Dennis Kelly’s conspiracy thriller is one of the strangest-looking things British television has made: flat, bright, acid yellow, and scored with breathing. It is cruel, funny and gripping across its first six episodes, and rather less sure of itself across the second six.
Dennis Kelly’s Utopia opens in a comic shop with two men who look as if they have come about the boiler. One of them, Arby (Neil Maskell), asks the staff whether they have seen a manuscript and, in the same tone, whether they have seen Jessica Hyde, and then he kills everyone in the building. A boy hides. Those first minutes tell you how the ten hours will behave: the violence is sudden and staged without fuss, the killer is soft-spoken, and the programme is sure you will keep watching. We did.
The plot is a conspiracy, and a large one. A graphic novel called The Utopia Experiments is supposed to have predicted real epidemics; its unpublished second volume is loose; and an organisation calling itself The Network wants it, and Jessica Hyde (Fiona O’Shaughnessy), badly. In the way are four people from an internet forum who have never met: Becky (Alexandra Roach), Ian Johnson (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett), Wilson Wilson (Adeel Akhtar) and Grant Leetham (Oliver Woollford), who has lied online about his age. Kelly and his co-writer John Donnelly hand out the explanation in small, late portions. For most of the first series you know as much as Becky does, which is not much, and you do not mind.
Marc Munden directs and Lol Crawley and Ole Bratt Birkeland shoot it in wide, symmetrical frames, people small and centred against fields, car parks and estates, and everything that can be yellow is yellow: a sports bag, a raincoat, a cornfield, a wall. Jennifer Kernke, Kristian Milsted and Simon Rogers give Wilson a bunker under his father’s house with the tins in rows, and give The Network rooms that are white and empty. Cristóbal Tapia de Veer’s score is made of breaths, clicks and voices stretched out of shape. It does not tell you what to feel; it tells you something is wrong with the air.
There is a scene in the first episode, involving Wilson, a spoon and a bag of chilli and sand, that horrified us more than anything we had seen on television in years, and it did it with the camera mostly on Arby’s face while he explains, kindly, what is about to happen. Maskell is the show’s great asset. He plays Arby heavy and slow, breathing through his mouth, working through a box of raisins between jobs, and he never raises his voice. He is the most frightening thing on screen because he seems to bear nobody any ill will. Later the series asks more of him than killing, and Maskell carries that too.
Akhtar is funny and then not, a conspiracy theorist who turns out to be right and takes no pleasure in it; we laughed at his bunker and then stopped. Paul Higgins has the second plot, as Michael Dugdale, a civil servant being blackmailed over Anya Levchenko (Anna Madeley) into approving a flu vaccine, with Alistair Petrie as his boss Geoff Lawson and Ruth Gemmell as Jen Dugdale, the wife he is lying to. Higgins plays a man being squeezed by degrees and his scenes are the most ordinary in the programme and among its best. O’Shaughnessy’s Jessica is hard to like, on purpose: she has been running all her life and treats the others as luggage. Roach and Stewart-Jarrett are given less to play than they deserve.
The violence is a lot, and not all of it earns its place; a shooting becomes the show’s usual way of leaving a room. A second series of six episodes followed from 14 July 2014. We will say nothing about what happens in it, except that the coincidences that were forgivable in the first series stop being forgivable in the second, and that it is less sure of what it is for.
Certificate 18, and it means it. Watch the first series in as few sittings as you can; it is built like one long film. Then decide about the second with your eyes open, and do not take a bag of sweets into the first episode.
