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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
8
Mixed:
9
Negative:
2
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Critic Reviews
The PlaylistOct 5, 2020
Season 1 Review:
“Utopia” thinks big to erect its overarching structure, but thinks small to give that structure its support. And it’s loaded with great work from its cast, particularly Lane, a talented actress with a gift for slipping in and out of genres and easily fitting into each.
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Sep 21, 2020
Season 1 Review:
“Utopia” has numerous and obvious parallels to current real-world events — but this violent, darkly comic, bizarre and consistently involving eight-part series (I’ve seen the first seven episodes) has its own wild creativity and exists in a universe even crazier than our own. In nearly every episode, something shocking happens.
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Sep 29, 2020
Season 1 Review:
Like all conspiracy theories, Utopia’s central narrative ends up being a bit too grandiose and hokey to be entirely believed—which is sort of a relief, given how psychologically enveloping the conspiracy is for the first few episodes. But maybe that’s why I found it unnervingly compelling, too.
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The TelegraphSep 25, 2020
Season 1 Review:
It demands to be binged, but it’s not just a thrill ride. There are so many interesting ideas in Utopia, and little echoes of other great science-fictions, such as Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, and paranoid film thrillers, such as The Parallax View (1974), that it seems unlikely to pause here.
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Sep 23, 2020
Season 1 Review:
This show zeroes in on the current social… well, current: panic, terror, distrust, feeling controlled, feeling like no one is in control; the kind of moment when it’s all too easy to believe the most unhinged conspiracists are probably onto something and where everything feels unequivocally as though it’s falling apart for good. It does it stylishly. Generously. Lavishly.
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Sep 15, 2020
Season 1 Review:
The conspiracy plot is twisty and surprising, and is the rare plot like this that stays interesting as it gets deeper. A lot of thrillers like Utopia have trouble sustaining themselves past the initial premise in the first couple of episodes, but Utopia remains compelling.
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Sep 24, 2020The IndependentSep 24, 2020
Sep 25, 2020
Season 1 Review:
[It has] a nasty chilliness and a lack of empathy for its characters, who are blunt instruments Flynn uses to deliver shocks to the strapped-in audience. ... The show’s directors (Toby Haynes, Susanna Fogel and J.D. Dillard, so far) keep it moving right along; if it isn’t engaging, neither is it boring. And the cast is uniformly good, supplying more feeling, dimension and humor than the scripts indicate.
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Sep 25, 2020
Season 1 Review:
The result could be a fascinating mashup of sensibilities, but instead, the series flattens and settles into a more basic middle ground. Accidentally relevant topics or no, “Utopia” ends up feeling like a decently entertaining version of stories that have been told before.
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Sep 15, 2020
Season 1 Review:
Feels curiously stagnant in the seven of eight episodes provided for review. The series incorporates a slew of thematic elements that are eerily timely—an increasingly devastating pandemic, for one—but an overreliance on brutal violence masks the fact that Utopia doesn’t have much to say about the corporate overreach or government listlessness that inspired the show’s concept.
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Sep 25, 2020
Sep 24, 2020
Season 1 Review:
It exploits some of contemporary civilization’s greatest anxieties without saying anything worth hearing about them. ... Utopia’s glib, allegedly humorous scripts never provide such detailed portraits of the characters—probably, in part, because there are just so many of them. At times, Flynn seems to be remixing reality rather than commenting on it.
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Sep 15, 2020
Season 1 Review:
Flynn is unafraid of rapidly adding more and more branches to the Utopia mythology, which occasionally shocks but seldom intrigues. After seven episodes, the heroes remain underwritten archetypes, the villains are unconvincingly all-powerful yet constantly screwing up and there are more traumatized but precocious children (Javon Walton, Farrah Mackenzie) than there should be in a fight against the end of the world.
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