Climate Change Is the Biggest Story on Earth. So Why Can ’t Hollywood Make Good TV Shows and Movies About It?

Last summer, I wrote a short story entitled Rat Island, set in a post-pandemic United States. In it, the rule of law and social order have broken down, with mobs roaming the streets of Los Angeles. A wealthy group of people stand on top of a skyscraper, waiting for the helicopter that will whisk them away, but the crowd storms the building, desperate to board. In the fall of 2020 my agent reported a surprising amount of interest from Hollywood in adapting my story for the screen—but this cooled off after the presidential election, when there appeared to be real danger of a coup, and came to a complete halt with the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. We were told that fiction had come too close to our truly frightening reality. Creators have always pulled from history to explain the past as well as create apocalyptic visions of the future. But this moment seems particularly remarkable when you consider why so few creators have made shows and movies about the climate catastrophe. It’s the most dramatic development in our world, but it’s not just something that happened in the past. It’s still happening—and that might be the best explanation for why we struggle to translate it into art or entertainment. The television series Occupied, based on a storyline I conceived in 2012, was about climate change and oil production, but its principal attraction for viewers was likely that it was about a Russian occupation of Norway—a story with clea...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized climate change Magazine TIME 2030 Source Type: news