Review: ‘Brave New World’ Strikes Surprisingly Right-Wing Stance

Non-stop drug-taking, dance-party orgies, and unquestioning deference to authority have always worked for me, but what if they were mandatory? Brave New World’s vision of a chemically smoothed future society stripped of real feelings, intimacy, and (consequently) of genuine happiness continues to resound as loudly as ever, so it’s a good time to take another crack at filming it.

Brave New World, an hour-long series whose first nine episodes just debuted on Peacock, the new streaming service from NBC Universal, is temperamentally so right-wing that I wish it were better. As it is, the series (created by David Wiener, whose last show was Homecoming) is merely tolerable, hampered by a lead-you-around-by-the-nose quality that is more in keeping with the network-TV ethos than with top-shelf cable drama. The writing is mostly superficial, albeit with some clever satiric touches. The characters are flat.

About the Author

Kyle Smith

Kyle Smith is the film critic for the Wall Street Journal.

Non-stop drug-taking, dance-party orgies, and unquestioning deference to authority have always worked for me, but what if they were mandatory? Brave New World’s vision of a chemically smoothed future society stripped of real feelings, intimacy, and (consequently) of genuine happiness continues to resound as loudly as ever, so it’s a good time to take another crack at filming it.

Brave New World, an hour-long series whose first nine episodes just debuted on Peacock, the new streaming service from NBC Universal, is temperamentally so right-wing that I wish it were better. As it is, the series (created by David Wiener, whose last show was Homecoming) is merely tolerable, hampered by a lead-you-around-by-the-nose quality that is more in keeping with the network-TV ethos than with top-shelf cable drama. The writing is mostly superficial, albeit with some clever satiric touches. The characters are flat.