From 9/11 to COVID-19, the twenty-first century looks increasingly dystopian—and so do its television shows. Long-form science fiction narratives take one step further the fears of today: liberal democracy in crisis, growing economic precarity, the threat of terrorism, and omnipresent corporate control. At the same time, many of these shows attempt to visualize alternatives, using dystopian extrapolations to spotlight the possibility of building a better world.
Programming the Future
examines how recent speculative television takes on the contradictions of the neoliberal order. Sherryl Vint and Jonathan Alexander consider a range of popular SF narratives of the last two decades, including
Battlestar Galactica
,
Watchmen
Colony
The Man in the High Castle
The Expanse
, and
Mr. Robot
. They argue that science fiction television foregrounds governance as part of explaining the novel institutions and norms of its imagined futures. In so doing, SF shows allegorize and critique contemporary social, political, and economic developments, helping audiences resist the naturalization of the status quo. Vint and Alexander also draw on queer theory to explore the representation of family structures and their relationship to larger social structures. Recasting both dystopian and utopian narratives,
shows how depictions of alternative-world political struggles speak to urgent real-world issues of identity, belonging, and social and political change.