The environmental-themed anthology series Extrapolations begins in the year 2037 as government officials from around the world meet to decide the fate of our planet. Will they commit to taking the comprehensive action required to combat climate change before it’s truly too late or stick to the status quo and keep the corporations happy? After that decision-making process goes the way that you might expect it to, the Apple TV+ series follows a set of characters from around the world as they deal with the fallout.
Each subsequent episode of Extrapolations focuses on a single strand of the story, examining the environmental crisis from a different vantage point and often moving us another decade into the future. This structure allows for some light genre-hopping as episodes shift from a melancholic eco-fable about an attempt to communicate with the planet’s last whales to a contemplative crime thriller about a midnight run through the streets of Mumbai.
In “2047,” Daveed Diggs leads a First Reformed-esque religious tale about a young rabbi struggling to provide spiritual guidance to the inhabitants of a world on fire, while “Face of God” sees Edward Norton, Indira Varma, and Michael Gandolfini teaming up for a high-stakes family drama about a controversial geo-engineering project. Looming in the background throughout the series is Nicholas Bilton (Kit Harrington), the tech billionaire whose products are now ubiquitous across the globe, working hard to convince people that industrial arsonists like himself should be allowed to serve as the planet’s firefighters.
But Extrapolations stretches itself thin as it weaves together stories from across the globe into an overarching plot that spans decades. The dialogue is often dominated by clunky exposition and clumsy references to historical events, both real and fictional. And there’s a flatness to the way the information is delivered, with everyone from White House officials to random train passengers delivering their reports in the same robotic tone. Even the main characters are reduced to mouthpieces for whatever philosophical debate a specific episode wants to spark.
This lack of character development renders the show’s big, dramatic confrontations inert. There are interesting ethical questions being posed about how much guilt each of us should bear for the state of the world and how much right anyone has to take matters into their own hands. But the lack of emotional investment in the characters strips these notions of any real tension, even when they take place at gunpoint or during an emergency meeting the Oval Office.
Many of showrunner Scott Z. Burns’s past works—such as The Report and his screenplays for Steven Soderbergh’s The Laundromat and Contagion—trace the precise, often mundane mechanisms by which catastrophes are unleashed, and Extrapolations is similarly fascinated with the bureaucracy of disaster and the economic forces that drive it. Rising temperatures create a market for cooling devices, DNA-mapping companies compete for the copyrights to extinct animals, and cognitive issues caused by the heat give Silicon Valley the chance to sell a subscription service that will store a person’s memories in the cloud. Each new step in our planet’s environmental collapse is quickly worked into a source of massive profit.
From Roomba-style robots that hoover up floodwater to nasally ingested nanobots that combat toxic air, the show brims with fascinating tech. Some of the gadgetry makes for striking imagery, like when the surface of Bilton’s private swimming pool turns into a display screen. But Burns seems less interested in the people of this world than the machinery that powers it.
When it’s not in full-on debate-club mode, Extrapolations conjures some powerful visuals. In a series that’s about how me move forward into an increasingly uncertain future, the sight of the rabbi leading a wellington boot-clad congregation in prayer inside a flooded temple, the digitally displayed stained glass flickering behind him, is more thought-provoking than almost any of the show’s dialogue. In spite of its best intentions, then, Extrapolations’s reach far exceeds its grasp.
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