Utopia - Series 1

It's very yellow, isn't it.

A big hit last year (although I've only caught up with it recently thanks to 4OD making series one available while series 2 is showing, Utopia is a conspiracy thriller which premiered on Channel 4.

The series, which centres on the manuscript for the 'lost' second volume of a fictional graphic novel called Utopia, is notable for its use of stark, brutal violence, including an extremely controversial sequence in which an assassin murders two teachers and (offscreen) half a dozen children in order to frame another child for the killings. It is a far from pleasant series, and as is the nature of such material, the question arises: Is it good enough to earn the use of such shocking content, or is it purely there to shock? In all honesty, I'm not convinced that the level of violence, or the nature of the violence, was entirely necessary. It isn't completely gratuitous, and can't take away from the fact that the story is gripping and compelling, but it sours the experience.

The main narrative is excellent, however, telling the story of a group of enthusiasts who meet through a comics forum centred on Utopia, and are invited to see the manuscript for volume 2. However, the manuscript contains information wanted by an extra-governmental conspiracy called the Network, and the characters are soon on the run from the Network's killers and framed for all manner of appalling crimes.

The central group are IT consultant Ian (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett), medical student and would-be conspiracy theory postgraduate Becky (Alexandra Roach), geek survivalist Wilson Wilson (Adeel Akhtar) and obnoxious-yet-artistic eleven year old Grant (Oliver Woollford). Their main lifeline is Jessica Hyde (Fiona O'Shaughnessy), the author of Utopia's sociopathic daughter, and their enemies include Arby (Neil Maskell), a compassionless yet almost childlike killer who is Jessica's equally dark reflection, and Corvadt Biological Sciences, a corporation run by Letts (Stephen Rea) and his assistant (James Fox).

The latter two are something of an anomaly in the series, being pretty stereotypical villains in smart suits plush offices, while little else follows any such conventional patterning. Jessica Hyde would be the hero of a more conventional series, but O'Shaughnessy's dead-eyed performance turns her into an anti-villain, a cold-blooded survivalist devoid of emotion or attachment, and Maskell's turn as Arby has a weird dissonance between his brutal actions and his soft, placid expression. The actual 'heroes' are typically ineffectual and indecisive, and frequently wrong. Moreover, only one of them is actually entirely what he appears to be.

Utopia series 1 is a starkly brilliant piece of storytelling, which works to remove the glamour which has come to adhere to killers in fiction, but in the end is marred by the violence which is in part its purpose. I will be giving series 2 a shot, but I'm not convinced I'll make it through.