In 1931, when Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World, he envisioned the future as a place where people no longer bone for the sake of reproduction, where children are born artificially in hatcheries, where they’re then organized into castes, and where they’re discouraged from thinking, via subconscious conditioning, a psychedelic drug called soma, and many, many orgies. Oddly, Huxley didn’t foresee a world in which film and TV turn into an endless loop of already told stories. Which is to say that Syfy’s Brave New World series is going forward, as it now has its adaptors.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the cable network has selected comic writer/playwright Grant Morrison and writer/director Brian Taylor to pen and executive produce the series; formerly, Extant/Dante’s Peak writer Les Bohem had been attached to adapt, but they’ve since clearly replaced him.
The Verge tries to instill a bit of optimism in skeptics — who’d think that a Syfy adaptation of the classic doesn’t sound too promising — noting that “Grant Morrison’s name is synonymous with mind-bending metafiction.” (One can certainly see connections between World and the thought-control plot line of Morrison’s DC Comic, The Multiversity.)
And, I will say that as much as the announcement of Brave New World-the-series adds to the notion of an overcautious new entertainment world rehashing old ideas, it’s hard not to be at least reservedly excited about this one. Though the novel has already been made into a TV movie and… another TV movie, there hasn’t yet been a particularly noteworthy adaptation.