The Best of Fall TV Proves (Again!) the Rich Won’t Save Us
[Editor’s Note: The story contains spoilers for the finale of “A Murder at the End of the World.”]
It seems like a rich guy is in the news every other day, doing something funny or perplexing or downright horrible. Over the course of this year, we all watched Elon Musk acquire one of the world’s most powerful social media sites and then, instead of making the user experience better than it was, mold it into his own image, censoring any language and people he didn’t like. More recently, entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried, who was once counted among the richest people in the country in the Forbes 400, gambled on a fraud-ridden crypto exchange whose exposure and bankruptcy may send him to prison for decades. Six years ago, we had a famously wealthy businessman and TV personality as president who nearly drove us toward a nuclear conflict.
More from IndieWire
Hating on the rich is nothing new, but a number of this year’s fall TV shows feel particularly incensed, crafting greedy, grimy stories about corporate corruption that hinge on the gutless deeds of the ruling class. Netflix’s horror miniseries “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Apple’s space odyssey “For All Mankind,” and FX’s icy mystery “A Murder at the End of the World” unmask the corporate rot at the heart of every billionaire endeavor, warning us not to expect the rich to save us.
Mike Flanagan’s take on Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” still maintains its spooky, gothic roots despite its ultramodern setting. In the Netflix miniseries, the “house” of Usher is both an actual, physical building whose ultimate importance isn’t revealed until the final shot of the show, and also a bloodline, the family Usher, whose future was once gambled away by power-hungry patriarch Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood) in exchange for a single lifetime of unimaginable wealth. In the present day of the show, Roderick and various members of his family (most illegitimate but still carrying the blood) live in penthouse palaces in enormous cities, able to fritter away their time planning extravagant sex parties or conducting private, semi-illegal medical research in pristine laboratories. The company that has allowed the family to amass such wealth, Fortunato Pharmaceuticals, was manufacturing and selling addictive and deadly opioid drugs under the guise of a miracle painkiller.
The inspiration for that was no doubt taken from the real-life Sackler family, whom many credit with selling and overprescribing the drugs that spawned today’s ongoing nationwide opioid crisis. In the show, Roderick tells himself and others that his only goal was to create a world free from pain altogether, but finally reveals the craven truth: He knew what he was doing the whole time. He didn’t care. Roderick’s punishment, ultimately, was not a result of Death personified (Carla Gugino) tricking him into signing away his soul. He’s doomed because he signed it away willingly, not on that fateful New Year’s Eve in that empty bar, but later, when he and his sister decided they could live with making their billions off the suffering and death of thousands. Never trust a man selling miracles, especially if he’s getting filthy rich off of them.
The fourth season of Apple’s “For All Mankind” has a lot going on, as is typical, but one plotline has swiftly proven to be the machinery on which the rest of the storylines will run. In the alternate 2003 of the show, NASA has partnered with world governments and private companies to create a lively base on the surface of Mars from which they’ll be able to mine any passing mineral-rich asteroids for materials they can transport back to the technology-driven societies of Earth. Yes, even the most heroic ventures go corporate eventually. Tensions soon run high on the Martian outpost Happy Valley, where the spacewalking astronauts and the cleaning staff find themselves living out a classic upstairs-downstairs situation.
The overworked maintenance workers, who are employed by Helios, a spacecraft hardware provider formerly owned by Bezos-ian billionaire Dev Ayesa (Edi Gathegi), are pissed that the higher profile employees get all the perks while everyone else is crammed inside a warren of stale submarine tunnels without even the opportunity to don a spacesuit and take a walk on the red planet. And they are essentially held hostage on Mars: If they renege on their contracts and attempt to return to Earth, they forfeit their wages and their meager bonuses—months, even years of their lives stolen. If that reeks of the package fulfillment center horror stories of a certain online retailer, it’s not a random coincidence.
On FX, eyes turn towards the future with Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij’s latest twisty project, the miniseries “A Murder at the End of the World.” The cast of would-be killers is composed of wealthy forward-thinkers from all over the planet with fingers in a number of industries that dabble in futurism and new technologies. They’re invited by a reclusive tech billionaire Andy Ronson (Clive Owen) and his infamous hacker wife Lee Andersen (Marling) to a remote resort whose purpose, they claim, is to figure out ways to save the world from climate change. The retreat is held in Iceland, an island nation whose volatile environment is marked by extreme weather and tectonic activity—an ominous portent of our climate future.
After a member of the party is killed and a murder investigation has run its course, the show saves one more grand reveal for the final episode. Ronson, as it turns out, is shockingly not all that interested in saving the whole world from the incoming climate apocalypse—he only has a small army of construction robots (reminiscent of the four-legged creatures Boston Dynamics sells to the military and the NYPD) building an underground bunker that could maybe house a few thousand. The plan was never to prevent climate change, but to figure out the most efficient way to save only the wealthiest, the smartest, the most worthwhile classes from its ravages. The horror of Ronson’s casual rich guy selfishness is expanded to a worldwide scale, the inherent soullessness of his endeavor put on full display. The rich won’t save us. They can’t even save themselves.
Best of IndieWire
2023 Movies Shot on Film: From 'Oppenheimer' to 'Killers of the Flower Moon' and 'Maestro'
Quentin Tarantino's Favorite Movies: 59 Films the Director Wants You to See
Sign up for Indiewire's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
