Utopia – The Paranoia That Became Prophecy
Utopia came across as more than just another series; it arrived as a riddle, wrapped in neon chaos and bloodstained pages. Part dystopian thriller, part black comedy, the show’s unnerving blend of genres made audiences lean towards the screen to decipher its every frame. The British original version became a cult phenomenon between its 2013 to 2014 airing and its later American remake only contributed to the fascination. The question propelling it all was: what if the conspiracy wasn’t fiction?
Nevertheless, the enchanting visuals and the scathing humor don’t explain Utopia’s compulsive, psychological core. The phenomenon was the confluence of real fear, obsession, and unsettling prophetic insight that became the pretext to the vast universe of fan and critical theories, even involving the cast. The misplaced fictional conspiracy and the real world anxieties of Utopia are unnervingly aligned more than ever, today.
The Comic Adaptation’s Journey
The crux of Utopia focuses on strangers who learn that a cult graphic novel, The Utopia Experiments, contains details of a chilling government scheme to manufacture a pandemic. The curiosity of these strangers transitions into a life-or-death situation when a secret organization, ‘The Network’, starts hunting them. The assortment of misfits, rogues, and idealists that form this ‘team’ suffer a laced moral paradox as they come to learn of the depths to which life is being altered for the so-called “greater good.”
Utopia’s creator, Dennis Kelly, unleashed the absurd and the chilling through the “sweetly” violent, cacophonic score that painted “dread” as something to be savored. Greene Hyde became an immortal myth of the series. “Mother, Avenger, Victim,” portrayed with chilling grace by Fiona O’Shaughnessy, is an assassin to whom fans direct their cult worship. The whisper, “Where is Jessica Hyde?” is a prayer of sorts that lingers.
The intelligence of the show is what keeps the fans ruminating. And, unlike the bold style of most creators, Utopia’s Kelly chose to suggest, “trust no one.” Fans created theories that expanded the narrative and concept beyond what even Kelly imagined.
The Internet Searched For Secret Meanings
When Utopia first streamed, fans created forums and frantically posted theories about the show. One theory argued that the comic included in Utopia Experiments was based off of real classified documents and the creators of the show were “testing” the waters to see how the audience would react to such documents. One fan theory about Jessica Hyde proposed that she was not entirely human, but rather a lab-grown hybrid, a “utopia prototype” made to bear both the cure and the chaos.
The announcement of an American remake in 2020 reignited speculation of all kinds. Especially on social media, comments about the show having “predicted the pandemic” became rampant, due to its storyline on controlling the population through viral outbreaks. Utopia’s uncanny timing — premiering during the global COVID-19 crisis — made people believe it was a harbinger of fiction. Many Reddit users examined every detail and some claimed the show’s cancellation was part of “a bigger cover-up,” suggesting the show’s critics were in on it all.
Dennis Kelly was amused by the attention. He claimed “People see patterns where they want to see them,” and that “That’s what the show is about, really — how conspiracy makes us feel powerful, even when we’re helpless.”
Fiona O’Shaughnessy, who played Jessica Hyde, seemed to feel the most impact by the show’s controversial subject. Somewhat alarmingly, she said that people would come up to her and say, “You know too much,” before whispering. O’Shaughnessy was, of course, joking, but she did say that Utopia stuck to her in an unnerving way — “like static,” she described it.
What Could Have Been: The Lost Season
Utopia’s fans are still broken-hearted that the series did not get a proper conclusion. The British series Utopia ended on a cliffhanger, where the surviving characters debated the issue of whether to “save” humanity through forced sterilization, a profound moral issue that could have fueled a third season.
Kelly had written drafts, one of which leaked, on the continuation. In one, Jessica Hyde confronts the architect of “The Network,” who, in a shocking twist, turns out to be her father. The narrative was to further complicate the definition of hero and villain in that Jessica was to inherit control of the very structure system that she was to destroy.
However, Channel 4 pulled the funding and creative disagreement on the project. The response was devastating, with online petitions for revival and conspiracy-loving corners of the internet claiming the cancellation was “intentional” because the show had hit too closely to the truth.
During a BBC radio interview, Kelly addressed the speculation with a smirk: “If a covert government body were to shut us down, I’d hope they’d send a note of appreciation.”
The Shadow of the Remake and Its Real-World Echo
When Gillian Flynn, the author of Gone Girl, took on the 2020 Amazon Prime remake, expectations were high. With a cast featuring John Cusack, Sasha Lane, and Rainn Wilson, there was promise of a new interpretation of the story’s dark humor and moral complexity.
But there are times when the timing of a release can be unfortunate. The show was released during a time when the world was in the middle of a pandemic. The plot, which centered on a deadly virus engineered for population control, became uncomfortably real. Audiences, instead of relishing with the paranoia, found it quite dangerous to their health.
Some reviewers claimed the show was designed to scare audiences, while others found it eerily prophetic. Flynn’s admission in interviews was that it was “a weird time to release a story about a virus” and that it had been written before the pandemic. The resemblance, however, was impossible to deny.
To him, the role appeared forebodingly prophetic. He admitted to Entertainment Weekly, “For us, it felt like we were living inside the show. The world is arguing about science, about control, about truth. We were doing fiction, but the world is doing the same thing.”
Making Utopia wasn’t straightforward despite its visual boldness. Achieving the show’s dominant color scheme of saturated yellow and greens required careful grading that, ironically, took longer than photography. To best articulate the experience she aimed to induce in the viewer, cinematographer Ole Bratt Birkeland stated, “dazzled and sick at the same time.”
Inspiration for the violence in the show became a central theme for critique. The actors were so affected by violent scenes that they required time to decompress. In Season 1, Fiona O’Shaughnessy referred to the interrogation sequence as, “emotionally brutal.” She explained that to build tension, the director would have them rehearse in silence for an hour before the first take.
Unbeknownst to fans, the now celebrated soundtrack by Cristobal Tapia de Veer was almost turned down.
Some stated it was “too odd”, but Kelly was a defender of the madness approach, “And that’s exactly what Utopia needed.” Later, the music would become one of the most identifiable features of the show, frequently appearing in fan edits and conspiracy videos. For the subscribers of the original Utopia series, it was sheer madness.
When Fiction Refuses to Die
Still to this day in the decade, Utopia refuses to die. The fan art, the podcasts, and the Reddit discussions all continue to nourish it. People in the discourse continue to ask, was Jessica Hyde a savior or a destroyer?, and did “The Network” really end or just evolved?
The show pointed to something primal, that losing one’s fate to be controlled by powerful people somewhere, and thus a season became a series, a series to a counter- series. To a society shaped by dread, this series became a mirror. It became a mirror to our collective paranoia. It was a repository of collective dread shaped by Utopia.
Dennis Kelly once said, “The scariest conspiracies aren’t the ones that are true — they’re the ones that make us stop trusting everything else.”
And that perhaps is the lasting genius of Utopia; not that it revealed secret after secret, but that it made us ask, who is really telling the story.