Brave New World

The new series is a clever modern adaptation, engaging deeply with the source material while dispensing with Huxley’s glaringly racist themes and some of the misogyny, too.

Though the “Westworld” parallel applies to the affluent creeps-exploiting-the-poor in an amusement park narrative, “Brave New World” is much more rewarding to watch. Attention-getting scenes of good-looking people having orgies aside, “Brave New World” benefits from a dark wit -- which the grimly self-important “Westworld” has always lacked -- and which keeps it watchable.

The plot devolves a bit as it builds to an overcomplicated finale, and Ehrenreich is a bit of a blank spot, rightfully refusing to carry John with a pure protagonist’s swagger, but without finding the charisma we know he’s got during key scenes. Still, Season 1 is an emotionally intelligent thriller, and it looks damn good to boot.

It is a series well aware of its purpose as a confectionery gateway to synthetic emotion. As long as you're not expecting much longstanding value beyond that, you'll probably be happy with it.

With its small cast and heavy reliance on CGI, Brave New World has the look and feel of a modestly-priced Syfy miniseries. It will appeal strongly to some but not to most.

“Brave New World” begins as mostly serious and dystopian, but by episode four there’s a shift in tone. Whether by showrunner David Weiner’s design or network notes, the show lightens up, allowing for more moments of dark humor but also some weird character turns.

This isn’t a slow-burn Netflix drama with all the big plot points lurking in the finale; there are frequent, cheesy, surprising deaths. By the time the romantic triangle heats up, Brave New World has successfully put the “soap” back in “dystopia.”

Interesting looking and provocative in its themes (updating the 1932 book for modern consumption), "Brave New World" starts out with considerable promise and doesn't end nearly as well; still, at least the show feels big, strange and slightly different.

The cast is excellent, the writing superior and the direction, too. ... But this "World" does suffer from lack of scale, or at least reduction in scale. This could easily be a Syfy series as well as a Peacock one. It doesn't soar off the screen to wow you, or shock you.

For all its group sex and pill-popping, this adaptation doesn’t take many risks. It’s a cautious old world, and Aldous Huxley would surely have been disappointed.

It is attractive and, at points, even compelling TV; the adaptation is neither too close nor too far from the original source material; and at major twists in the plot, it did make me curious about what would happen next. It’s not at all exciting or innovative, though, and, especially later in the series, several of the major plot developments seem held together mostly with abstract CGI visuals and overly on-the-nose board-game metaphors.

Frequently obvious, but nicely designed and acted, with a thoughtful Nina Sosanya a welcome presence as the woman at the top.

The show only begins to break away from its inspirations in its final hour, when storytellers and characters alike begin to wonder if they can’t choose something else, something more. Until then, Brave New World is caught in a feedback loop of references, one that only occasionally resonates with a culture in the midst of challenging systems, unseen and otherwise.

Bent, diluted, and deluded are all good ways to describe this take on Brave New World.

The main problem is that the stakes just feel too low. Nothing is really on the line until around eight hours in, and the story doesn’t really go anywhere that isn’t largely predictable.

As it unfolds, “Brave New World” fits only the most nebulous sense of the word “interesting,” with its most relevant commentary left behind in the Savage Lands. Where Peacock could use a big bang, the series mostly just manages to look like plain old cable TV.

The series looks gorgeous, and expensive, even if its sci-fi brutalist aesthetic is a bit generic. The performances are solid, too; Ehrenreich, in particular, imbues his character with brooding charm. Episodes are fast-paced and pulpy. Yet something is missing from the show’s core. Television thrives on rich characters, but, in large part because it’s set in a realm devoid of eccentricity, I struggled to get invested in this bunch. ... Brave New World feels [inert] as serialized TV.

This Brave New World has nothing to say.

Huxley's novel was a warning against blind ideology and the numbing comforts of conformity. But much of that has been lost in the wash in the new, nine-part adaptation which in the main settles for being a silly, if action-packed and excellently-acted, chunk of escapism. It passes the time – but that is where its ambitions end.

“Brave New World” looks like something NBC might have programmed in the 1980s. The sex and swearing are a stretch, of course, but there’s a lot of “Stepford Wives” to this that doesn’t really work.

This adaptation looks great but is definitively hollow, and in turn all of its parties, extensive discussions, and choreographed orgy scenes become simply exhausting.

Don’t get us wrong; the acting is top-notch across the board, but this just feels like one of those shows where the characters will really find minds of their own a la Westworld or it’ll continue to be antiseptic and dull. We’re thinking it’s going to be the latter.

With more orgies than comprehensible plot points, the sex and nudity in "Brave" doesn't just cross the line of good taste, it leaps over it with a smirk and a chortle. And despite the collective talent of its three main names, the acting falls spectacularly flat, as does the draggy plot.

It spends so much time reveling in its own aesthetic that dramatic momentum becomes an afterthought. ... [Series’s creator, David Wiener] has made improvements that are anemic and uneven.

Welcome to this not-so Brave New World, where all the ideas feel old and not nearly as deeply considered as the creators think. But hey, at least it all looks fabulous.

The nine-part debut season feels like it's built on miscalculation atop miscalculation, but the gravest one is that the citizens of New London are effectively extraterrestrials. ... If this lavish but lifeless production is Peacock's most prestigious original offering, well, there's always Jim and Pam.

Dull, generic and padded, the series, one of the premiere offerings for NBCUniversal’s Peacock streaming service on Wednesday, transmutes a provocative warning into a vision of a sci-fi world that feels neither brave nor new.

So many of the characters we meet in this series are not merely loathsome but have so completely had the character trained out of them through a lifetime of sloth that we grab onto what little signs of life are there elsewhere. ... Both Brown Findlay and Ehrenreich seem frustratingly tamped-down here. ... No wonder the actors seem exhausted; their project, deep into its first season, doesn’t know what kind of show it wants to be.