Extrapolations

You may tire of the message Scott Burns is trying to get across by the end of Extrapolations‘ eight episodes, but there are moments in there that will be affecting and effective. You just may have to try your luck to find them.

It’s a humane, carefully constructed but often frustrating project—and one that illustrates why insightful art about the climate crisis has proven so elusive.

Extrapolations is at its best when it finds the sweet spot between lecturing and enlightening, but these moments don’t come frequently enough. More often it finds itself stuck at the student debate level set in the first episode.

This big-budget, A-list-stuffed dystopian vision has occasionally shaky execution, but worthy intentions, and some intriguing future-concepts peppered among the sillier ones.

Extrapolations does sometimes compel. But when opposing speechifiers go at it hammer and tongs about causes, effects and solutions, it can drag like a long night at the debating soc.

Together with the dull, discolored and unremarkable visual palette we’ve come to expect from speculative fiction that really wants to be taken seriously, Extrapolations often feels like it’s challenging you to stay focused on the screen. It’s noteworthy as a collective effort in arguing that hope will survive in humanity’s darkest days, but by playing straight some pretty silly material.

True, “Extrapolations” has its heart in the right place but its pedantic volume rises just like the sea level and all but overwhelms the characters and the drama itself, spinning the whole enterprise sadly right off its storytelling axis.

This lack of character development renders the show’s big, dramatic confrontations inert.

Scott Z. Burns’ AppleTV+ climate crisis anthology series squanders an urgent premise and star-studded cast with preachy drama and one dimensional characters.

When characters aren’t laboring through expository dialogue about how the bees are almost all gone and why a Miami synagogue is falling into the ocean, they’re asserting again and again that humans are too flawed not to fail at saving the planet, and themselves. This conclusion isn’t necessarily wrong, but it neutralizes any momentum the show might have had.

Extrapolations is both patronising and predictable.

The show works a bit like a breezy and brisk collection of linked short stories, constantly moving forward, continually showing new consequences of our own inaction. Keeping the characters flat and underserved, though, makes the lavishly depicted world they inhabit feel less like a matter of concern. ... Clumsy in its delivery of information, “Extrapolations” is also maudlin where “Black Mirror” is icy.