Extrapolations
Apple TV+ | ★★★✩✩

Marshall McLuhan’s statement “The medium is the message” is a call to not ignore specific dynamics of different methods of communication.

So if you do have a specific message you’re trying to get out there, at the very least you had better respect that medium.

And as television is ultimately a tool for storytelling, especially in its episodic format, even if your message is pretty darn important, like say, saving the world, story must still come first. Even Jesus understood that.

Extrapolations Photo 010201 (2)

Meryl Streep (FX Network)

Instead, Extrapolations commits the critical error of instead making the message the story. Which isn’t to say the missive is in itself uninteresting: detailing the different effects that climate change will most likely have on humanity over the next half-century.

Over its eight episodes, each at a critical moment on the timeline, wildfires spread, water shortages lead to mass migration, sea levels cause flooding, and species die out. Not humans though, as we tenaciously cling on, using technology to counter as best we can.

But can the damage be undone? And how much suffering is a result of profit?
So, interesting, yes, but entertaining, not really.

Scott Z. Burns, writer of The Bourne Ultimatum, obviously does know how to entertain, he even knows how to make a point as he did with the prophetic pandemic thriller Contagion, but here as creator, writer, even director of some of the episodes, coherency is wrongly sacrificed to cogency, practicalities of storytelling to preachiness.

Like that last sentence, it’s somewhat of a convoluted mess.

There’s ostensibly a through line, with certain characters re-emerging, unfortunately the most annoying ones, including a newly-ordained rabbi in Tel Aviv, in later years the leader of a sinking shul in flooded Miami, whose hammy acting and clichéd religiosity reminds me of a rabbi officiating at a wedding for a couple they’ve just met.

There is a fun bat mitzvah speech though, serving as a warning that if your daughter’s about to be a teenager, perhaps that’s not the best time to leave your wife.

Maybe the most frustrating thing is the abounding talent aboard. There are a boatload of truly great actors, from award winners such as Meryl Streep and Marion Cotillard to lesser-known indy breakouts Tahar Rahim and Adarsh Gourav.

The latter, from The White Tiger, stars in the best episode of the series, as stolen seeds are transported through a drought-ridden India.

Breaking out from a somewhat western bubble, and from the rest of the series, here we see the gritty and awful results for the majority of the population as the planet warms up just a few degrees.

There’s a lot of money sloshing about, as you’d expect from prestigious Apple TV+, most evidently spent on well-thought-out technological upgrades that in turn save and enslave us. And there’s a lot of passion.

And a very knowing joke about Kanye. If only it had spent less time trying to save us then, and more time saving itself.