4/27/2023 0 Comments Paranoid tv seriesThe show’s heroes are strangers who meet on the internet by virtue of their shared obsession with an obscure, out-of-print graphic novel, and the audience is asked to believe that these characters never know what the others look like until they meet, I.R.L. In the pilot’s opening scene, the titular comic strip is discovered as a pile of dusty pages rotting away in an abandoned house. “Every time I post something, I get this nervous feeling,” she said, “like, have I given away too much?”Ĭhanneling this digital reticence into “Utopia,” Flynn took her cues from “all those ’70s paranoia thrillers that came out post-Watergate: ‘Parallax View’ and ‘Marathon Man.’”Īs a result, the world these characters occupy can appear anachronistically analog. She’s not very online, for instance she has the requisite Twitter account, but she says she uses it only sporadically, “in streaks,” which is believable if you consider that 25,000 followers seems somewhat low for one of the most recognizable names in contemporary publishing. In “Utopia,” that anxiety has simply mushroom-clouded into a full-blown global conspiracy.įlynn herself is a little paranoid. Though her lens has widened beyond the intimacies of marriage and the home, paranoia and unreliable narration have remained constant threads throughout Flynn’s work. “He was incredibly cool about me getting in there and mucking around in his world,” she added, “which is more than I could say for how I would’ve been if someone had taken ‘Sharp Objects’ and been like, ‘And now I’m going to do anything I want with it, ha ha!’” “I took two lines from Dennis’s original, and everything else I rewrote.” “That’s the only way I could have it become my own, by not constantly looking back,” she said. Kevin Christie, a big pharma executive played by John Cusack) whole cloth. Instead, she approached Kelly’s original as a “beautiful D.N.A.,” watching it once through and then freestyling from there, even creating entirely new characters (like Dr. “I’m not a fan of remaking something just because the original was really cool,” Flynn said in a telephone interview in early September, from her home in Chicago. That “Utopia” is as mischievous and gutsy in spirit as the author herself makes sense - although Flynn adapted the 8 episodes from Dennis Kelly’s 2013-14 British series of the same name, she ultimately made the story all her own. Beneath the dark and twisted novels that have made her a wildly successful author is a lighthearted, thrill-seeking conspiracy theorist with a general distrust of the digital era. Comics-like TV serial might seem out of left field for a novelist best known for writing about “damaged, up women,” as she described it, the series is in many ways more reflective of the real Flynn. Its release during an actual pandemic is coincidental, but the quixotic, larger-than-life tone is exactly what Flynn, who has been working on the story off and on for seven years, envisioned. Keep this in mind as you watch “Utopia,” the pulpy action thriller that marks Flynn’s debut as a television showrunner, after making her name writing psychological page-turners like “Gone Girl” and “Sharp Objects.” Premiering Friday on Amazon, the show is a rollicking, Dickensian adventure story about a troupe of wide-eyed comic book nerds who think a long lost strip contains the keys to saving humanity from an impending deadly virus. Her father, a film professor and an avid comic book collector, would spend weekends taking her to flea markets and garage sales, explaining the various eras and artists she should know, which strip was loosely based on a Ray Bradbury story, and so on. Gillian Flynn grew up surrounded by comics.
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