John Landgraf of FX coined the term “Peak TV” when he counted 400 scripted television shows that year and since then it has only gotten peakier and will explode even more this year with the launch of HBO Max, Peacock, and something called Quibi which apparently you will only be able to watch on your phone. I do not think anyone even bothers to count how many shows are being aired anymore (the best I could find is 1400+). So with so many different options, there are shows for every little niche you can think of.
But watching Utopia Falls, a Canadian import coming to Hulu today, I have to ask, who exactly this show is for. Having watched every episode, the best I can describe this show is “Hunger Games meets Fame”; feel free to put that in your promos Hulu. I just do not know who would see that and think, cool, I have to watch them. At best, there may be a couple people who read that and think, what the fork, that sounds so stupid I have to watch to see if that is what the show really is.
But seriously, Utopia Falls takes place hundreds of years in a dystopian future where a city within a dome has been split up into four sections, Progress, Industry, Nature, and Reform (which seems to be the lowest rank). The dome is to protect them from the poisonous outside world that was turned into a wasteland from endless wars. Then for the past seventy-three years twenty-four exemplars from the sectors are chosen, but instead of a fight to the death, Hunger Games style, they compete in a talent competition, be it dance, singing, or playing a musical instrument. See, I told you, Hunger Games meets Fame. I was not joking.
Like any good dystopian future, everyone wears very boring clothing and hair styles but there has not been any civil unrest in five decades. Of course most of them have weird names but unlike other YA adaptation, these are just dumb, like Tempo, Apollo, Bohdi, Mags, and Sage and their last names are numbers. Then most everyone is hot and ambitiously ethnic with some weird parentage. The vaguely Asian chick has a black and white mother. The Latina has a redhead mother. If it is ever explained how the parentage does not make any biological sense, I missed it.
Though they are currently living in Utopia, as the title suggests, that will not last long. While celebrating their selection as an Exemplar, two happen upon a secret library outside the city limits which houses a library of media from present day that had been long lost. And really, there are very few things more entertaining that watching a bunch of people who clearly were hired for the dancing ability try to act like they have never heard hip-hop before. Oh, and did I mention, the Alexa of this library is voiced by the disembodied voice of Snoop Dogg?
So despite never hearing rap music before, one dude is able to spit verses an hour later. The Exemplars become so versed in modern music, before long they are debating Old School and New School. And yet the person that claims there was no good rap before N.W.A. (umm, I think someone got their old school/new school and East Coast/West Coast debates mixed up) starts rapping The Message less than five. So I really cannot call this show at all good with its paint by numbers dystopian YA trope presented with bad acting, yet I am kind of hoping it gets renewed.
All episodes of Utopia Falls are now streaming on Hulu.
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