THE FEED by Armen Pandola
Amazon's The Feed is a futuristic drama whose premise is that human brains will be wired into a central 'feed' and thereby become able to share thoughts and emotions directly. So, imagine not 'watching' a movie, but, instead, the movie takes place in your brain. Sounds great, right?
OK, so you ever hear of something called Murphy's Law? Right, that's the one that says whatever can go wrong, sooner or later, will go wrong.
What can go wrong with having your brain wired into a super cloud?
How about a super virus allows dead people to take control of live humans and start killing everyone in sight so they can keep on existing?
The Feed is owned and run by a family, the Hatfields. David Thewlis (Fargo, 2014) plays the patriarch, Lawrence, Michelle Fairley his wife Meredith and Guy Burnet, Tom and Jeremy Neumark Jones Ben, their Cain and Abel feuding sons. The dynamics of the Hatfield family relations dominate most of the show, but there are intriguing glimpses of what the world may become if an online super company is able to control a society - are you watching Google, Facebook and Amazon?
Some countries on earth do NOT allow the Feed and they have a thriving tourism business based on being Feed-free. Some people have become so engrossed in the Feed that they are incapable of human interaction and there are psychologists who specialize in helping them to kick the Feed addiction, In fact, eldest son Tom has renounced his family and is a therapist specializing in getting people to kick the Feed habit.
The family dynamics are a little trite - eldest son Tom while rejecting the family is the most loved by his parents and younger Ben while devoted and hard-working feels himself a second class son. But the world of The Feed is fascinating - the world becomes more and more interconnected, but, at the same time, more and more dependent on the Feed to make the world go round.
Does anyone think this state of affairs is going to lead to Utopia? I didn't think so. Based on the novel of the same title by Nick Clark Windo, showrunner Julia Clark has ten different people write and direct the ten episodes and it shows - there is a lack of cohesion and in the final episodes there is a lot of cutting back and forth to various plot lines without any real attempt to build on them toward a central theme. It seems as if the story is moving along fairly well when someone remembers a plot line from the last show and stops the current show to go back and fill us in,
Having said that - watch this series. It's fun looking at a future that could very well happen. More importantly, it speaks to our time - is putting our whole world at the mercy of a few giant digital companies a good idea?
In one of the chilling scenes toward the end of the series, Lawrence Hatfield gives an interview and explains that he is one of only a few hundred people on earth with a heightened intelligence capable of incredible feats of thinking and analysing that make him worthy of being a dictator. He is so much smarter than most people, why wouldn't the world want him in charge of making decisions?
As we blunder into one world crisis after another - 50 years of playing nuclear blinds-man-bluff followed by decades of terrorism and now an existential environmental catastrophe that our nation-states world cannot address yet alone solve - maybe it's time to think about democracy. When people are manipulated, lied to and indoctrinated, can we expect them to make good choices? And finally, how is it that the thing that brings us together, the internet, makes us living zombies less and less capable of human interaction?
All episodes are currently available and there has been talk of a second season. The novel’s plot does go beyond the point where the series ended so it’s possible, but not probable given the lack of publicity for The Feed.