Extrapolations is a Juggernaut of Climate Storytelling

Sienna Miller in Season 1 Episode 1 of Extrapolations on Apple TV, a drama from writer, director and executive producer Scott Z. Burns that introduces a near future where the chaotic effects of climate change have become embedded into our everyday lives.

By: Daniel Simons

Contagion, written by Scott Burns, featuring Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, and Kate Winslet, was released in September 2011. Almost an entire decade later, it became the 10th most downloaded movie on itunes. The reason for the film's unusual resurgence in popularity was its uncanny portrayal of what life would feel like during a global pandemic.

It may not have included the hoards of wild monkeys overrunning the streets of Bangkok, or the choruses of people singing from their ‘iso’ balconies while they waited for their sourdoughs to bake, but its depictions of empty shelves, lockdowns, truth wars, and social unraveling was an eerily prescient foreshadowing of the way Covid-19 would later engulf the world.

When Scott Burns wrote Contagion, the facemasks, looting, temperature checks, and desperate wait for a vaccine seemed like fantastic devices for gripping storytelling, but not something we wanted to imagine would ever actually happen to us. Fast forward a decade and they would make up the fabric of our daily existence, for over three years.

Extrapolations is the latest Apple TV series from Burns. It is set 15 years in the future, roughly the same amount of time that passed between Contagion and Covid. This time, instead of dropping us into the middle of a pandemic, Burns transports us to a future where the climate crisis has continued to intensify unabated. We can only hope that this time his cautionary prognostication won’t be as accurate.

In a world starved of good climate fiction, the gravitas of Extrapolations can’t be overstated. In addition to the honey-pot, A-level cast, its producers, Media Res, are the creators of Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston’s Emmy-nominated Morning Show, and the series co-showrunner, Dorothy Fortenberry was a key writer on the wildly popular series The Handmaid’s Tale.

More significantly, in addition to writing Contagion and The Bourne Ultimatum, Extrapolations’ creator, Scott Z Burns was also the producer of Vice President Al Gore’s documentaries An Inconvenient Truth and An Inconvenient Sequel, arguably the most culturally impactful climate documentaries in history. All combined, that makes Extrapolations more than just an entertaining TV series, it’s a historic breakthrough for our collective imagining.

Following on from the Al Gore documentaries, and almost two decades in the making, Extrapolations is set to be another climate storytelling juggernaut. Only this time instead of spotlighting inconvenient truths, the series uses all the tools in the fiction tool shed to help us feel the future.

Extrapolations is an intertwined anthology that spans three decades from 2037 to 2070. Traversing the globe from Antarctica to the Middle East, the 8-part drama series interweaves stories about love, work, faith and family, and gives us a visceral appreciation for the devastating impacts that climate change will deliver as it becomes embedded into every aspect of our lives.

The series is as expansive in scope as it is bold in ambition, and covers an extraordinarily vast terrain of genres and ideas. One episode might be a courtroom drama about corporate ecocide, the next a heart-thumping thriller featuring gangsters and stolen seeds.

There is a Black Mirror-like episode about a role-playing escort at risk of losing his memories (which are being stored externally on the blockchain), and there’s a chamber piece about a failing marriage and mind uploading. The series covers everything from geoengineering to the unholy power of corporations to dictate our future and even includes an episode about using artificial intelligence to communicate with the last whale on Earth - voiced by Meryl Streep.

The show’s A-level cast and creative prowess might be impressive, but one of its greatest achievements is the fact that it was ever made in the first place.

Diane Lane, in Apple TV series Extrapolations

Hollywood has the power to shape our collective imagination, but it has failed us on climate change. A recent study from Good Energy and the USC Media Impact Lab analysed over 37,000 TV and film scripts that were screened between 2016 and 2020. It found that less than 3% of scripts made any reference to climate change, and only a miniscule number were specifically about the topic. Of those scripts, most focus on apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic dystopias where the world has been ravaged beyond recognition.

When Burns was asked in an interview recently if he was surprised that we hadn’t seen more meaningful action on climate change since An Inconvenient Truth was released he said that he wasn’t, but he was surprised, and frustrated, that so few films and TV shows had been made about the topic.

It was this dearth of climate fiction that had so many of Hollywood's A-listers clamoring to fill the meaningful roles that reflected their values. The UN Biodiversity Ambassador Edward Norton plays a scientist battling a rogue billionaire who wants to geoengineer the planet, and Kit Harington, who has recently lent his face to a banking divestment campaign, plays Nick Bilton, a psychopath tech mogul whose Googlesque company owns the world.

Oscar-winning Marion Cotillard, a Greenpeace spokesperson, plays the wife of a man who is considering having his consciousness uploaded to the cloud, and environmental advocate Meryl Streep plays a cancer-stricken animal activist and the AI voice of the world’s last whale.

The series is so stacked with talent that many commentators have said it’s easier to list who isn’t in the series than who is. David Schwimmer, Heather Graham, Daveed Diggs, Sienna Miller, Tobey Maguire, Forest Whitaker, Diane Lane, Keri Russel, and Tahar Rahim all feature, even Grammy Award winner Ben Harper beams in as an AI hologram of an activist musician.

Extrapolations might be saturated in A-level talent on camera, but the scientific experts behind the scenes were just as impressively well-credentialed. Author-activist and founder of 350.org, Bill Mckibben, former Vice President Al Gore, NASA scientist James Hanson, author Elizabeth Kolbert, and other world-leading academics and IPCC scientists all helped to ensure that Extrapolations was grounded in cutting-edge science.

