2013 - 2014
Utopia (UK) ran on Channel 4 for two seasons across 2013 and 2014, twelve episodes total, and then Channel 4 cancelled it. That is the short version and it is also the tragedy. Created by Dennis Kelly and directed across its run by Marc Munden, this is one of the best-looking, nastiest, most singular conspiracy thrillers British television has ever produced, and if you have not seen it you have a gift waiting.
The premise is simple enough to fit on a postcard. A graphic novel called The Utopia Experiments has a cult following online. The people who love it trade theories about what the manuscript of its sequel might contain. Five of them, an awkward cross-section of conspiracy forum regulars, end up in a real room together when a copy of that sequel surfaces. Within an episode they are being hunted by men in suits who work for something called The Network. Within two episodes they have met a young woman called Jessica Hyde, who knows a great deal more than they do, and the question "Where is Jessica Hyde?" has become the scariest sentence in the series.
The scope of what they uncover is enormous. The Network, a biotech plan called Janus, a shadow figure known only as Mr. Rabbit. I will not say another word about any of it because the pleasure of Utopia (UK) is watching the scale expand in your face.
The casting is sharp in an unusual way. The leads here were not household names when this aired, and the show treats that as an asset. Fiona O'Shaughnessy plays Jessica Hyde as a feral, damaged, brilliantly unpredictable presence. You never relax around her. Her line readings are unlike anything else on television in that decade. It is the kind of performance that should have made her a global star and for whatever reason it did not.
Around her, the found-family of comic readers:
Then there is Neil Maskell as Arby, the Network's in-house killer. Maskell, soft-voiced and round-faced and impossibly sad, delivers one of the great TV villain performances. Arby is terrifying in a way you rarely see on screen because the show refuses to make him cool. He eats Skittles. He asks strange, childlike questions. He murders people with bureaucratic indifference. You cannot predict him and you cannot stop watching him.
Paul Higgins plays Michael Dugdale, a mid-level civil servant dragged into the conspiracy from an angle nobody expects. Geraldine James is Milner, the spymaster with agendas you spend twelve episodes trying to read. Stephen Rea arrives in season two as Letts and gives the show a weary gravitas it did not quite have before. Tom Burke shows up. Michael Smiley shows up. Everybody in British character acting seems to turn up at some point, each of them doing excellent work.
Stephen Rea
Letts (Season 2)
Fiona O'Shaughnessy
Jessica Hyde
Paul Higgins
Michael Dugdale
Michael Smiley
Recurring role
Geraldine James
Milner
Tom Burke
Donaldson (recurring)
Oliver Woollford
Grant Leetham
Alexandra Roach
Becky
It is the rare ensemble show where you cannot predict which of the regulars the writers are willing to hurt. That uncertainty is half the reason the tension stays bottled tight across both seasons.
Marc Munden shoots this series like no other drama of its era. The palette is pushed to a level of yellow-and-teal saturation that shouldn't work and does. Grass looks poisonous. Skies bruise. A suburban kitchen in daylight looks like a crime scene waiting for a body. The framing is off-centre and wrong-footed in a way that keeps you leaning forwards.
The violence, when it comes, is filmed with the same painterly care as the quiet scenes and that is what makes it horrifying. There is a scene set at a school in the first season that people still talk about more than ten years later. The camera refuses to look away. The score, by Cristobal Tapia de Veer, is a crunching electronic soundscape of whirrs and squeaks and broken synth pulses that has no right to pair as well as it does with the images. I can think of almost no other show where the marriage of sound and image is this idiosyncratic and this confident.
There are aesthetic cousins out there. The beautifully composed dread of Severance lives in the same street. The "what if a thought experiment were filmed by a painter" sensibility of Black Mirror and Dead Set, both also Channel 4 DNA, is a close relative. But Utopia (UK) still looks like nothing else. You could freeze any frame and hang it on a gallery wall.
The show wears a genre coat. Underneath, it is asking hard questions about idealism. What do you do if you genuinely believe the human species is driving itself off a cliff? At what moral cost do you intervene? Who gets to decide?
Dennis Kelly has written something deeply unfashionable, a thriller that takes the arguments of its villains seriously enough that you spend real minutes of real episodes wondering if they might be right. The best conspiracy fiction works this way. The Americans and Counterpart make you understand the other side without absolving them. Utopia (UK) does the same. It weaponises biotech anxiety, overpopulation fear, and the old temptation of top-down solutions and asks the viewer to sit with all of it. Nobody is let off lightly.
Set this against the more world-building-heavy conspiracy shows like The Man in the High Castle and the difference is temperament. Utopia (UK) wants argument. It wants to leave bruises.
Critics adored it from the jump. The Guardian, The Telegraph, and the industry awards noticed. It won a BAFTA for its cinematography. It still sits near the top of almost every "best show you have never seen" list in the UK press. And yet, after season two, Channel 4 pulled the plug. The reasons given at the time were ratings and costs. The reasons felt in the fandom were something closer to cultural cowardice around the show's subject matter.
Amazon tried an American remake in 2020 with Gillian Flynn writing. It is not good. I will be blunt. It sands the edges, softens the violence, reassembles the plot without understanding why the original plot hit, and it was mercifully cancelled after one season. If you are reading about Utopia (UK) for the first time and see a more recent American version on offer, do not be confused. The real thing is the 2013 Channel 4 series. Accept no substitute.
Cristobal Tapia de Veer went on to score The White Lotus and a lot of people heard him for the first time there. He was already doing career-best work here.
I come back to this show every couple of years and it still hits. The reason is that the writing is disciplined in a way conspiracy thrillers almost never manage. Every reveal lands because every setup was planted two episodes earlier in a scene you thought was about something else. Every character is exactly as smart as their situation requires and no smarter. The violence has weight because it has cost. "Where is Jessica Hyde?" is both a plot question and a thematic one by the time the credits roll on episode twelve.
If you can stomach a show that earns its darkness, Utopia (UK) is one of the great British thrillers of the last twenty years. Watch it before someone spoils the big question for you.
Neil Maskell
Arby / RB / Pietre
Adeel Akhtar
Wilson Wilson
Nathan Stewart-Jarrett
Ian Johnson