Amazon's UTOPIA: Full Comic-Con Panel and Teaser Trailer
One of my favorite things at Comic-Con is randomly attending a panel and discovering a great new series. It usually happens when I’m in Ballroom 20 or Room 6BCF waiting for the panel I actually planned to see/need to cover, and suddenly I have a new favorite show. Obviously, things aren’t the same this year due to the whole global pandemic thing, but I did go into the Utopia panel knowing almost nothing about it, and it is for sure in the running for my favorite new thing at the Con.
Utopia is a new show coming to Amazon Prime this fall, and it looks good. It is adapted by writer and executive producer Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl, Widows) from a British TV series. Flynn has been trying to get this adaptation off the ground for seven years, and she has finally done it. The series is described as: “A twisted, eight-episode thriller about a group of young comic fans who discover the conspiracy in a graphic novel is real, and embark on a high-stakes adventure to save humanity from the end of the world.”
The series stars John Cusack, Rainn Wilson, Sasha Lane, Ashleigh Lathrop, Dany Byrd, Desmin Borges, Javon “Wanna” Walton, and Jessica Rothe, who all joined Flynn in a virtual Comic-Con panel moderated by Entertainment Weekly’s Christian Holub. Some of the highlights:
Flynn discussed why she was so invested in the series and the changes she wanted to make to it. She said that working on (the fantastic) Widows with director Steve McQueen, itself a remake of a British series, they were focused not just on honoring the source material, but changing it and making it their own, because if you don’t have anything new to say, what is even the point of the remake? She said the tone and look of the original were very “poppy” and graphic novel influenced, and she wanted to “make it American but also gritty and dirty and nasty.” She was very heavily influenced by 1970s paranoia thrillers, which I am all about. She also said Cusack’s character, some kind of scientist billionaire, was not present in the original series but felt necessary to the American version.
Cusack said he was given six or seven episode scripts and he read them all in one go and signed on immediately because the writing was so good.
Aside from the very spare description of the show, it sounds like a group of people obsessed with a mysterious comic book called Utopia who have interacted extensively online meet for the first time in person at a Comic-Con and go on a quest together to find copies of the comics, believing they are the key to transforming the world. There is also a real life conspiracy, somehow connected to the comics, that involves Cusack’s company and, maybe indirectly, Wilson’s character, Michael Stearns, who is a much less successful scientist at a small university. Somehow key to all of this is a woman named Jessica Hyde, played by Lane, who describes her as “like a feral cat,” who is seeking her own answers.
An element of the series that I am very intrigued by is the comic books themselves, which feature art by João Ruas, who worked closely with Flynn to achieve a specific look and to include the Easter eggs and clues that spur the “nerds” onward.
For more information on the story and characters, you can watch the full panel below, and the teaser trailer is below that. Utopia premieres September 7 on Amazon Prime video.