If HBO Max made one mistake at launch – outside of not being available on Amazon and Roku devices, or being confused with the two other HBO streaming services that exist – it was launching without a big original show or movie to get people excited. HBO Max probably has the best library of any streaming service at launch to date, but Love Life starring Anna Kendrick just didn't feel like an event in the way that The Mandalorian did.
NBC's Peacock is (hopefully) the final streaming service launch of the year in the US, following Quibi (the three-month free trial of which has passed without us watching it for more than 10 minutes) and HBO Max.
While Peacock doesn't have an original show with as much cross-generational appeal as The Mandalorian, it does have something new and pretty cool available on its July 15 launch: Brave New World, an adaptation of Aldous Huxley's 1932 sci-fi novel starring Solo's Alden Ehrenreich. It's been in the works in some form or another since 2015, when it was originally planned as a new show for the Syfy Channel.
Brave New World is set in New London, part of a utopian world where peace has been attained by sacrificing everything from privacy to monogamous relationships and money.
Here's a trailer for it:
The idea of adapting an old-sci-fi novel with a pile of money and a pretty boy from Star Wars as the lead isn't what excites us, though. It's that this adaptation comes from influential comic writer Grant Morrison (The Invisibles, Animal Man, Doom Patrol, Arkham Asylum among many others), an inventive and imaginative storyteller with an amazing track record.
And he doesn't actually sound totally in love with the source material, which is refreshing.
In an interview with Slashfilm last year, Morrison was pretty honest about the process of adapting the book for TV. "The story, to be honest, is pretty weak and the female characters aren’t great. As a work of detective fiction, as a work of satire, I think it’s unparalleled. For us, the fun was to just see what can we do about adding more story to it, more character to it to look at it in a new way."
Morrison said he's been "very much involved" in the creative process, so hopefully the end result is subversive and relevant to our times. He previously worked on the Syfy show Happy!, which was cancelled after two seasons.
If you need something new to add to your watch list this summer, then, and you've noticed that the TV schedules are starting to slim down due to delays brought on by the health crisis, Brave New World looks like it's worth checking out.
Brave New World starts on July 15 on Peacock in the US, and later in 2020 on Sky One in the UK.
