The product of Eton and Oxford, Huxley had more faith in the elites than the masses, whom he estimated to make up 99.5 percent of the population, and enthused about the potential of eugenics (with some reservations). It often reads like a novel at war with itself, in part because it was written by a man occasionally at war with himself. Much of the power of Brave New World comes from just that tension. On the other, it has a certain undeniable appeal. And what’s the difference between drug-induced happiness and the real thing when you get down to it (to say nothing of all that attachment- and consequence-free sex)? On the one hand, Huxley’s World State takes some worrisome tendencies from the years of its creation to their logical, if nightmarish, extremes, combining the most dehumanizing elements of communism and capitalism in a culture that despises individualism, places all control in the hands of the state, and reveres Henry Ford for inventing the assembly line and Sigmund Freud for demystifying the soul (even though it sometimes confuses the two men). Which speaks to the book’s other tricky element: Brave New World’s 600-years-in-the-future society-one that’s banned monogamy and family, done its best to erase history, mandates the use the euphoria-inducing drug Soma, and uses a combination of genetic engineering and brainwashing to create a rigid caste system-is quite functional, maybe even desirable. That’s partly because much of the novel is short on incident and long on ideas, effectively climaxing with one character arguing why the dystopia of New London, however awful in its implications, makes sense as the only recourse against humanity’s excesses. We’re Going to Run Out of TV The Ringer Guide to Streaming in July Adapting it, on the other hand, proves far trickier. A glossy take on the material filled with TV-MA-friendly amounts of explosive violence and tightly choreographed orgies, it proves that Huxley’s book can be easily mined for concepts and incidents. Instead, it’s coming to us once again as an ongoing series, one of the flagships of Peacock, NBC’s new streaming service (though this Brave New World was developed first for Syfy then for USA before finding its current home). Then, for a few years in the late ’00s, Brave New World seemed likely to become a feature film starring Leonardo DiCaprio and directed by Ridley Scott.
#A brave new world tv show movie
(What would have been the four-hour version, running just over three hours without commercials, eventually aired on BBC and is now the easiest cut to find.) The network returned to Huxley’s World State again in 1998, with a TV movie starring Peter Gallagher and Leonard Nimoy. A version of it, anyway-the miniseries had shrunk from six, to four, then finally three hours and been reduced to a TV movie. NBC found out that adapting Brave New World was tricky indeed-and not for the last time.Īfter pulling Brave New World from its schedule several times, NBC finally aired it in March 1980. And perhaps inspired by the Star Wars–stoked interest in all things science fiction, she also commissioned an adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s 1932 dystopian landmark Brave New World-despite it being, as a profile of Barkley described at the time, “a tricky property everyone in Hollywood had been afraid of.” Starring 2001: A Space Odyssey’s Keir Dullea and Harold and Maude’s Bud Cort, it was set to debut in 1979 and run for six hours across several nights. By 1978, she’d locked down the rights to James Michener’s Centennial, recruited Natalie Wood for a six-part adaptation of From Here to Eternity, and picked up James Clavell’s Shogun for a lavish production destined to become a ratings sensation in 1980. In the back half of the 1970s, when miniseries adaptations like Rich Man, Poor Man and Roots became runaway hits, a great book could make or break a TV career-so the influential NBC producer Deanne Barkley scooped up as many great books as she could.
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