Utopia (2020)

Even with its end-of-the-world urgency, this Utopia still feels sluggish, muddled, unfinished. It’s as if someone went to great pains to restore a classic car, added their own custom interior, and then forgot to fill up the tank with gas.

Overall it feels like one of those shows that’s hard to judge from the first episode. What we’ve seen so far we like, but we don’t know enough about where the show is going to get excited over what’s next.

For how well “Utopia” mines modern society’s greatest fears, it’s mainly cultivating them for ambiance, not commentary. ... Ultimately, it’s just another spooky story in need of refinement.

[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.

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.

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.

We get a generic, almost camp flippancy that patronises fantasy/sci-fi nerds, and makes it hard to distinguish this show’s group of reluctant heroes from the protagonists of any Scooby-Doo teen horror.