Extrapolations looks like a million bucks—a hundred million. Or, I should say, it looks like 600 metric tons of carbon dioxide. There are actors in it, people you will recognize. The technology is impressive and sleek. The futuristic fashions are tasteful and not overbearing. None of the furniture looks like I could afford it. When a helicopter flies over the blazing Adirondacks, it looks like Mordor.
If there is something to be said for Extrapolations, it’s that no fictional TV show in recent history has been as direct or explicit about the effects of climate change. The problem is that it becomes mired in the depiction of climate change but not the experience of it. The show revels in scientific platitudes and images of planetary degradation, but only within a glass dome of political, aesthetic, and imaginative conservatism. Its enclosure excludes critiques of systemic political complicity or of the growth logic driving the economy forward even as it is dooming us. Environment is the backdrop rather than the atmosphere, and its stories never become living, breathing things.
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