Interview with the Cast of TV"s Minority Report - IGN Live: Comic-Con 2015
Minority Report on Fox is set in 2065.
Screenshot via Fox.
During the publicity tour for the new Fox TV series Minority Report, executive producer Kevin Falls has pointed out that it is the first Steven Spielbergdirected movie to be adapted for TV. So ... no pressure, he concludes. While his premise is not entirely true (hes forgotten The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles), he is right to stand by his conclusion because he will likely feel pressure of many other forms. Most especially, because the show promises to deliver a large component of high tech in the near future. Such a promise is difficult to keep in an age when, to paraphrase whoever actually said the quote attributed to Yogi Berra, the near future aint what it used to be. The original film (made in 2002 and set in 2054) is already showing signs of what Douglas Adams and John Lloyd called zeerusta form of out-of-date futurism. The TV shows producers need to beware.
For the noisy lot of us born during the baby boom, there is a growing nostalgia for the future of our youth. By future of our youth I dont mean optimism about what we ourselves might have been. Weve long given up on that. I mean what we thought the future would be like when we were youngsters. For many of us, we thought the future would mean The Jetsons living in Walt Disneys Tomorrowland (the theme park attraction, not the movie), with all the tailfins, ray-gun gothic aesthetic, and Googie architecture you could cram into a New York Worlds Fair. Our parents may have lamented about surviving world wars and a Great Depression while our kids continually grouse about facing imminent climate change and acute economic inequality. But wheres the justice of living in a world in which we havent gotten our jet packs?!
Fond remembrances of futures past have been around ever since H.G. Wells Things to Come didnt come.
Fond remembrances of futures past have been around ever since the 1936 big-screen adaptation of H.G. Wells Things to Come didnt come. Its probably for the best that what happened in 1984 didnt happen in 1984 (except the legendary Super Bowl Apple commercial). But there was a burst of future nostalgia when the prophesies of 2001: A Space Odyssey proved to be nonprophetic. As it turns out, the failure of Pan Am and Howard Johnson to offer deep-space hospitality (or of the former to even exist) by 2001 had already been diffused by the abrogation of the Apollo program decades prior; the mild attention in nerd culture to Hal 9000s birth four years earlier; and the sobering gut punch of Sept. 11, which returned our focus to the present. Ten years later (April 21, 2011, to be exact) we blew past the oft-delayed Judgment Day from the Terminator movies only to be told in Terminator: Genisys that itll be back in a few more years. Most recently, a lot of digital ink has been spilled deciding whether the 2015 of Back to the Future II was an accurate or mistaken foreshadowing of the 2015 of 2015, but generally speaking the predictive abilities of the fictional world of tomorrow have been relegated to the trash heap of yesteryear.
The future yet to come doesnt look too bright either. After the next Terminator-led Judgment Day in 2017, the bleak events of Blade Runner unfold in 2019, just in time for the Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Soylent Green is on the menu for 2022, the grim city of the future that is Metropolis takes place in 2026, the global infertility of Children of Men will be borne out in 2027, Robocop reports for duty in 2029, Snowpiercer arrives at its dire destination in 2031, and I, Robot boots up in 2035. Good luck to anyone who lives long enough to see Woody Allen reawaken in Sleeper circa 2173, because the best he or she can hope for in the meantime is the 30-year midcentury whiplash of Looper, the did-it-or-didnt-it-happen happenings of Total Recall, and the mildly awkward, high-waisted couture of Her. Good times (to come).
Source: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2015/09/fox_s_minority_report_tv_show_and_the_dangers_of_out_of_date_futurism.html
