Utopia, like utopias, was never meant to work. The "social experiment" that premiered on Fox last week has a fascinating premise—15 vastly different contestants are dropped into an oasis, deprived of almost all possessions, and tasked with creating their own sustainable paradise—but the show's grand gimmick quickly become a portrait of disastrous irony.
Five hours of Utopia have aired thus far, and already the differences and inequalities that cause many "real world" problems—the ones supposedly wiped clean upon contestants' entry—are becoming sources of violent conflict. Drunken bros, angry hillbillies, and homeless ex-cons are butting heads with ex-military chefs, body-positive feminist hunters, and free-spirited survivalists. It's what you might call a devolution; and it's making it abundantly clear why dystopian literature, rather than its utopian counterpart, has flourished: true utopia is inherently impossible. Attempting utopia is the surest route to dystopia—and even if you could make utopia happen, it would be unspeakably boring.
The thing is, the producers knew all of this from the get-go. How could they not? Even those who have never picked up a book in their lives have to understand perfect communities are impossible. So why make a series that is doomed to fail?
Well, for one, it makes great television. "The inspiration is meant to be [less Survivor], more 'hell is other people,'" says Utopia producer Jon Kroll. "[Contestants] are walking into a perfect environment. It's not 'Can they create it?' It's 'Can they sustain it?' They have to build this with other people with different views. A lot of Twitter people are creating drinking games around anytime someone says 'my utopia.' And that's the beauty of the entire show—that utopia is subjective."
Kroll's contribution to the show is manifold. The veteran reality and documentary producer has worked on both sci-fi and social reality projects, but he also is the only showrunner to have some experience in utopia-making. From age eight to 18, Kroll and his family lived on a commune (turned tourist farm) in northern California called Oz, an insular environment in which he witnessed firsthand why paradises like Thomas More's are nowhere near as feasible as, say, Aldous Huxley's dystopian Brave New World.
"They asked me when I was interviewing for this project, 'Do you think you know what it takes to make a utopia?'" he says. "I said, 'Absolutely not, but I know everything that goes wrong when you try.' It's like, those who don't [learn from] history are forced to repeat it, and I feel like there's a lot of repeating history going on on the show right now."
But here is the big paradox: In order for utopia to be achieved and the show to actually be successful in its ends, the contestants have to create full cooperative harmony in the compound—but as anyone who has seen an episode of Real Housewives can tell you, peace makes for decidedly unsuccessful television. Those arguments are exactly what are necessary for the show to be interesting enough to get ratings and stay on the air.
"It's very important for us as producers to look to add special sauce constantly when people do leave, and make sure that we keep things fluid and dynamic, that new ideas and new points of view come in," Kroll says. "Obviously, this show is like a shark: if it stops moving, it dies."
For the moment this paradox is moot. Even with its conflicts, and perhaps because of how boring those conflicts are, Utopia is suffering in the ratings. The fundamental flaws of utopianism are what the producers are banking on for it to succeed, but it seems as though both the appeal of building a perfect society and the appeal of reality-show bickering are escaping Utopia. (And that may be the most dystopian thing of all.)
That doesn't mean there's nothing to glean from Utopia. Just as Kroll's Oz experience taught him—and just as Elysium (among others) taught us—the subjectivity of paradise breeds exclusion.
"My father made a comment along the lines of 'I don't like that they can vote people out,'" Kroll says. "I said, 'Dad, we did that. That's why you don't like it, 'cause it's uncomfortable.' It is an important part of a living, breathing, growing society that new points of views come in [and out]."
But it's not as simple as a revolving door. So far, the show's biggest blow-ups—the ones that push contestants to the brink of leaving the compound—have stemmed from conflicts of class and privilege. Toothless (white) hillbilly Red clashes majorly with (black) ex-military chef Aaron when he is forbidden from cooking and eating a chicken that has died of unknown causes. Feeling unwelcome, Red almost walks out, until Dave, an ex-con and self-described homeless son of a prostitute, convinces him to stay—only to be "banished" from the compound himself in the following episode, thanks to seemingly irresolvable issues. His replacement: Kristen, a young, blonde woman who doesn't "have time for fat people" and whose skillset is "sowing the seeds of drama."
It's hard not to see Dave's ejection as an eerie metaphor for another major theme in dystopian literature: the American attitude towards the prison-industrial complex. (Minority Report, anyone?) It's only been four episodes, and yet the cast of Utopia has already effectively, if not consciously, figured out its own miniature model for self-policing.
There's also the fact that all of this is closely monitored—like, Orwellian-style monitored—via 130 cameras throughout the complex, and the point is to get people to watch it like it's the Hunger Games (presumably minus death). One has to hand it to them: even if it's unintentional, even if showrunners truly had altruistic ambitions in setting this "experiment" in motion—like believing their contestants could pull off a perfect community—the macabre irony of voyeuristically watching a show like Utopia is brilliant.
Technically speaking, a more achievable approach to seeing if utopia can truly be reached would be to go the Star Trek way: give contestants Eden. Give them all the food and tools they want and see if they can decide on one way of life and live harmoniously after scarcity and competition have been eliminated. But of course, that's ... exactly what we've been trying to do in real life, and it really hasn't turned out very well so far.
"[Any] human interaction is going to lead to disagreement, and disagreement is going to lead to a form of dystopia," Kroll says. "So if your definition of utopia is zero conflict, zero lack of resources, then stick a tube in your vein, and watch MTV all day, and play with your videogames. That's some people's utopia, and there's certainly a lot less conflict—but some people would consider that a dystopia as well."
