NBC launched its dedicated streaming service yesterday to Comcast subscribers (the service will open up for everyone in July), and in doing so, it released a number of teasers for some of the original content that subscribers will have access to, including its take on Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
The teaser shows off a first glimpse of the futuristic utopian series where society is organized into strict hierarchies, and which are kept under control with cocktails of drugs. We get a quick look at what World State looks like, as well as the world outside of it in Savage Reservation (renamed here as The Savagelands).
The series stars Alden Ehrenreich (Solo: A Star Wars Story) as John the Savage, Jessica Brown Findlay (Harlots), Harry Lloyd (Legion) as Bernard Marx, and Hannah John-Kamen (Killjoys, Ant Man and the Wasp), as Wilhelmina “Helm” Watson. David Wiener (Homecoming), with Grant Morrison (Happy!), and Brian Taylor (Happy!, Crank) wrote the series. The teaser showed off that the show would debut sometime this year, but didn’t provide an exact date.
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Brave New World has been adapted for television before: A pair of films came in the 1980s (one in 1980 from Burt Brinckerhoff and another in 1988 by Leslie Libman and Larry Williams.) Another film adaptation had been in the works from Ridley Scott and Leonardo DiCaprio, but ultimately never went anywhere.
This particular project dates back to 2015, when the Syfy Channel picked up the rights to adapt the series with Steven Spielberg and Amblin Television. The series then moved over to USA last year, which gave it a straight-to-series order. Months later, the series then moved again within the NBC family to the network’s newly-announced streaming service, Peacock.
That streaming service will help NBC compete with the likes of Warner Bros (which will debut its own streaming service, HBO Max, later this year,) as well as others, like Netflix, Disney +, Apple TV +, Hulu, CBS All Access, and others. With its release will come a number of original shows exclusive to the service, including a reboot of Saved by the Bell, a revival of Psych, spy comedy Intelligence, surveillance series The Capture, and more. In addition to those projects, the network will also feature a new take on Battlestar Galactica, which is apparently set in the same world as Ron Moore’s series.
