I was quite looking forward to this when my partner described the outline of the show to me. Following a family from the present to 15 years in the future as the world breaks down slowly around them is a novel and entertaining way to present a dystopia.
Unfortunately, the writing is horrible; this is Russell T Davies at his worst. The future provided is the kind of half-baked naive vision of a 14 year old's English essay. The worst possible outcome to any situation usually happens, but this isn't set up through clever writing; instead it's just arbitrarily thrown in with no research or effort to lead into it. There's no sense of pay-off from the various disasters happening - they're completely arbitrary and routinely come out of nowhere. These are disasters which appear simply because the plot needs something bad to happen now, rather than because they were clearly set up earlier and are a logical progression of the narrative.
The characters are basically ciphers for the writer's views; while I agree that Trump is a dangerous nutter and the rise of the far right is a threat to modern society, the script handles this with absolutely no subtlety and so people will randomly leap into a long dissertation on the nature of the world in the middle of a normal conversation. They may as well just turn to the camera and start addressing the audience directly, or else cut to RTD reclining in a leather armchair to lecture us.
This would be problematic in itself, but is compounded by RTD's frankly incompetent grasp of seemingly everything - his idea of politics is facile, his grip on basic science questionable. If you're going to include a plot line involving radiation, then try reading a book on the subject rather than just throwing arbitrary numbers around like a 1950s comic book. And most of the tech progress ideas are honestly either rather silly, or else anachronisms which have already been surpassed by current technology - again, something a little basic research would've spotted.
Tone and pacing are both issues as well; the script goes from silly comedy to tense drama and back again with such flippant regularity that the overall tone is just a mess. Pacing, meanwhile, tends to drag on the family scenes and then skate over the actual useful plot-furthering scenes, leading to lengthy,, unrealistic information-dump dialogue between family members to try and make up for it.
The actors do their best with what they've been given, but really a comprehensive re-write would be needed to make this anything worthwhile. I've struggled to watch the first two episodes, but tbh I don't know if I can stand the third; a terrible missed opportunity.
Unfortunately, the writing is horrible; this is Russell T Davies at his worst. The future provided is the kind of half-baked naive vision of a 14 year old's English essay. The worst possible outcome to any situation usually happens, but this isn't set up through clever writing; instead it's just arbitrarily thrown in with no research or effort to lead into it. There's no sense of pay-off from the various disasters happening - they're completely arbitrary and routinely come out of nowhere. These are disasters which appear simply because the plot needs something bad to happen now, rather than because they were clearly set up earlier and are a logical progression of the narrative.
The characters are basically ciphers for the writer's views; while I agree that Trump is a dangerous nutter and the rise of the far right is a threat to modern society, the script handles this with absolutely no subtlety and so people will randomly leap into a long dissertation on the nature of the world in the middle of a normal conversation. They may as well just turn to the camera and start addressing the audience directly, or else cut to RTD reclining in a leather armchair to lecture us.
This would be problematic in itself, but is compounded by RTD's frankly incompetent grasp of seemingly everything - his idea of politics is facile, his grip on basic science questionable. If you're going to include a plot line involving radiation, then try reading a book on the subject rather than just throwing arbitrary numbers around like a 1950s comic book. And most of the tech progress ideas are honestly either rather silly, or else anachronisms which have already been surpassed by current technology - again, something a little basic research would've spotted.
Tone and pacing are both issues as well; the script goes from silly comedy to tense drama and back again with such flippant regularity that the overall tone is just a mess. Pacing, meanwhile, tends to drag on the family scenes and then skate over the actual useful plot-furthering scenes, leading to lengthy,, unrealistic information-dump dialogue between family members to try and make up for it.
The actors do their best with what they've been given, but really a comprehensive re-write would be needed to make this anything worthwhile. I've struggled to watch the first two episodes, but tbh I don't know if I can stand the third; a terrible missed opportunity.