Amazon have bankrolled a shiny new version of Channel 4’s sleeper hit, penned by Gone Girl’s Gillian Flynn. But though its pandemic plot feels prescient, it’s a damp squib of a series
The new version of Utopia has been long awaited, or at least long-talked about. The original Channel 4 series, which aired between 2013 and 2014, was a classic piece of cult British telly: fresh, unsettling and instantly recognisable as the sort of show America inevitably would, and almost certainly shouldn’t, remake. David Fincher got a long way into planning his reimagining before it was dumped for fear of it costing too much. Now Amazon has bankrolled it, without Fincher but with his Gone Girl collaborator Gillian Flynn doing the scripts. If you reflexively dismissed the whole idea of telling the story again, you needn’t rush to reconsider.
As before, a gang of bright young-adult misfits, brought together by their belief that a comic book of uncertain authorship could be more than just a work of fiction, are proved right when an unpublished sequel comes to light. As assassins target both the super-fans and anyone else who shows an interest in Utopia, the gang end up living new lives on the run – forced to unpick the book’s mystery and save the world themselves, as they’re faced with an enemy that transcends the usual rules and safety nets.
