Why isn't every show about climate change?

Apple TV+'s Extrapolations is a decent attempt—there should be more.

On Extrapolations, Meryl Streep voices the last humpback whale on Earth.

I’ve started researching air purifying devices for my apartment. Last summer, like every summer lately, the Pacific Northwest has been pummelled with unusually hot weeks, and forest fires in the surrounding areas send smoke billowing into the city for days on end. Everything smells like a camp fire and being outside for more than a few hours starts to burn your throat and lungs. I had my portable AC plugged in through my living room window to survive the heat, but smoky air kept wafting in. I’ve been thinking to myself, as we head into another summer: is this my new reality? And what should I be doing about it?

The early episodes of Apple TV’s expensive-looking anthology series Extrapolations imagines that fires, at one point in the 2030s, will rage all over the globe, taking out large swaths of forest and perpetually covering the sky in blankets of smoke. Pregnant women give birth to children with what the show calls “summer heart,” a genetic abnormality caused by exposure to smoke in the womb. In the later episodes (I’ve seen the whole season via press screeners), as we get into the 2060s, the air quality has degraded to the point where you need to carry around your own fresh air canisters and breathing masks, or approach an oxygen street merchant to pay for a “pull” of fresh air before moving on to your destination. This speculative future is bleak, but not completely out of the realm of possibility.

Air kiosk in Mumbai (Extrapolations, episode 5).

Critics kind of hated Extrapolations. It holds a 57 Metacritic average, with one critic calling it “patronizing and predictable,” and another writing the show is “draining in all the wrong ways.” These critiques are mostly clear-minded takes on the show, but I can’t help but reflect on how television barely addresses climate change at all. While narratively, Extrapolations made some disappointing choices (particularly in the last handful of episodes), I still feel a modicum of respect toward its creators for the effort toward tackling climate change at all. In my opinion, the show is still worth watching—at the very least, to prompt reflection.

The best essay I found on Extrapolations, which I highly recommend reading, appears in the Los Angeles Review of Books, in which writer Aaron Bady rips the show to shreds for its insular depiction of wealthy Americans and its sidelining of activist characters/groups:

This is not an activist show that knows what we should do about climate change, right now, and tells us; this is a fatalistic show about what the consequences will be when we don’t do anything at all. It’s a show about comfortable rich people who, while they worry about the future in some abstract sense, also, in a much more concrete sense, do nothing of substance to avert it. (LA Review of Books)

Extrapolations is created by Scott Z. Burns, a producer of the much-lauded 2006 climate change documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. Burns would go on to write Contagion (2011), and create, write, and direct The Report (2019). Extrapolations is his first real foray into television, and he was given unfettered access to (clearly) a huge production design budget and pulled in everyone from Meryl Streep to Gemma Chan to Tobey Maguire. I had the show on my 2023 highly-anticipated list because I thought: finally, a show with enough star power to start a real, compelling conversation around climate change.

But overall, the characters of this sort-of anthology fall disappointingly flat. High Maintenance was able to do so much more in the anthology format with so much less. Like good god, did they really need Keri Russell for that five-minute scene? How many stars signed on as a virtue signal?

Despite my misgivings about the show, it still inspired reflection. It made me think about the lack of education and understanding around climate change. It made me think about how we’re not going far enough to think about the future of our planet because we’re too busy drowning in today’s problems. It made me think about how climate change on television, these days, is relegated to the butt of a joke or brought up in a blasé, off-hand comment by a character to justify their existential musings. For a medium that is so obsessed with our contemporary anxieties, why isn’t there more television addressing the simmering climate crisis?

The Americans reunion! Sort of. Matthew Rhys appears in the pilot, Keri Russell in the fifth episode.

I don’t know about you, but our “return to normal” following years of pandemic restrictions has felt full-throttle to me. Employees are being forced to the office, layoffs are threatening those still in jobs to work even harder, and the pace of seemingly everything, including my heart rate, has felt sharply increased. Inflation and a wobbly economy has activated all of our worst instincts around capitalist scarcity. The rush to a full in-person life has been nauseating. The streets are filled with cars and airlines are bulking under the pressure of a return to travel and conferences. The climate, which saw benefits of society’s slow-down during the height of the pandemic, has lately been…an after-thought. It feels that way on television, too.

Speculative science fiction is a tough nut to crack, though. The Affair aired for five seasons on Showtime, a drama that focused on the fall-out of an affair between characters played by Dominic West and Ruth Wilson (Noah and Alison), with Maura Tierney and Joshua Jackson (Helen and Cole) playing their respective spouses. The soapy premise was injected with fascinating depth by how they played with perspective: each episode was split into parts according to a character’s point of view. While Alison might see herself as depressed and desperate for intimacy from her perspective, Noah may see her as a confident flirt, and so on. The way the show plays with costume design through character perspective is fascinating and academic analysis-worthy, but that’s neither here nor there.

My point is: in the last season, the show introduces a future timeline that follows Joanie (Noah and Alison’s child, played by Anna Paquin) as she uncovers truths about her parents in a flooded Montauk, where the sea levels have risen. Meanwhile, in the present, Helen and Noah escape from dangerous forest fires in California. I bring this up because it was when The Affair had gone largely off the rails, and this tangent in the final season was cringe to watch—but I remember admiring the showrunners for giving it a shot regardless. I wanted more of these kinds of TV writing risks.

Anna Paquin in The Affair (Season 5, 2019)

As Katharine Gammon writes in a piece for Nexus Media that was re-published in Teen Vogue last year, there is a slight shift toward television acknowledging climate change as a reality, but the quantitative reality is kind of pathetic:

A study of more than 37,000 film and TV scripts that aired in the U.S. between 2016 and 2020 found that only 2.8 percent even mentioned climate-adjacent words like solar panels, fracking, sea level rise or renewable energy, according to the University of Southern California’s Media Impact lab. (Teen Vogue, October 2022)

As Bady admits in his LARB piece on Extrapolations, “I’m not sure what a good TV show or movie about climate change would look like.” I don’t either. Are metaphorical scenes of Anthropocene on apocalyptic shows enough? How do you boil down such a global problem to a small set of characters and make it feel compelling? What I do know is what it should feel like—it should make me angry, or sad, or optimistic enough that I’m willing to do something to jolt me out of the trudge of the every day. I guess I’ll let the TV writers figure that one out.