Everything depicted in the series is based on scientifically ‘extrapolating’ what the world will look like if our emissions trajectory continues on its current path, right down to the amount of sea level rise and the date that the last grape would go extinct.

Every episode of Extrapolations is titled according to the year it takes place, and each begins with a record of temperature rise and another startling fact, like the population level or the number of climate refugees, giving the entire series the thrilling undercurrent of a ticking clock.

Unlike most climate fiction that either depicts a global calamity or transports us to a post-apocalyptic world, Extrapolations embeds us in the ‘messy middle.’ Like Russell T Davies’ Years and Years, or Shelley Birse’s The Commons, there is no acute disaster, and civilization has not unraveled. Instead, we live the granular human experience of, what writer Dorothy Fortenberry refers to as, ‘a stumblepocalypse.’

The series begins with drowning cities and smoke-blighted skies, but the planet is entirely recognisable. As the story unfolds life becomes more and more futuristic. But it’s never a far-fetched imagining of a distant future. One of the most confronting things about the series is the fact that a 15 or 16-year-old living now will probably still be alive in 2070 when the series concludes.

When a large-scale climate change series is announced you can almost ‘extrapolate’ the criticisms and critiques before a single word has been typed. It will be ‘preaching to the converted’. It will be ‘moralising’. It will be ‘too depressing’, or ‘not extreme enough’. It will focus too much on intellectual ideas, or too much on individual characters.

Kit Harrington in Apple TV series  Extrapolations

Everyone has something to say about Extrapolations. Some reviewers believe it is too heavy, others say the villains are too cartoonish, some get lost, and others love the inventiveness and complexity. There are also disappointments about what it didn’t include, like fossil fuel corporations or frontline communities. Because the series is so diverse in theme and genre, it's not surprising that the reactions have been varied and often contradictory. One of the most universal reactions is that the first episode is difficult but the show gets much better as it evolves.

Extrapolations is interlaced with folklore and allegories. Myths recounting how ravens became black highlight the weight of irreversibility, Jack and The Beanstalk is parallelled with a story about stolen seeds from the Svalbard Global 'doomsday' Vault, and there is the obligatory nod to Sodom and Gomorrah and Noah’s Ark. If there was one fable that encapsulates Extrapolations it would be The Ghost of Christmas Past in Dickens' A Christmas Carol.

When Burns was researching Contagion, the scientists told him that it was not a matter of ‘if’ but ‘when’ a global pandemic would wreak havoc on daily life. With climate change, the scientists aren’t asking ‘when’ because it is already happening. The questions are: how severe will the crisis get before our actions rise to meet the challenge, and what can we do now to make sure the worst doesn’t happen?

The series isn’t the ‘extrapolation’ of what the world will look like on the road to 2070, it’s a cautionary thought experiment, and frustrating lament, about what the world would look like if we continue to let governments, corporations, and citizens sacrifice the future for the present - all the while having the technology and knowledge to avoid calamity.

Almost every work of art that deals with existential threats like climate change or artificial intelligence walks a tightrope that would fill even Nik Wallenda with trepidation. On the one hand, you have to terrify people enough to galvanise action, on the other hand, if you overwhelm the audience you risk inducing debilitating despair and cynicism. If Extrapolations doesn’t cross the line, it certainly gets close.

Movie Scene Snapshot from Extrapolations

In the 2019 film, The Report, which was also penned by Burns, there is a scene where a CIA officer explains how he plans to extract information from one of his detainees.

“Seligman did an experiment with dogs,” he says. “He put them in a cage with a barrier running down the middle. One side of the cage was electrified, the other wasn’t. At first, when he shocked the dogs they’d jump over the barrier to get away. Then he electrified both sides. There was no escape. No belief they could change anything. He’d open the door to the cage and they wouldn’t even leave. That’s learned helplessness.”

Learned helplessness didn’t work for extracting information from prisoners and it's not the best way to motivate people to act on climate. As the climate psychologist Renée Lertzman and 2040 filmmaker Damon Gameau teach us, ‘If you’re going to raise the fire alarm, you need to show people the exits.’ In fact, too much doom can not only lead to immobilising despair, but it can also tilt people toward paranoid selfishness, or even self-destructive behaviours.

There is a relentless sense of irreversible loss and happlesness at the beginning of Extrapolations, which never leaves, but does move into the background as the lens shifts to different characters' stories. The thwarted agency and soft despair are also forgivable, given the fact that the entire series is premised on the idea of immersing us in a world where we have already failed to act on climate and are forced to endure the consequences.

When Burns is asked what he hopes viewers will take away from the series, he answers that he wants them to realise that the narrative that they have no agency to change the future is false. While not everyone will be able to extract that message from the show’s plot, the fact that such a large-scale, celebrity-driven production was made in the first place should be encouragement enough to nudge audiences towards the enormous and blooming ecosystems of solutionists and changemakers dedicated to making sure that our 2037 looks nothing like the one Extrapolations has depicted for us.

Burns and Fottenbury don’t want Extrapolations to be the defining climate series of our time. They want it to be a battering ram that will smash open the doors for future artists.

A recent survey from Netflix found that the majority of their audiences want to see more climate storytelling. Adam Mckay’s climate parable, Don’t Look Up, was the most popular film in the platform’s history. He’s now making his own follow-on series with HBO. If Extrapolations can succeed in proving the hunger for these important themes, it could mark the beginning of a new era of world-changing climate storytelling.