage Lands devotes one section of the park to the savages’ most cherished holiday, “the annual day of black.” As New Londoners watch, with popcorn, actors re-enact a Black Friday stampede, in all its hair-pulling, box-grabbing, late-capitalist glory.
These fundamental changes turn Brave New World into a different kind of story. Huxley’s novel, portentous, ends firmly on a note of tragedy, casting John the Savage as a Jesus-like figure, ultimately too human for the scientifically refined, bloodless New London. But because that’s boring—and doesn’t make much room for a season two!—this John is a lot less pious and a lot more “buckaroo,” to use the show’s term. He’s still a sensitive romantic attached to his mother Linda (an underused and almost unrecognizable Demi Moore)—but he’s not about to let New London crush his spirit, either. By midseason, he demonstrates an enthusiasm for orgies, parties, and the company of Lenina Crowne (Jessica Brown Findlay), a knockout beta-plus with a curiosity that belies her place in the social order. This puts him in conflict with alpha-plus Bernard Marx (Harry Lloyd), a constantly cringing type who struggles to get Lenina to notice him while he desperately seeks social approval.
The story begins with him and Lenina as the audience’s de facto guides through New London. Lloyd, who I haven’t seen enough of since his turn as Viserys on Game of Thrones, puts so much contradiction and nuance into Bernard’s performance that he becomes pathetic but lovable, a killjoy whose insecurities are writ clear on his face. And if Findlay is the narrative’s resident sexpot—a huge proportion of her scenes are sex scenes, more than any other character—the way Lenina tries to form her own sense of herself, outside of how men like Bernard see her, makes Findlay’s performance a compelling combination of erotic energy and political awakening. (This nuance was probably facilitated by credited intimacy coordinator Ita O’Brien, who also worked on I May Destroy You and Normal People.) When Lenina and John eventually succumb to their attraction for each other, Findlay’s performance contains within it everything from trepidation to inchoate longing. By comparison, Ehrenreich’s John is a much simpler character—perhaps a little too much like Ehrenreich’s previous role as a young Han Solo to bring poignancy to the role.
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Review: Peacock’s Brave New World Puts a Modern Spin on Aldous Huxley - Vanity Fair
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